“Either his parents are rich or he’s on drugs.” I learned this master lesson when I was 18 in Compostela, at a party in a penthouse in Ensanche. Some will think it was already late. At the time, I still didn’t understand how there were people in their thirties living in the city and renting apartments without having a known job. I also didn’t know – not yet – what a rentier was and I was already suspicious of the obsession that everyone in the adult world had with property (my parents had already been suffering the consequences of a pre-crisis variable-rate mortgage for years). Of course, I’m talking about 2012, when renting a student room in Santiago de Compostela cost around 100 or 150 euros (sometimes more, sometimes less, depending on the size and furniture) and we were all amused that in Julio Gerpe the real estate agency had to take a number to be served, as if it were a supermarket.
Today, I suppose that those whose parents were rich will continue to be so, and those who took drugs… the truth is that I don’t know how they are doing. I am particularly concerned about those who were not really rich, those who lived with parents who had just enough to support an “independent” child over thirty. Did they find work? Did they pass an exam and get married? (I warn you, it is not enough to pass an opposition, you need two salaries). Although those who interest me most are everyone: students, young people, retirees, low-income families. Where do they live? On what solid ground do they walk? What fragile economic, social and emotional balance do they maintain?
I would say that Spanish politics is living, in terms of housing, in the era of Carrie Bradshaw. It seems that the progressive politicians in the government – I stress this because I have already left out my comments on the circuses of the Xunta de Galicia – are applying to housing unrest the same fiction that the scriptwriters of Sex in New York: you can afford to live in a nice studio apartment in the center, be single, not share expenses, work little and have fun with a single weekly column in the print media. We don’t know how, but it can be done, right? Wow, the world says it’s not possible? What are people complaining about? What concrete measures are they asking for to solve this situation? Let’s write some tweets. Let’s go out and make a speech.
It seems clear that the model is (almost) that of the one who governs who governs. And it’s sad. It’s frustrating. I see people from the city marching. I see rents increasing. I see friends who signed contracts eleven months ago and who are already going to see the increase in the CPI applied (has the market changed so much in eleven months?). I have heard of student rooms in Santiago at 175, 250 and 300 euros. I see that the studio that I rented in September 2021 in a central neighborhood for 420 euros cost, when I left in September 2023, 550 (without community). 130 euros more in two years. And in coastal cities, the same: in the best case scenario you can find seasonal rentals in September-June. And during the summer? Well, going back to live with your parents. What if your parents were also unable to buy a house at that time and were living in rental accommodation? Then I guess you have grandparents.
And of course, in all this there are big speculators and small speculators. Greedy speculators and others who thought that speculation was part of the game and survival. It is everyone’s fault and it is no one’s fault. The fault lies with a few, but not with us, the government seems to suggest. And meanwhile, there is no law capable of containing and regulating effectively a market against which we are all revolting. In the meantime, the greatest concern of the Minister of Housing in recent times has been to think that the people in the service sector who work to keep the wild tourist machinery of a city or a village running, perhaps deserve to be able to live in this city or in that city, in the one that works. That minimum of decency, a little more.
So the biggest question is why do we continue to endure all this instead of moving to a place that is cheap and uninhabited enough (my mother advises me). They seem to tell us that it is in our hands to regulate the market, to redistribute wealth. It seems as if they are blaming us, doesn’t it? Why don’t we give up and leave? Why do we complain and continue to wait for the miracle of loaves, fishes and plates? Dear Carrie Bradshaw, how do you manage to live in La Coruña, Pontevedra, Vigo, Cangas, Vilagarcía, Compostela? What future do you trust? What secrets are you hiding?
