Spanish state: What is behind the campaign against squatting?

By: fawda - August 28th, 2020  Filed under: essay

Panic wave. The looming economic crisis has begun to negatively affect the real estate market: rental prices are falling, rents are falling.

Breakfast with alarming news: squatting is still going on, the insecurity of everyone (as we are all owners) is at its highest. Radio advertisement of a security company: “Burglary and squatting alarm equipment”. Report in a program of maximum audience to the heroes of the companies kicking out squatters: five bodybuilders already in their forties explain their work; the legality of it seems doubtful. Statements by a politician: “One of these days you go on vacation and when you return, because they consider the house to be empty, they give it to their squatters’ friends – in reference to a well-known ‘leftist’ party”. The emergency campaign for the problem of squatting is continuous, insistent, and crushing. The fear, converted into a wave of panic, reaches a good part of the population. Rumors of home invasions have acquired the rank of “I know the case of a friend of a friend who had his house occupied, and blah, blah, blah”.

But what are we talking about when we say ‘squatting’? Obviously, of entering to live in a property of which one lacks all legitimate rights (understand, sanctioned by the property). [Read More]

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Resisting the next wave of real estate speculation in Spain

By: fawda - October 22nd, 2015  Filed under: essay, video

Stop_BlackstoneA new speculative bubble may be taking shape as global investment firms buy devalued real estate in Spain. Will they beat a new path of dispossession?

At the dawn of the twenty-first century, Spain was flying high. After extensive economic liberalization and adoption of the euro in the late 1990s, all indicators pointed up. Spain boasted the highest use of cement in the European Union, fifth worldwide, as close to a million houses were built in 2006 alone — more than France, Germany and Italy combined. Many were convinced that prosperity was here to stay.

But the boom was built on an asset bubble, where skyrocketing housing prices and unprecedented amounts of credit for developers and homeowners — and thus vast indebtedness — created the perfect storm. While more than six million new homes were built and house prices increased by over 200 percent from 1996 to 2007, in the years since then Spain has seen millions of vacant properties accumulate, housing production at a standstill, price declines of over 65 percent from their peak, and hundreds of thousands of home repossessions. [Read More]

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Spain’s unlikely squatters

By: sisulscz - July 2nd, 2014  Filed under: News

[From liberal mainstream press]

To a casual observer, the apartment blocks look much like any other. Well maintained, adequately furnished and with a reliable supply of power and water, few would guess the buildings are squatted by families who lost their jobs and homes to Spain’s long-running economic recession.

Around 250,000 seizure orders were served on properties between 2008 and 2012 but the cash-strapped state offers little support for ruined homeowners. So, in apartments dotted across Spain, grassroots anti- eviction group Platform for Mortgage Affected People [PAH] is attempting to engineer its own housing-crisis solution.
[Read More]

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Cataluña: PAH-occupied flat block is a foot in the door

By: sisulscz - September 17th, 2013  Filed under: News

For the last five months, sixteen families – from a broad range of backgrounds and nationalities, almost all victims of bank foreclosures – have been living together in an abandoned, brand new flat block in a ghostly quiet suburb of the Catalan town of Salt in Spain.

Organised in the PAH (Plataforma por los Afectados por la Hipoteca –the Victims of Mortgages Coalition), the occupiers of Bloc Salt have held out since 23rd March against repeated attempts by the authorities to cut their water supply and intimidate them into leaving, and instead are concentrating on developing their own community, with a living space that suits their needs and desires, as well as preparing for the court-ordered eviction, mooted for 16th October.
[Read More]

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Spain: the Big Squat

By: fawda - March 2nd, 2012  Filed under: News

“If they evict us, I don’t know what we’re gonna do. Now we have nothing”, says Trini, who lives with his partner and son in one of the eight squatted houses in a building at the center of Madrid. The 500 euros she earns taking care of elders is the only income of her family. As with most of the families that had been forced to squatting, Trini and her family want to pay for their house, but at a fair price. “I have a son and I want him to learn that he have to work hard to gain things”, explains Trini.

Since 2007 there were more than 350,000 evictions for unpaid mortgages, according to the Spanish Association of People Affected for Embargoes and Auctions. Many of these evictions have left entire families with children without homes and, have even been the cause of several suicides, like the case of M.P., who hanged himself in the street on November, 2011, in Catalonia, after being evicted with his wife and two children.

The situation of housing in Spain is especially paradoxical. While hundreds of thousands families have lost their homes, in 2001 there were more than three million empty houses and today there could be six millions. Meanwhile,the financial entities had became the mayor real states of the country. Bankia alone owns more than 5 million euros in properties. [Read More]

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