2023-08-31 22:21:21
Only in the first quarter of 2023 and only in the Community of Madrid, 661 evictions were carried out, according to data from the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ). In the State as a whole there were 6,579. This is a reality that unions and anti-eviction platforms have been denouncing for decades, which now focus on government forces and some of their allies who, during the last legislature, did not take advantage of the wording of the new housing law to put an end to these launches.
The effect of limiting the rent increase: “The 2% ceiling means that I can live in this apartment, but in a year I won’t be able to”
Further
The rule progressively increased the rental price limit and lowered the requirements for the different regional and local governments to declare an area as stressed. But on evictions, the new law limited itself to stating that “an arbitration system will be applied that provides the necessary time for social services to offer housing solutions and the judge is empowered to establish longer terms.” In addition, it included “new extensions in the launch procedures, which will postpone the processes for more than two years,” and stipulated “mandatory access to out-of-court settlement procedures for vulnerable people.”
Valeria Racu, spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants Union, explains that simply “moratoriums are given, the eviction process is extended, or if you get a vulnerability report it can be temporarily suspended” but denounces that “a solution is not being put in place to the problem”.
The Housing Law also provides for a modification in the Civil Procedure Law to include a new mediation and arbitration procedure, the objective of which is to give administrations sufficient time to find a housing solution. However, this requirement applies only to homes owned by large tenants and, in addition, it must be the habitual residence of the occupant, who must be in a vulnerable situation.
Laura Barrios, coordinator of Vivienda de Madrid, defends that in everything related to evictions the norm “is undeveloped” and that what is going to happen with all the paralyzed judicial processes that could end in launches is that “it will take five more months ”. She also calls mediation a “understatement.” “Between a big fork and a vulnerable person, you don’t have to mediate, you have to protect,” she warns. Likewise, Paco Morote, state spokesman for the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH), highlights the enormous inequality between landlord and tenant: “People feel very weak in the face of the powerful.”
Real estate coercion and invisible evictions
To all this we must add the phenomenon of the so-called “invisible evictions”. Last June, the consumer organization FACUA presented a battery of complaints against thirty real estate agents who circumvented the housing law by making their tenants pay the fee known as “fees”, which must now fall on the owners, ” In addition to those that directly announce or communicate that the payment for these efforts must be made by the future tenant, there are those that invent new concepts”.
These are lies that real estate companies use to coerce their tenants. Cases of landlords not renewing the contract, raising the rent a lot or threatening their tenants have multiplied. The unions warn: these evictions are not counted, they are cases without prosecuting and they are increasing. “You are leaving because of a threat, because conditions are drastically changing for you. Judicially it is not an eviction, socially it is,” Barrios says.
This is what happened to several neighbors of a property in Alcorcón, in the south of Madrid, who more than a year ago decided to rebel against the increases of up to 70% in the rents of their houses, now owned by Blackstone, but acquired years ago when they were publicly owned. This has been a case in the media, but Racu affirms that the vast majority of tenants who approach the union do so because they are forced to move, a phenomenon that especially involves large tenants but also small owners.
All in all, the unions agree that there have been “small improvements” derived from the housing law but regret that they are “very unambitious in relation to the need and what could be expected from a progressive government,” according to Morote. In his opinion, the total number of evictions “has not fallen as it should.”
A new progressive government “but more ambitious”
“What the progressive government has made evident is that the enemy of the right to housing, the big capital that invests in housing, is a much bigger monster than we can think,” says the Madrid Housing coordinator. In the same vein, Racu explains that what has taken place in recent years is the “enormous media war that has been waged against the housing movement.” The spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants union points to the real estate employers, the security companies and the general media “that what they have done has been to create great fear of the squatter”, they have misrepresented “what an occupation is or how big it is that problem”.
For his part, Morote talks about the almost four million empty properties in Spain – only in Madrid there are more than 97,100 – and claims that what must be done is “invest in the expropriation of houses that are in disuse and that are introduced into the affordable rental market” because “it would generate a general reduction in rental prices.”
Public housing in Spain represents 2.5% of the housing stock compared to the 9.3% average in the European Union. For this reason, the state spokesman for the PAH calls for the reissue of the progressive government but “with a more ambitious position” and for the housing law to be applied by the state. “From the PAH we propose that it is necessary to have a more ambitious progressive government than the previous one and start by reforming the law to make it applicable throughout the State.”
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