Thousands of people took to the streets of Madrid this Sunday to demand that “housing be a right and not a business”. With a focus on rents, one of the main slogans of the call was: “Let’s lower prices”. “We can’t make ends meet. If prices don’t go down, go on a rent strike,” chanted the organizers of the Tenants’ Union, megaphone in hand, a few minutes before the start of the march on Atocha Street. The refrain continues: “Guilty rentier, responsible government” and “Madrid will be the grave of rentism”.
Union spokesperson Valeria Racu stressed at the start of the march that it was a “historic” call. During his speech to the media, he warned “real estate owners and employers that impunity is over.” “If you continue to raise prices, we will stop paying them and there will be no police, no courts, no thugs to evict us,” he said. In addition, he addressed directly the politicians, who “did not take advantage of any of the opportunities”: “The only thing that awaits you is to assume responsibilities, which is why we demand the resignation of the minister (of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez). , because she is responsible for all of this.
Paloma López Bermejo, general secretary of the CCOO of Madrid, another of the organizers, accused President Isabel Díaz Ayuso of “dereliction of duty” and asked her to stop declaring “insubordination” to the housing law. The union denounces the fact that community workers spend “more than half of their salary, in the best case scenario, to be able to access housing”.
The event intersects with the call to demonstrate in Barcelona, also for the right to housing, but with a focus on the impact of the Copa América and tourism, and will be replicated in different cities in the coming weeks. In Valencia, a march is planned for October 19 and in Malaga, on November 9. They are not the first. Thousands of people have already taken to the streets of the Andalusian city in June to demand a city “where to live, not survive”. And in Majorca, in May, a crowd demanded to be able to live on the island “without being rich”. .”
The organizations which defend the right to decent housing, more visible after the bursting of the previous real estate bubble and the drama of evictions, have continued to do street work, neighborhood by neighborhood, based on their different sensitivities. However, this is the first major mobilization in Madrid since the arrival of Pedro Sánchez in La Moncloa in 2018. Six years later, even the national housing law, ineffective on several points due to the refusal of the PP communities to applying the declaration of stressed areas, neither the end of the Golden Visa, nor the announcement of the construction of more than 180,000 new housing units, nor the promise to multiply the public stock by 10 have served to mitigate the rise in rents and property purchase prices. A social crisis which delays the emancipation of young people, who took to the streets this Sunday.
From the Platform for the Right to Housing, an organization created in October 2023 to demand that the Community of Madrid guarantee access to a roof in the region, and in which there are present from the Regional Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Madrid to Tenants Union, had been planning since the summer to call for a mobilization, supposed to imitate other large marches in the capital, like those which have taken place in recent years for public health. The failure of the popular Union legislative initiative to regulate seasonal rentals, which had been left outside the law despite the warning of entities and parties like Podemos, was the definitive boost.
In fact, the slogans have degenerated beyond the Community itself and for days, from the networks of the Tenants’ Union, they have been demanding the resignation of Minister Isabel Rodríguez. This situation, the organizers emphasize, “is possible because all state administrations, to a greater or lesser extent, have abandoned their functions, seeking lucrative deals for banks and speculators.” “It is now necessary to reverse this situation and for all state powers to assume their legal and social responsibilities,” they say.
Alba, Ángel and Carlos are friends and colleagues of the Ideas en Guerra platform. “Young people have no possibility of a life project, because they have no place to be,” denounces the young woman, citing the latest data from the Spanish Observatory of Emancipation, which locates the age average over 30 years old. young people can become independent. Ángel, 26, shares an apartment “off the M30”. “More than 35% of my salary goes to pay my rent at the start of each month. » The group holds a banner that reads: “Solidarity does not lower the rent. » This is a response to Minister Isabel Rodríguez, who demanded that small owners “take charge” of the situation.
Even if the increase in rent prices, which increased by an average of 30% in Spanish metropolitan areas between 2015 and 2022, to further enrich rentiers, monopolized a good part of the conversations, the main demand was that ” Housing is a business, that’s right, not a business. And there, there are the rents, but also a “meager stock of social housing” which “has been and is the subject of sales and transactions” with “disastrous consequences”; that “residential neighborhoods are gradually being replaced by immense tourist complexes that are incompatible with life”; that gentrification is driving families out of the most central neighborhoods, but also increasingly out of peripheral neighborhoods; the normalization of expulsions; or the “deregulated” market, say the organizers.
In their proclamation, the organizing organizations highlight the “lukewarm position” of the Spanish government. They recognize the “step forward in the right direction” that the Housing Act represents, but criticize that “it has not resolved many of the structural problems of the crisis that we are suffering from”, because it does not prohibit housing launches without an alternative. rooms, nor It persecutes those who speculate in housing, nor intervenes or regulates prices, nor has it recovered the obligation of promoters of urban planning actions to allocate a percentage of new properties to social housing, they list.
But they also highlight the Community of Madrid and the “model implemented for decades by the Popular Party” which makes “access to decent housing practically impossible”. This model was produced, they emphasize, by “criminalizing” the occupation while “the social housing stock was sold at bargain prices to so-called vulture funds” and by giving priority to the “tourism business » to the detriment of “neighborhood needs”. “.
The manifesto also highlights that the government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso favored urban speculation, “even at the cost of sacrificing valuable environmental environments.” “Their apathy and lack of empathy deserve special mention regarding the problem they themselves generated in San Fernando de Henares with the construction of metro line 7b,” they add. Esperanza Aguirre ignored technical reports that advised against the area, which ended up generating more than 73 demolished homes.
