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Is this any way to run a housing market? (Or is it even a market?)

"Todos somos Maricarmen.” The shouty housing debate of recent weeks has focused on evictions — and the tale of Maricarmen, the 87-year-old who died days after enduring one.

That's understandable. But it also masks a deeper argument between two very distinct views of what property is and how it should be used. And the solution to Spain's current housing crisis — and it is a crisis — is very different, if not diametrically opposed, depending on which view you subscribe to.

Worse, if you split the difference between the two housing theories — as Spain has done so far — it only gets worse.

So what are the views? El País laid out the two sides well in an article this week, as a disagreement between two political views represented by José García Montalvo, an economics professor at the Universidad Pompeu Fabra in Barcelona, and Javier Gil, a sociologist at the CSIC, Spain's public scientific research body.

García Montalvo’s view is essentially a supply argument. Rents are high because there aren’t enough homes — specifically, enough public housing — and small landlords are filling the gap the state left. They charge market rates not out of malice but because the market allows it.

Gil starts from a different premise entirely. He’s less interested in supply-and-demand mechanics than in what the landlord-tenant relationship actually does in society: it transfers wealth from people who don’t own property to people who do. Even a well-meaning landlord with a single inherited flat is participating in a system that makes some people richer at the expense of others’ stability.

Underneath all of this is a more fundamental clash — is housing an asset, or isn’t it? Where you stand on that defines what you do to fix the problem.

Let us count the ways: