“Rent is through the roof, but we don’t live in heaven”: Seville and Malaga start a new wave of housing protests

This Saturday, November 9, four demonstrations—in Seville, Malaga, Cadiz and Murcia—, convened by citizen platforms, which demand the consideration of housing as a right will open a new wave of mobilizations throughout November and December throughout the State.

These, according to the tenants’ union, will be followed by others in Albacetethis Sunday, the 10th; in Barcelona, ​​Burgos, Jerez and OviedoNovember 23; in Saragossaon November 30; in Salamancathe first of December, and in Bilbaoon December 14.

The analysis carried out by the convening platforms is similar for all cities. Thus, Málaga para vivir, which already launched a massive protest last summer, calls under the motto If they throw us out of the neighborhoods, we stop the city.

The one in Seville to live has the premise that the city is not a business. For Cádiz resistsit is about fighting for the identity of the city and its neighborhoods, and for residential housing. In Murcia, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgage (PAH) has called “in order to demand the release of empty homes to the market.

All platforms and citizen movements agree that today there is a housing crisis of gigantic proportions. Its causes, as they explain, are found in phenomena such as tourism, and, above all, in the promotion and maintenance of a city model that “turns housing into a business and erodes the social fabric.”

The consequences are, according to Málaga para vivir, that the city “expels the neighbors”, it becomes a theme park in which housing is a speculative goodwhich “destroys” neighborhood alliances and networks. The problem is similar, in each place with its level of intensity, in other cities.

“There is,” explains Sevilla to live, “a unprecedented housing crisis caused by speculation, the commodification of urban land and touristification”, which causes “the right to housing to be a true privilege and not a right”.

“The right to housing supports other fundamental rights such as physical and mental health and education,” emphasize the organizers of the protest in Seville: “Housing is a fundamental axis to guarantee a decent life“.

Touristification and empty homes

“In Málaga there have gone from 25,000 homes and apartments for tourist use in 2018 to almost 73,000 in 2024,” denounces the Málaga para vivir platform. “Malaga is today one of the cities with the highest rents in Spain and the second city with the most expensive land in Spain; Only in the first three quarters of 2024 has it risen 20%,” they add.

In Seville, the City Council, with the votes of PP and Vox, has just approved, with a strong neighborhood rejectiona regulation that would allow 23,000 more empty apartments, not in the center, but in the rest of the neighborhoods.

In the Region of Murcia there are about 100,000 unoccupied houseswhose release on the market would lower rental prices, according to the PAH.

In Cádiz, there are currently accommodation places to accommodate more than 10% of its resident population on the same day. Cádiz resists also states that the city is the one that receives the most cruise passengers per inhabitant —six per person— each year in the entire State and where long-term rentals have decreased the most in the last decade.

“Tourism and the excess of tourist housing has been the straw that broke the camel’s back, but the problem goes much further“, explains Seville to live. Among the demands of the Seville platform is the declaration of stressed areas to set maximum rental prices, the increase in the public housing stock in all neighborhoods, legal guarantees so that in no case will produce evictions without alternative rooms and that public housing sold to vulture funds or in the hands of SAREB is recovered.”

Citizen movements have been maintaining neighborhood meetings and assemblies in different neighborhoods to prepare for the demonstrations. In them, in addition to sharing diagnosis, problems and solutions, part of which, they consider, is in the very existence of these meetings, they have also collected support from all walks of life. For example, a punk song that the local band Miarma Warriors contributes to support the demonstration from what they call “decayed” Seville.

Thus, for example, on the Sevilla para vivir website there are different slogans that summarize the feeling that is breathed in those assemblies: “Rent through the roof, but we don’t live in heaven“; “being a landlord is not a profession”; “I only ask to be able to live in my neighborhood”; “fed up with having money left over at the end of the month”; “housing is a right, not a privilege”; “Seville is not an amusement park“; “your Airbnb was my grandparents’ house”; “more stew, less sushi”; “I’m from Triana, but I will never be able to live in Triana…”

The example of Lagunillas in Malaga

One of the assemblies in Malaga was held in the Lagunillas neighborhood, a working class area, in the north of the central district, which has been devastated by the tourist flats. “What happens in neighborhoods close to the historic center we also see in Huelin, Ciudad Jardín, and even in peripheral areas such as La Luz or El Palo. The financialization of housing is causing widespread suffering and has no limits,” they say in Malaga to live.

Lagunillas, Malaga maintains to live, has been a neighborhood historically forgotten by the administrations. “Despite the efforts of the neighbors to make it habitable, only when the tourist apartments have invaded the area and the neighbors have been displaced has public investment arrived with pedestrianization works. We do not believe this story: without an effective ban on housing for tourist use or a significant drop in rental prices, these interventions only make the problem worse,” they warn in a note.

In the neighborhood, there are streets with concentrations of tourist housing of 80%. “Counting neighbors is done with one hand. Living here is impossible. The situation is unsustainable,” the platform denounces.

And after? Once the demonstrations occur, they will not stop. They will continue, they assure from Malaga, with the self-organization processes in neighborhoods, focused on three axes: housing, job insecurity and the climate crisis and destruction of the territory: “These axes respond to the concerns of the neighbors.”