Badalona leaves three mothers and their four minor children on the street

2024-01-09 08:30:02

BadalonaIf there is no last-minute counter-order, the three women and four minors who were evicted last December 15 from a building in Badalona will have to hand over the keys, this Tuesday before 11 a.m. and leave the hostel where they have stayed for the last three weeks. “I don’t know where to go or which door to knock on because they are all closed,” laments Souad Ghailan, mother of two teenagers aged 13 and 16, summarizing the general sentiment. It is Monday morning, and with less than 24 hours left until the deadline set by the City Council is met, the team led by Xavier García Albiol has announced that it will not continue to pay for accommodation, an “exceptional measure” that it took taking into account the “need” of these families. This means that when they leave the hostel they will have to find an alternative if they don’t want to sleep on the ground.

The women were neighbors of an eight-apartment building on Calle Calderón de la Barca in Badalona, ​​declared in a dilapidated state, which a court ordered to be vacated to protect the safety of the occupants. The City Council paid for three days in a hostel in Barcelona for the twenty affected residents, but after these days it only wanted to take care of the three women and their minor children until January 8th, and left the husband and an 18-year-old son of one of them out of the deal. Another neighbor, who has a physical disability, has also had a roof at the Bufí Vell municipal shelter. The rest are single men who have had to find a life for themselves. There are those who have found refuge in the homes of friends or relatives, while four other neighbors have been sleeping in the taxi of one of them and, “when there is money”, they take a room in a boarding house.

In a short statement, the City Council insists on the fact that the property was occupied “illegally”, although all the residents can prove with documents that they had a contract with the owner and that they have been paying the fees, among the 200 and 300 euros per month, some up to a month before the judicial commission and the Mossos d’Esquadra riots took them from their homes. “We are neither murderers, nor thieves, nor drug dealers. We are just poor”, says Ghailan to again deny the accusations, later nuanced, of Mayor Albiol when he claimed that the farm was a den of conflicted people and criminals.

The residents had known for two years that time was running out and that they had to leave because the building suffered from serious structural deficiencies and had to be demolished. However, they continued to pay the fees by making bank transfers or with an envelope to the owner, a natural person who ignored the City Council’s requests to shore up the estate and who has not taken care of his tenants. The personal situation of the affected neighbors is complicated. They had never gone to social services until they saw each other on the street. And with precarious jobs or on medical leave, for months their income has not covered a rent at market prices in Badalona or the surrounding neighborhoods. “Even less when they hear you speak”, points out Abdukar. “If we were called Antonio it would be something else”, he emphasizes to denounce the xenophobia and racism they encounter when being able to rent an apartment. “We don’t want the keys to a house for free, we want them to help us find one that we can afford”, claims Lamya Havari.

In cancer treatment

Havari is married and has three children: an eleven-year-old girl, a five-year-old boy and an eighteen-year-old boy who has been staying with friends because the City Council refused them help. The woman is undergoing chemotherapy for breast cancer and, precisely, tomorrow afternoon she has an appointment for a CT scan to check if the tumor has returned, but seeing herself almost on the street, with her family separated, makes her “nervous” and her children makes them “do badly at school” because they are not strangers to the family situation.

Her friend Fatima Ben Abdel is 90% visually impaired and requires almost constant assistance. In the hours before having to leave the hostel, the three women approach what had been their home until a few weeks ago. Havari had lived there for almost twenty years and the others more than ten. Now, the estate is boarded up and, although they have asked on several occasions to be allowed to enter it to retrieve the belongings that they could not take, the owner has not given them permission. “There we have all the clothes, household items, but also photos of the parents, family memories,” Ghailan enumerates.

The families receive support and advice from the Sant Roc Som Badalona platform which, once it became known that the help to pay for the hostel would not be extended, denounced that the municipal administration did nothing for these families and, instead, the City Council spent money and effort to have the biggest Christmas tree. “It’s a question of priorities”, denounces the spokesperson of the entity, Carles Sagués, who assures that “no other city” in the metropolitan area leaves minors on the street.