Thousands of people in Seville, Málaga, Cádiz and Murcia took to the streets this Saturday to defend housing as a right. Rental prices, touristification and speculative excesses that prevent access to an apartment are the axes of protests that inaugurate a new wave of claims. There have also been demonstrations in Tarifa and La Línea de la Concepción.
In Seville, a crowd gathered at the Palacio de San Telmo, the demonstration became more animated as time went by. To the rhythm of a batucada and to the voice of “It’s not tourism, it’s class struggle,” he started walking along Avenida de la Constitución, around 12:10. There was a large presence of young people, those most affected by the housing crisis, those who encounter the most difficulties. Amalia Vahí, of the Triana Norte Neighborhood Association and Nerea de Tenaa member of Hazando Barrio, Macarena, spoke to the media: “What we want is to guarantee that that apartment, home or block does not lose its housing function.”
“Tourism has been incorporated as an economic resource for those who have inherited it, but everything has the possibility of being limited. Don’t forget the housing function, don’t think only about your pocket. The real estate market is fighting with all its tools, but we must guarantee that that apartment, home or block does not lose its housing function.“said the spokespeople of the citizen movement that has called for this protest.
The march passed through the center of Seville, full of tourists, a tower of babel. While the slogans of the demonstration were chanted, —”neither people without homes, nor homes without people”; “the housing law is fucking shit”; “less build and more intervene“—people ate roasted peppers and potatoes season and drank glasses of wine and you cut in the bars that fill the streets.
The organizing platforms have been carefully preparing the demonstrations for some time with seriousness and joy. This Friday, in La Macarena, there was a workshop on creating banners. Some of them could be seen this Saturday. “Fewer Airbnbs, more neighborhood corral”; “The country is your neighbors”; “housing is a right, not a business”, “less candaos and more pots”, “I have inherited, but my friends have been kicked out”; “I was born in La Alameda, but they kicked me out to the outskirts”; “no more empty houses, no more abusive rents”; “peace for the speculators”.
Each city has its own casuistry, but there are common patterns in all of them: they host more tourism than necessary and accumulate thousands and thousands of empty homes. The house has been placed in recent months in third place among the main concerns of Andalusians, after unemployment and the state of public healthaccording to surveys carried out by the Center for Andalusian Studies, an organization dependent on the cabinet of Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla (PP).
In Seville, the protest reached the mushrooms, a great symbol of tourism, of a city model, and at the same time of the protests in Seville since 15M. There, at around 1:40 p.m., the thousands of people gathered took out their keys and created a concert based on their jingle. Again, the fundamental slogans were chanted —”an eviction, another squatting”; “Progressive, hypocritical and rentier government”; “neither people without homes, nor homes without people”— and a text was read in which it was claimed that “housing is a right guaranteed in the Spanish Constitution.”
Spokespersons for the organizing platforms took turns reading the main demands of the protest: “The right to housing is transversal, it guarantees a dignified life for any human being, no matter where they come from. Young people and people with vulnerable economies are forced to postpone a vital right. Tourism affects coexistence and cities and towns become hostile spaces. There is a gigantic Monopoly. “The housing law is progress, but it does not solve the structural problems.”
Faced with this, the spokespersons were listing some measuresamong them: One, the brake on rental prices. Two, the brake on touristification. Three, increase in the public housing stock. Four, legal guarantees and a stop to evictions without a housing alternative.
Five, a limit on speculation and access to urban land. Expropriation of use of empty homes. Six, energy supply guarantee. Seven, promotion of cooperativism and transfer of use. Eight, universal basic income and limitation on large fortunes and corporate benefits. And nine, green revitalization and urban reforestation.
Then again the multitudinous jingling of keyswhile chanting “neither people without homes nor houses without people” closed the protest. It was 2:06 p.m.
The regulations undertaken so far by the Andalusian Government, which refuses to apply the state housing law – considered incomplete and insufficient by citizen platforms – and promotes its own, with a model based on increased supply —the return of brick— and the city councils have not stopped the effects of touristification, which expels inhabitants from the city centers.
From Murcia, in the protest called by the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) they added the problem of empty housesmore than 100,000, they say, which could contribute to a solution.
Problem of class and power
For the Seville platform to live “it is a structural, class and power problem.” “The administrations, allied with investment funds, banks, owners and rentiers have sought in recent months to whitewash their complicity in the management of the housing crisis,” they consider.
The geographer Iban Díaz has written this article titled Is the tenant strike the tool we need? in which he reflects the following reflection on the matter: “Currently the housing problem has many facets and a fragmented subject that must be mobilized in a broad framework. In addition to the group of tenants, we find in our cities a growing number of homes that are expelled from the market and cannot even rent.
“In addition,” adds the professor from the University of Seville, ” the mortgage problem continues to jump sporadically at the rate of rising interest rates, residents of tourist cities are displaced by short-term rentals and the habitability conditions of homes in many neighborhoods are degrading, regardless of the property regime.
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