2023-11-03 17:14:45
Luis (not his real name) has been looking for a room for eight months. He lives in Vitoria and his landlady wants to sell the five apartments that he has for rent. “He says that he is retiring and has sent a letter to all the tenants,” he says. “In my apartment, for example, a couple also lives. “I’ve been searching since February and it’s crazy: there is a shortage of rooms.”
Desperate, Luis – who collects the Basque Income Guarantee Income and works making substitutions – placed an ad on a classifieds portal. “I’m looking for a room with a standard”, He said. Yours is not the only one. Similar requests proliferate on the web. There are homes that do not allow the tenant to register, a practice that has led to the birth of the opposite market: rooms or apartments only to register, but without the right to live.
“I’ve come across a lot like that,” says Luis. “They don’t cut corners. You call interested in a room and they tell you: It is a contract without living. They register you, you pay 300 euros, you act like you live there and you make a living. It is a fictitious registration to access aid, because the other option is a room without a registry. In social services They told me that there is a housing problem, that if they were to evict me, they could make a fictitious registry for me and give me a place in a shelter.
Special registration
The law obliges all people living in Spain to register in the registry of their usual municipality. Since 2015, it has also contemplated a series of “special cases” which include the possibility of registering in a shanty, a caravan, a cave and even in the complete absence of a roof. This requires the intervention of the social services of the city council on duty, which confirm that that person lives there.
In the case of rooms, things get complicated. Associations of migrants, domestic workers, social movements and those for the right to housing have been denouncing it for some time in various parts of the country.
In the Valencian Community, as reported by ‘Levante-EMV’, a newspaper published by Prensa Ibérica, as The Spanish Newspaper– entities such as Valéncia Acull report that The social services of different municipalities “deny” registration to people “who have a rented room, reside in substandard housing or in a squatted apartment.” The same media reported the case of a woman who was required to 200 euros extra per month for registering in a room. In 2020, Catalan social entities collected on a map the municipalities that register the most complaints due to the lack of registration without a fixed address.
“In the Basque Country, rentals without the right to register are very common. This happens because those who live rented with a contract do not have the right to sublease and If several people are registered, the owner can find out“, explains Germán García, of the refugee aid platform Ongi Etorri Errefuxiatuak. “And then there is owners who do not register for fear of the Treasury. They put six people in, they charge black and, since they are not registered, nothing appears. Thus the opposite case arises: they let you register, but not live. You can pay 200 euros a month for this right. There are also people who charge more for the room with registration rights. Without right, 300 euros; with right 400. “It affects foreign people, but not only.”
Access to services
Onti Etorri Errefuxiatuak is one of the associations that signed the campaign “I am your neighbor, but without a registry I do not exist”through which they asked the Basque town councils to guarantee the registration of people who live in a municipality, but cannot prove it.
“The registry is the gateway to many rights. Without a registry, access to health, basic education for minors, social benefits, a residence permit, voting… is difficult,” they write. “For many people it is impossible to obtain it. There are people who live in an apartment out of solidarity, kinship or friendship, who are not registered for various reasons and have to ‘pay the registration fee’ in another home. Or people who work internally in household tasks and whose employers deny them the right to register.
City councils, they explain, have the obligation to register people who live on the streets. What these organizations ask is that public windows are opened to which room cases are referred. “If the social services are aware that a person lives in a room but they do not let them register, they should register them in a social office,” continues García, who is not in favor of forcing the owner to register people. “It happens with domestic workers. If the City Council comes to verify that they live in a house where they do not want to register them, the next day they may be fired.
With the current situation, he says, “it may be the case that A person who lives on the street has a registry and one who lives in a house does not. They both have the right. The absurdity is that living in an apartment you don’t have it. Let’s create an administrative mechanism that allows people who live in apartments and cannot prove it to register so as not to harm other people.” The social entities ask for “a consensual solution between city councils and the associative movement.”
Can your landlord deny you that right?
In Madrid, says the spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union, Valeria Racu, payment by registry “is a reality. We see it many times in Wallapop and Milanuncios. It is the same as the dating market with Immigration or Social Security. The registration barrier is suffered by non-EU migrants, who, due to the Immigration Law, need to be registered to regularize their situation. Also “young people and people with few resources, who see how renting a room with fraudulent contracts is their only option to access housing.”
However, he adds, A landlord cannot deny a tenant registration. According to the information provided by the Madrid City Council, if someone lives in a house but does not appear in the rental contract, You only need the authorization of the contract holder (not the owner); If the owner is not registered in the home, he needs one of the registered adults to declare that he lives there.
“Registration is a right that opens the door to other rights and does not depend on the will of the landlord. It happens because we have normalized housing as a market good and it is used as an extra business. If it happens, we encourage people to organize into housing unions and report it, because it is illegal”said Cancer.
#Paying #apartment #live #register