Kika Aguilera has voluntarily stopped paying the last two monthly payments of her rent. She and her neighbors, in an officially protected block in Salou, Tarragona, have become the first to start a tenants’ strike in Catalonia. Their objective with the protest is to get the IBI collection from recent years returned to them, a tax that the Supreme Court has already established that the landlord must assume.
The Tenants Union of Catalonia announced this Wednesday that two blocks of officially protected housing, the one in Salou and another in Sentmenat, are the first to resort to a rent strike. Both belong to InmoCaixa, CriteriaCaixa’s apartment portfolio. The nearly 80 apartments of the first one are also included in the package of 451 that the Government of Salvador Illa has announced that it will buy from the financial entity for 30 million euros.
However, while the purchase process is being formalized, Kika Alguilera and her neighbors have decided to go on strike. They have returned two monthly payments, which approximately add up to 700 euros for each tenant. With this they express their rejection of the property being charged the IBI, about 25 euros per month. “They are obliged to return it to us,” denounces Kika, who recalls that there are families who have been paying it for 14 years.
This woman entered her apartment in Salou in 2017 with a five-year contract. But at the end of its validity, in 2022, they did not want to renew it. Even so, you continue to pay the property each month. Of the rest of the apartments, about 40 are currently empty, another 20 occupied by tenants with a contract and only four are in the same situation as Kika. However, the majority say they support the protest. “Since everyone has their contract, this facilitates disunity, but now we are organized,” defends this tenant.
“It is the first step of a strike movement,” said Enric Aragonès, spokesperson for the Tenants’ Union of Catalonia, who assures that in recent months they have been working to extend this model of protests and pressure to other buildings. The idea of a rent strike has been hovering over the movement for the right to housing for some time, especially coinciding with recent demonstrations in cities such as Madrid or Barcelona, but until now it has not been widely raised.
In this sense, in Catalonia it is no coincidence that they have started InmoCaixa promotions, since the Tenants’ Union began a campaign more than a year ago against the financial entity’s management of its officially protected apartments, at least 38 promotions distributed throughout the autonomous community. The tenant organization denounces that they include “abusive clauses” in their contracts – such as the collection of IBI or maintenance expenses – and that they often refuse to renew their tenants.
Two other properties in which strike action has been approved this week are in Sentmenat, in the province of Barcelona. In your case, however, they will begin on March 1. Until then, the neighbors will work to reach at least 25% households joining the protest. Their strike will consist of paying their monthly payments to a “joint fund”, according to their spokesperson Marta Carrillo, with the aim of getting InmoCaixa to sit down and negotiate their demands.
The first request is that these two promotions be included in the Generalitat’s purchase of the financial institution’s apartments, although this ultimately depends on the Catalan Administration. “Maintaining the official protection status is the only way to prevent them from throwing us out onto the streets,” warns Carrillo, who is therefore demanding that his house and the others pass into the hands of the Catalan Land Institute (Incasòl). In addition, the residents of Sentmenat demand to renew contracts “without price increases”, paralyze all eviction processes open in both properties, and also review clauses such as the payment of the IBI.
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