At the end of August, while a part of the country, the luckiest, was on vacation, perhaps fearing that upon their return their usual home would be invaded and the lock changed, Jorge Javier Vázquez visited Ana Rosa Quintana on his program. He, in a chatty tone and with a half-smile, made a request to the TardeAR host: “I say this for my mother, who suffers a lot. “Once a week, don’t talk about the squatters, who are afraid to go out on the street because of you,” he said. “What we have to do is demonstrate so that the law changes,” replied the former queen of the morning shows.
But the truth is that, despite the overexposure of cases of alleged occupation in magazines and in some media, there is no permanent social protest in the streets, although having your house taken away seems like a good reason for people to demonstrate regularly, as happened in San Fernando de Henares with the families that the Community of Madrid left homeless due to the works on metro line 7b.
This week, several television programs have once again echoed a particular and media case. The singer Manu Tenorio lamented on a television program that his son could not visit Sanlúcar because alleged “squatters” were living in a house that he had owned for more than a year without paying rent. They responded that he was paying the income to the Treasury, to which he would have a debt. And then several tweets from the singer, from which it emerges first that the contract expired a year ago and, later, that it never existed. “He is a defaulter who encourages the false discourse of squatting,” added to the controversy the spokesperson for the State of Podemos, María Teresa Pérez.
Last Wednesday, during an interrogation by the Vox parliamentary group, the Minister of Housing, Isabel Rodríguez, estimated the risk of occupation in Spain. “It is less than 0.06%,” she calculated, based on the 16,765 known acts of burglary and property theft, out of a total stock of 20.9 million homes. She gives a practical example: “Do you think that if there really was a real risk of occupation, there would be insurers who would offer us a coverage price of 12 or 24 euros? Where is the company? This, while the National Police indicates on its website that “the installation of an alarm system is a good deterrent.”
“The casuistry that we have before the courts does not correspond to the alarm that has been generated, where it is clear that there is an ideological interest,” says investigating judge Diego Álvarez, who asks not to minimize the importance of the problem, but it should not be exaggerated “to sell an image that does not exist”: “We do not live in a country where you go on vacation, buy bread or walk the dog and they occupy your house.”
Breaking and entering
To understand the jumble of concepts that are mixed together as if they were one, some definitions must be clear. “The most important thing is to differentiate between the offense of trespassing or usurpation of real estate and non-payment of rent, which is dealt with through civil channels,” the judge said, recalling that “a tenant of a rented apartment is never a squatter.”
What if you stop paying? “An eviction procedure is initiated for non-payment of rent through civil channels. Depending on the encumbrance of the land, it will be more or less agile. This is where the vulnerability rules come in, because it is not the same as a tenant not paying because he cannot or because he does not want to, but it affects large tenants,” explains Álvarez. According to an analysis by the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (IDRA), owners “constitute a small minority of the population”, between 3 and 9% and, among them, those who have a single rented home constitute only 38.7% of the population. market.
“The mistake is to represent all owners who own several rental properties as if they were a ‘private’ owner who owns a single rental property. The result is a distortion of reality (…) that spreads the image of the vulnerable owner,” the study states. “A vulnerable person who rents a house is practically non-existent. It is a situation that is amplified to the point that there is a social majority concerned about a problem that does not exist,” adds the spokesperson for the Socialist Housing Union of Catalonia, Marina Parés.
The data also refute the fact that it is “impossible to evict them,” a mantra that is repeated. “A pact has been made to exaggerate people who tell you that someone has entered their house and has been trying to evict them for months. Here we have to think about having several properties and tenants with a contract that they cannot continue to pay,” Parés warns. According to the latest statistics from the General Council of the Judicial Power, the measures taken after the pandemic to prevent evictions of vulnerable people have reduced evictions. Even so, in 2023, almost 20,000 families ended up on the street due to non-compliance with the Urban Lease Law and another 5,260 because they were unable to pay the mortgage.
And then there are the raids and the usual usurpations. The first case is a serious crime: a person enters an inhabited house with the intention of staying there. “In my judicial district, we can have one or no cases a year. It is not profitable, criminally speaking, because when someone commits a crime, they are trying to escape the effect of justice and here, they will catch you as soon as they return home. In this case, you call the police, they arrest them and return your house to you immediately. It takes as long as it takes for the police to arrive and evict them,” reassures Diego Álvarez.
“We are selling something like a squat that is not one and that does not exist much either. If you go down to buy bread and when you come back there is someone in your house, it is a home invasion and these people are evicted. ipso facto“, agrees Parés, who points out that private security companies profit from this alarm: “They sell alarms to the owners of their homes and to no one else. “These people will never suffer from squatting.”
Usurpation of real estate, which statistics add to trespass, is a minor crime and does not protect either ownership or use. “The more intense your relationship with the home, the closer you will be to a burglary,” explains the judge, who points out that “squatters usually go to houses that are not being used,” such as those that banks keep without electricity or water. “In these cases, you have to go through civil channels rather than criminal channels.”
As the following graph shows, these cases have been increasing since there were records, but Álvarez says that “one thing is that the complaints are increasing and another is the result.” “I can go every day to report that my car was stolen, but when the court investigates it and finds that it was not stolen, it is filed, even though it counts as a complaint filed,” he emphasizes. “There are also many complaints, even from large operators, who know that they have to constitute themselves as civil parties, but they inform them to safeguard their civil liability.”
“It is important that we do not address the issue of squatting as an isolated issue, but in the context of the housing problem,” says Perés. Real estate prices rose 7.8% in the second quarter of the year, which shows its profitability. While testimonies of private owners going bankrupt prevail, the drop in profitability given by banks is pushing investors to speculate on rentals. Income declared in personal income tax from rental of homes and other real estate has increased by 70% since 2007, the year before the outbreak of the Great Recession, and one in five taxfilers with income between 30,000 and 60,000 euros per year earns, on average, almost 800 euros for this concept, which increases with income.
Furthermore, the income rate of owners is up to 2.58 times higher than that of renters, according to the analysis “The Rental Market. Source of Inequality”, prepared by the Critical Urban Studies Group, which considers that renting is “a powerful mechanism for the amplification and reproduction of socio-economic inequalities”.
For the spokesperson of the Socialist Housing Union of Catalonia, the generalization of the housing problem and the amplification of certain discourses, mainly from the right and the extreme right, but also the lack of adequate public housing policies, are part of a “cultural” context. offensive against the occupation as a great public enemy, which harms all tenants who have difficulty paying their rent”: “It is a problem of brutal dehumanization, which distracts attention from the housing crisis and the reason why “so many people cannot access decent housing, quality housing.”
These speeches legitimize, in turn, concrete facts and attitudes, in the street and at the doors of homes. “It is our colleagues who are the target of this media campaign, those who suffer harassment from people like Desokupa, who show up at your house one day, without any problem, without even having stopped paying the rent, and engage in criminal harassment – real. real estate harassment – incredible for you to leave and be able to use it for tourist rental or to obtain greater profitability,” Parés denounces.
It’s no coincidence that the public discourse has changed in recent years. A quick search on Google’s trends tool is enough to see how conversations about evictions dominated between 2011 and 2015, with platforms like PAH at the center of attention, only to drop off while terms like Desokupa rose.
