The mayor of Seville, José Luis Sanz, from the Popular Party, has compared the shanty towns of El Vacie, the oldest in Europe, and Reina de los Ángeles, in the Polígono Sur neighbourhood, the poorest in Spain, with the New York neighbourhood of the Bronx. “This will be the mandate in which the settlements will end,” emphasised the mayor this morning, who announced that for this purpose he will “rely on international specialists who have participated in the regeneration of other neighbourhoods in the world such as the Bronx.”
Sanz and his team have insisted during their first year as mayor that one of their priorities is to end the El Vacie shanty town, located next to the wall of the San Fernando cemetery, before 2027. In this regard, the mayor indicated this morning that, in addition to social policies, to tackle the problems that these settlements bring with them, urban interventions are required “to change criteria that have turned certain neighborhoods into a ghetto” and to reverse this inertia is what they will count on these experts in the Bronx.
The relocation of the 176 people who continue to live in El Vacie is the responsibility of the technicians of the Social Services of the City Council who have been busy for years relocating the families who live in this enclave of substandard housing. For this reason, the mayor’s team has clarified at the end of the event in which he made this announcement, that these experts “will collaborate in the regeneration of the Polígono Sur, specifically in the strategic project of social, environmental, urban and architectural improvement.” However, they were unable to specify more when this newspaper asked them about the identity of these technicians or whether they had intervened in the regeneration of more neighborhoods in other cities.
The Bronx is inextricably linked to poverty, crime and insecurity, although during its transformation in recent decades it has gradually erased the stigmas related to drugs, gangs, violence and unemployment. Rubén Díaz Jr., who was president of the Bronx District between 2009 and 2021used to tell the press that the biggest challenge facing his neighbourhood was getting rid of the prejudices that people had associated with it. That is why the comparison made by the mayor of Seville between the Bronx and two of the most depressed areas of the Andalusian capital, and of Spain, which are struggling to get rid of the serious social and economic deficiencies that have weighed them down for decades, has not gone down well with its residents or the opposition parties.
“El Vacie continues to be a place of abandonment and exclusion, where families survive in unhealthy conditions and without having the minimum conditions of habitability,” says Macarena Olid, delegate of the Association for Human Rights of Andalusia (APDHA) in Seville and intensely involved with this village. “In this city we have professionals, social entities and the community that lives there to find solutions that allow or facilitate the eradication of the same, but what is essential is to have the responsibility of the public administrations, which are the ones that have systematically failed to fulfill their commitments, especially with regard to the provision of the necessary resources for a correct social intervention and the subsequent relocation of the families that live there,” she adds.
Raquel Gabarre, president of the Yiló Foundation, which gives voice not only to the gypsy women of Tres Mil Viviendas, one of the neighbourhoods of Polígono Sur, but to all its residents, warns: “No neighbourhood is the same as another.” She is wary of foreign experts being able to understand and act on the situation of marginality that exists in its streets and, like Olid, points out that these experts already exist in Seville. “There are many people from here who really care that we can break the gap that separates us from other neighbourhoods in Seville, who know the problems, who have done studies…”, she stresses, drawing attention to the work that has been carried out by various researchers from the University of Seville. “Fewer experts and more presence of the public services of the City Council, because here what we suffer from is a lack of municipal presence,” she adds.
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This is the idea that the municipal spokesperson for Con Podemos Sevilla, Susana Horrillo, has also underlined through her X account: “Instead of reinforcing social services with qualified personnel, the PP of Seville prefers to hire “specialists” from the Bronx to dismantle the shanty town of El Vacie.” The former socialist mayor, Antonio Muñoz, has also harshly criticized the comparison made by Sanz. “It is a disgrace that, in order to get a striking headline in the press, they lend themselves to this type of comparison that equates El Vacie, and by extension the neighboring neighborhoods, Pino Montano and San Jerónimo, with the crime rate of the Bronx, thus equating the problems of this New York neighborhood, which has more than a million inhabitants, with a shanty town whose main problems are housing and social exclusion.”
Stable policies in the face of occurrences
It was precisely during the last two socialist mandates when a greater push was given to the eradication of the village of El Vacie, a settlement whose first shacks were built in the 1930s and which reached almost a thousand inhabitants at the end of 2009. Although it was from that year onwards that timid relocations began to take place, it was not until November 2015, with Juan Espadas as mayor of Seville, when a schedule was designed to try to dismantle the enclave.
“We did it with the professionals from the City Council who were the ones working in situ and they knew the problems from within in collaboration with social entities,” Juan Manuel Flores, former delegate for Social Cohesion and Urban Habitat and responsible for this initiative, explains to this newspaper. In eight years, two thirds of El Vacie were able to be relocated. “A census was ordered and of the 613 people, 407 were relocated, grouped around 104 families, of which none returned to the town,” says Flores, who points out as keys to success the discretion with which the evictions were carried out and the fact that the relocations were carried out in a dispersed manner and always following the criteria of opportunity on who, when and where established by the municipal Social Services. The former socialist councilor regrets that the pandemic truncated its total eradication.
Now there are 176 people, distributed in 54 families, living in substandard conditions in El Vacie. “We must leave behind short-term projects and apply real policies of intervention in exclusion zones, with a stable and long-lasting economic provision that does not cease until the last family leaves the settlement for public housing,” says Olid, for whom, behind the scourge of poverty and exclusion that prevents the closing of the social gap that determines that Seville is home to six of the 15 poorest neighbourhoods in Spain, lie erratic policies of access to public housing: “There is no public housing stock in Seville that responds to the real needs of the city and it is an endemic problem that, for decades, continues to prey on the most humble and excluded sectors of the city. In the most forgotten neighbourhoods of Seville there are families that, generation after generation, suffer from social exclusion with which the necessary resources could end up being allocated to the problem.”
Both Olid and Gabarre demand seriousness and commitment from municipal leaders. “Until those who govern us take it seriously, the Vacie will only be news through headlines like the one that the Mayor of the city has made today and that will barely last a few hours or, at most, a few days. And, in the meantime, many families will continue to live in conditions of severe exclusion for years,” says the APDHA delegate in Seville.
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