“Home is our corner of the world,” said the thinker Gastón Bachelard. To defend our corner of the world, demonstrations are taking place in Madrid, one day after National Day, under the slogan “Housing is a right, not a business”. This house that Le Corbusier called “living machine», the living machine, producer of happiness and well-being that we have transformed into the most effective inequality machine. Sociologist Matthew Desmond anticipated this in 2017: “Housing policy offers great advantages to wealthy homeowners; to those in the middle class, minor advantages; and for the majority of tenants, nothing. It is difficult to imagine another social policy capable of multiplying inequalities so successfully.”
In the United States, the average homeowner has 36 times more net worth than the average renter. In Spain, the majority of people who rent in Madrid and Barcelona will never be able to buy a home. This is one of the conclusions of the “From owners to tenants” study. Report on growing inequalities in access to property”, published this Wednesday by the Barcelona Urban Research Institute (Idra). 70% of tenants in the two major Spanish cities do not expect to inherit or be able to buy a home. On the other hand, homeowners who rent get richer every year, and half of home purchases are made by people who already own them. The rental market functions as a gigantic mechanism for transferring money from the poorest population to the richest, and inheritance or help from parents becomes the only means of accessing housing. More than 50% of the profits from rental income benefit the richest 20% of the population; The poorest 20% of tenants spend at least 45% of their income on rent. 10% of the population owns 56% of the wealth and the gap is widening thanks to the effective engine of inequality that is housing.
