Real estate harassment in old age and violation of the right to housing

Evictions are one of the most extreme violations of the right to housing, and they are more than installed in the Spanish social reality. After the crisis that broke out in Spain in 2008, the risk of housing began to increase. In Spain we had been told, for generations, that renting was throwing away money and that property was the only "decent" way to live (We want a country of owners, not proletarians, said Arrese, that Franco minister who reversed the system of tenure of housing in Spain). It seemed to us that being an owner was "safe". Then we saw that it wasn't like that. 

In Spain we had everything we needed for the crisis to be spectacular, and that's how it was. Our labour market depended to a great extent on the construction of housing, which had been selling above its real price. Contributing to this were the banks, which had given mortgages above the percentage considered "safe". The point is that even with low and temporary salaries it wasn't too difficult to get a mortgage. Chained" mortgages came to be given, in which one home with a mortgage could guarantee another (yes, this happened) so that when one home could not pay, it looked like a tower of cards: after one family another fell. 

When less housing began to be sold, unemployment also increased (it was no longer being built). The price of housing fell, but it was still not accessible to many households. 

After becoming unemployed, many families were forced to pay for housing that had been priced well above its real price. With the fall in house prices, they couldn't even think about selling that house and going to a cheaper one. This was framed in the general decline in wages and mass layoffs, which became the norm. Overtime was no longer paid. Labour rights were contracted in the following years. Come on, a party in which the guest star was vulnerability and the hostess...the house. 

The most serious thing about the crisis - for me - was that it led to the normalization of situations unthinkable a few years ago. In terms of work, in terms of what we endured on an individual level (those extra hours that were no longer paid for, for example, because we had to put our shoulders together and we were all in the same boat) but also on a social level, such as the reduction of certain social advances. Saying goodbye was cheaper. And this increased the fear: in a context in which we weren't hired, we could be thrown out more easily. From before we already had temporary contracts, or we chained contracts that annulled the seniority (I remember chaining contracts for the same company with a day of dismissal in between). 

In the country's residential situation, he introduced a new reality: evictions. No, evictions were not new as such, but the concept was installed in our vocabulary. If not I will say that it was normalized (normal will never be) if we could say that it was installed in our surroundings, directly or indirectly. 

The number of evictions in Spain reached its zenith in the years following the crisis, although official figures did not exist at the time and it is difficult to have reliable data. PAH estimates that between 2008 and the third quarter of 2012 there were 362,776 launches, with 2011 being the year with the most negative results. This is also the year with the highest incidence of unemployment. In addition, if the layoffs began in 2008, one would expect that the two years of unemployment benefit entitlement would have ended, giving rise to situations of terror that are sometimes minimized. 

Such evictions are clear in the collective imagination. Although the data are not accessible, we know that they exist (data and reality). There is a non-payment, a judicial process, a documented result. We talk about eviction and think about that reality. 

However, there are other realities that are hidden behind somewhat complicated concepts such as "real estate mobbing" or blockbusting (which was defined as the attack of a gang to occupy the territory of another) but that lead to the same result: the violation of the right to housing. As in other types of harassment, in real estate harassment the object is to treat a person badly, to undermine them, to turn their day to day into a little hell, until that person wants to leave without needing to be "kicked out". 

Real estate mobbing did not affect (nor does it affect) according to age criteria: those who applied it did not kick people out because they were older, but because they wanted to obtain a greater economic benefit for the property. This was the case when the person occupying that housing paid an old rent or simply the owner wanted to have the property for other purposes. They wanted to expel that person from the house, but legally could not, since the tenant was not breaking the contract. 

While older people were not explicitly subject to this practice, they were more vulnerable. First, they were targeted for a matter of proportion: the old rent, regulated by the 1964 Urban Leases Act, referred to rents signed before 9 May 1985. For reasons of time, these were mostly older people's homes. Probably for this reason, some assumptions were established that "saved" older people from being legally expelled. But here, again, came what we sometimes call picaresque and which is still evil, which consisted of harassing the tenant until the tenant left or was forced to buy the flat. This was the case of two ladies I interviewed. It was not a phenomenon that was wanted, but it happened in two cases. In the case of the first of them, there was no harassment, simply a termination of that old income at the worst possible time: the two people (who had not yet turned 65 for lack of months) were unemployed. The difficult situation ended with the abandonment of the city (Madrid, which concentrated most of these old rental contracts with other cities) towards another autonomous community, another neighbourhood, new neighbours and another life. The second case is that of Asunción (no, it is not his real name) who was 71 years old when this happened to him, which has been called invisible eviction and which does not appear in the statistics. Asunción had just been widowed when her landlord told her that she either paid almost double, or she had to leave home. The conditions were unfathomable and the reasons given by the landlord were clearly illegal. But as Asunción, who never had children, told me, "I had enough of my sorrow, of losing my husband and being left alone, to fight with that man". A few months of fighting went by, Asunción couldn't take it anymore and left. When I interviewed her, she still missed her house, her neighborhood, her neighbors and even the baker on her street, but she had to leave everything behind. 

I close today's post with the second meaning of eviction given by the RAE: To take away someone's hope of getting what they want.