At 116 Percent
In Lisbon, the average rent is now 116 percent of the average income.
“These capacities should have served to develop the social realm, to broaden and strengthen the well-being of a society. Instead they have too often served to dismember the social through extreme inequality, to destroy much of the middle-class life promised by liberal democracy, to expel the vulnerable and the poor from land, jobs, and homes.” — Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (2014)
In Lisbon, the average rent is now 116 percent of the average income. That is not a tight market. That is a market the city’s workforce cannot occupy without subsidy, without inheritance, or without packing four to a room. Berlin is at 40 percent. London, until recently the worst figure in Europe, at 75. Lisbon has crossed a line.
Jorge is forty-three. He came from Brazil in 2017 and works full-time in marketing, earning two thousand euros net a month — about a third above the Portuguese average. When his rent went up by a fifth he left his neighbourhood, and now he lives in a friend’s spare room. Maria cleans for a living. She earns the Portuguese minimum wage, around eight hundred euros, and lives with her daughters in a metal shack in Taluda, a settlement outside Lisbon with no running water, no sewage, no electricity. The city has demolished her home once already. She built it again.
The mechanism that made this possible is not mysterious. In 2012, the Portuguese government liberalised the rental market and largely abolished permanent contracts. That same year, it launched the Golden Visa: residency for foreigners willing to buy half a million euros of property. The market followed. Property prices rose around 120 percent between 2012 and 2022; wages did not.1 By 2022 the first wave had done its work; the Digital Nomad Visa opened, income floor €3,480 a month, more than twice the Portuguese median.2 The American population in the country grew from 2,888 in 2017 to roughly 21,000 in 2024.3 In October 2023 the real-estate leg of the Golden Visa was shut under a programme called Mais Habitação,4 “More Housing.” The demand shifted. It did not diminish.
In a recent DW segment,5 an American real estate operator named Anne Brightman shows off a 1.4-million-euro loft in Alcântara. She runs a luxury agency in Lisbon employing more than two dozen people; her buyers come from Northern Europe, the United States, and Brazil. Asked about the crisis, she says on camera that this “really isn’t a problem of expats coming into the country.” The Lisbon city councillor Vasco Moreira Rato tells the same reporter: “Lisbon needed that investment.” They are not lying. They are telling the truth about the class they serve — the law firms that process the visas, the short-let management companies, the Portuguese families who held their buildings through Salazar and the Carnation Revolution and four decades of frozen rent, and who liquidated the stock after 2012 to whichever buyer arrived. The American operator is a symptom. The comprador class that built the arrangement is local, and older than her agency.
Helena Roseta, a co-author of the 1976 Portuguese constitution — which enshrined housing as a right — put the political stakes plainly: “The lack of a political response to the housing crisis is undermining trust. When that system fails to respond to one of the most basic problems people face, democracy itself begins to erode.” On 30 September 2023, thousands marched in Lisbon for a right their own constitution already grants them.6 This past March, sixteen cities marched again.7 Portugal has a welfare floor, public health, and an EU safety net, and it still marches. Further down the chain, the same mechanism runs faster, against populations without cushion, in countries where the release valve is not a demonstration.
The city demolished Maria’s shack. She built it again. This is the country that liberalised its rental market in 2012 to make itself attractive.
Two books:
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard, 2014). Introduction titled The Savage Sorting. What other writers describe as growing inequality Sassen calls expulsion: acute, not gradual; ejection from the core social and economic orders of the age. The Lisbon arithmetic is expulsion in her exact sense. 8
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Declares (1994). Set in Lisbon, summer 1938. Pereira edits the culture page at an evening paper whose editor-in-chief is close to the regime. Pereira considers himself non-political. A young writer turns up, and the politics he has managed to ignore stop staying at a distance. Reads faster than it sounds. The torque is that the pressure never announces itself; it just accumulates.9
Coffee:
Coffee. Coffee is a crop. Every bag on a café shelf began on a farm thousands of miles away, shaped by a growing season the roaster was not there to see. The market does not give you the year you want; it gives you the year you get. Ethiopian beans swing wide between harvests: one year clean and bright, the next thin or off. Brazilian beans are steadier, and they get blended in to even out what a rough Ethiopian crop would otherwise do to the cup. A roaster’s real work, once the sacks arrive, is less about choosing taste than about correcting for whether he was not there for.
A figure to sit with:
Social housing as a share of total housing stock:
Netherlands, around 28%
Austria, around 24%
France, around 17%
Portugal: 2%
That is the figure under every other figure in the piece above. Housing is not a market that allocates itself.
Sources:
Turning Point — The Cost of Popularity: Lisbon's Housing Crisis — 120% property-price / flat-wages figure
Tytle — Americans Lead Digital Nomad Visa Applications — D8 visa share and income floor
The Portugal Post — Americans Moving to Portugal 2025 — AIMA numbers
Connaught Law — Portugal Golden Visa Real Estate Eliminated — Mais Habitação
DW Reporter — Priced out of Lisbon: When a full-time job isn’t enough — Jorge, Maria, Brightman, Moreira Rato, Roseta; the 116% figure; the 42% rent-since-2020 figure
Lisboa Para Pessoas — A house to live in — 30 September 2023 protest
The Portugal Post — 16 Cities Protest March 2026 — March 2026 wave
Saskia Sassen, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Harvard University Press, 2014)
Antonio Tabucchi, Pereira Declares (English trans. Patrick Creagh, 1995; originally Sostiene Pereira, 1994)