Beyond Maricarmen

PalmaThe eviction of Maricarmen in Madrid is the symptom of a chronic illness. The ecosystem that allows housing to be treated as a simple financial asset began to be built with the land liberalization of the Aznar era and was fed after the 2008 collapse, when the pre-sales to the banks facilitated the sale of thousands of homes and real estate assets to vulture funds. Neither the intense but ephemeral indignation over the case—erected as a symbol—of an 87-year-old woman in a wheelchair thrown onto the street will manage to change the course of speculative inertia.

The state government has woken up and now wants to recover the housing measures it parked due to a lack of consensus. Among these, it proposes strict control of seasonal rentals, the prohibition of passing costs on to the tenant, and a strengthening of guarantees against certain evictions. But housing powers are transferred, and many of the tools to intervene in the market depend on regional and local administrations. The left-wing state government provides tools to contain prices that, in the case of stressed areas, can only be deployed where the competent autonomous communities agree to declare them. The position of the right in this regard is clear: pure and hard liberalism and the blind belief that the market regulates itself. In fact, it does so by emptying the pockets of the worker to fill those of the rentiers; suffocating the poor to enrich those who have the most. The different administrations also have other tools: from fiscal measures to incentivize certain rentals to municipal instruments such as the surcharge of the IBI on certain empty homes. There are also ways to intervene in seasonal and room rentals within the jurisdictional framework of each administration. In the case of empty homes, city councils can go so far as to apply a surcharge of up to 150% of the IBI.

In the Balearic Islands, the institutions have refused to apply measures they consider little less than communist and bet everything on getting some photos of helmets in the middle of some cranes that demonstrate the construction of more housing, even if the regime in which they are sold is, for the most part, in accordance with the rules of a voracious capitalism that leaves thousands of citizens not exposed to eviction, but simply unable to aspire to a roof under which to sleep.