Angela opened a new breach in a conflict which had lasted for eight years, since the courts handed down the first judgment canceling the sale of 3,000 social housing units to Goldman Sachs. This 48-year-old woman, mother of a large family, was evicted in 2016 by the fund when the social bonuses on her rent disappeared. After starting a legal battle, he managed to convince a judge to force the Community of Madrid to give him a new public apartment. When he received the call from his lawyer, he screamed with excitement. Then he started crying and celebrated the sentence with his whole family. The decision is not final and the regional government has announced that it will appeal.
This woman asks the public administration, the one governed by Ignacio González (PP) in 2013 and who sold her house to Encasa Cibeles, a company 97% owned by the American fund, “to realize the damage they caused “because of his children”. I experienced terrible times. » Ángela remembers the first day her whole family entered a house that had been assigned to them by lottery in Valdecarros. It was in 2009. “Everything was perfect,” he emphasizes, while explaining that “the children were very happy” in this apartment.
The Community of Madrid allocated him housing due to his “special needs” and “agreed to reduce his rent by 90%, then by 95%, based on his economic situation, a situation which has not improved “, he said. the sentence pronounced on September 23 by the Contentious-Administrative Court number 33 of Madrid. Angela, who worked as a sweeper at the time, paid a monthly rent of 50 euros.
With the change of ownership, the social discounts disappeared and Ángela began to accumulate unpaid bills, as she herself admits. Around him, his neighbors began to leave the building for the same reason. “I couldn’t cope [a esa cantidad]“I asked for help from social services, Caritas and I don’t know how many other things,” he remembers. No one explained to her the consequences that selling social housing would have for her and her family. He only received one letter, which he had difficulty interpreting.
In 2016, she and her family were deported. “I took all my things and went to La Cañada for a while. [Real]», he relates. This traumatic departure from what was his home for seven years, full of suitcases and furniture, left him with psychological after-effects. “I didn’t ask for an apartment in La Moraleja. I asked for a house to be comfortable with my children, because I am not worth living in a house that is not mine,” he adds.
1,700 homes recovered by the Community
Eight years after this launch, a judge ruled in his favor. Angela does not need to launch a new application for social housing and wait for it to be drawn or for the administration to grant it. First of all, Justice considers that the Community of Madrid, at least in this case, “must respond to the applicant’s housing need which it itself created”. And he adds that the complainant cannot be “harmed by an administrative action declared null and become definitive”.
There is no data on the number of people who were evicted after public housing was handed over to private owners. Of the 3,000 homes acquired by the fund, the Community of Madrid only recovered 1,700. The rest were sold during the years that Encasa Cibeles owned these real estate developments.
Since the start of the conflict, the Regional Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Madrid (FRAVM) has provided help and support to tenants who request it. Its spokesperson, Enrique Villalobos, affirms that among the 3,000 winners of social housing, the sector which has most blamed the consequences of the sale are the 700 tenants who entered these housing with social rent. As he points out, “the rest were young tenants”, with an option to purchase, and the majority of them did not encounter any difficulties with the change of owner.
Angela did not leave the apartment until a court order forced her to do so. Other tenants of these houses abandoned them without needing to find themselves in this situation. Marian M, who was given a house in Soto del Henares, left “because of the harassment she suffered.” “The rent they wanted to give me was excessive, 800 euros. I couldn’t pay it. He had two children with a third on the way. Until then, I paid 120 euros”, he explained to this editorial staff. Encasa Cibeles has always ensured that there has never been “pressure” on residents who were not up to date with their bills so they can leave their home.
Today, after hearing Angela’s sentence, Marian M. is studying the possibility of going to court, because she claims that after asking the Community of Madrid to return her apartment, she did not receive response. After all the administrative and bureaucratic journey, you feel helpless in your search for a solution. He regrets that there are no facilities for those affected by the sale of social housing. “It’s like we don’t exist,” he says.
After leaving their home, their family disintegrated due to the uncertainty and worry they felt when they found they could not pay the rent. Since then, he has shared a house with five other people. For her part, Angela had to leave the Community of Madrid in search of an affordable apartment. He is currently staying in a relative’s house in a town in Toledo, 96 kilometers from the center of the capital, while waiting for the Justice Department to determine whether it is confirmed that he is entitled to a public apartment again .
