Just by passing through the gate, we can already see that something is happening on the property: pipes are coming out of the water meters towards the homes. In the first, a floor supposedly under construction, the door opens and two burly men appear sitting on a sofa. These are employees of an illegal eviction company which has kept its “neighbors” in a state of constant tension for ten months and who occupy the upper floors of this building in the Poble-sec district of Barcelona without a lease contract .
“Stop Squatters Low Cost is making our lives impossible: it has flooded the property several times, it has removed the front door, it has blocked the downspout of the rainwater and it has sabotaged the water and electricity,” denounces Silvio, one of the occupants of the property. . “But we will resist,” he adds. The case of the property located at 83, Magalhaes Street, in the Catalan capital, ended up in court: the owners of the building and one of the directors of the eviction company are accused of real estate harassment of occupants of the building. Their statements are scheduled for this October.
It all started at the beginning of the year. After the previous owner of the property died without heirs, a real estate company established in 2017, domiciled in Malaga and managed by three citizens of Russian origin, acquired the property. For years, a tenant with a valid lease contract and other neighbors who occupied precarious housing lived in the apartments on Magalhaes Street and had vulnerability reports from municipal social services.
According to neighbors’ complaints, the new owners chose to go beyond the law. Without waiting for the evictions that the courts have already granted to the occupants, several acts of real estate harassment have been committed since last January by the company Stop Okupas Low Cost. The only tenant with a valid contract left when the Stop Squatters Low Cost actions began, and today this is the floor where the employees of the illegal eviction company are located.
During the visit that elDiario.es makes to the property, the two employees of Stop Okupas Low Cost, on the first floor, refuse to answer any possible questions. For its part, one of the defenses of the owners of the property investigated denied that the property hired the eviction company to harass neighbors. “Stop Squatters are not being asked to do anything illegal, but rather to monitor the property so that no more apartments are squatted, as has already happened with the agreement of the police “, declared lawyer Emilio Valdivia interviewed by this newspaper.
Unlike other cases of real estate harassment, in which companies start their coercion via WhatsApp and then move on to physical intimidation in the street, in this Poble-sec property the pressure occurs on the same level and in the form of a court. basic supplies. In this attempt to ensure that the right to property prevails at all costs, two threats from Stop Okupas workers were also reported, one of them after, together with the tenants’ union, the occupants replaced the door entrance to the property which belonged to the farm. the employees had been forcibly evicted.
In total, the Mossos d’Esquadra opened seven proceedings in less than a year for the actions of the illegal eviction company on the property. In court, the tenants provided dozens of videos and photographs of the “acts of sabotage” in the property of which they accuse the employees of Stop Squatters Low Cost. The traffic jams in the general downspout of the property (accessible only from the floor where Stop Okupas Low Cost employees now live) have occurred since the departure of the previous neighbor. The discharge of fecal water into the property’s patio caused bad odors for days.
“The sabotage does not only affect us, but also the rest of the residents of the neighborhood, who suffer from the plague or power cuts and work in the street to repair them,” denounces Francesco, another of the occupants of the property . When the occupants called an operator to repair the problem, after mediation by Mossos d’Esquadra, the technician found a resistant material blocking the downspout. In other downspout blockages, nails have been found inside.
A few days later, the property’s water supply was also cut off while the occupants kept their bills up to date. Neighbors were able to see several men accessing the basement of the property, to which only the property has access, and through which all the pipes pass. They were in fact private employees hired by the property, as they themselves admitted.
The reductions also extended to electricity service. On May 5, Francesco discovered that the cables of the entire property, located in the gate, had been torn out after two workers destroyed the box that contained them. Investigations by the Urban Police made it possible to identify a security guard from Stop Okupas Low Cost as the person who opened the door to the operator, a worker who claimed to have been hired by the property to renovate the ground floor. -pavement. The power company’s work to restore supply to the farm included opening a hole in the middle of the street and cutting off power to several neighboring properties in Poble-sec, as a safety measure.
Far from destroying them, the sabotage brought the occupants closer to Magalhaes 33. “I came here out of necessity, because I didn’t have a house, and when everything started, I thought about leaving. They even offered me money, but I ended up being convinced that it is important to resist and not give in to a right as important as housing and a roof,” says Nathaniel, with immediate agreement from his three other companions.
