'Neither people without homes, nor homes without people'

PalmaRecently, the Institute of Anthropology of the Islands (IAI), with a decade of academic and associative experience, has renewed its board with the goal of publicly reactivating the entity and resuming all kinds of activities, seminars, and spaces for debate and reflection surrounding the anthropological discipline.

However, this renewal also obeys a shared will on the part of the new board to reaffirm the IAI's commitment to the injustices present in the Balearic context, derived from its politico-economic position in the world, following the path of precedents such as the involvement with the Platform for Democratic Memory and the declaration condemning the Zionist genocide in Palestine in 2023. Neither as anthropologists, nor as workers do we wish to ignore the crisis and conflict that have escalated in recent years and months surrounding the housing issue.

A conflict, evidenced by the impossibility for more and more sectors of the working class to access decent housing (and more dramatically with the deaths of Maricarmen, Olga, Javier, and so many others), which has been brewing for decades and is part of a process of structural crisis of capitalism aggravated by the speculative bases of neoliberal conjugation. This is pointed out by a multitude of anthropological studies and ethnographies that analyze the predatory effects on life of imperialist globalization, the financialization of the economy, and the unbridled competition they incentivize, some of the crudest faces of which are the rise of authoritarianism in countries, the militarization of borders, and the escalation of warmongering everywhere.

The cost of living (the shopping basket, the rent, the 'services' that must be paid for in the face of the dismantling of the public sector) does nothing but grow while, however counterintuitive it may seem, the profits of businessmen who concentrate more wealth and properties are at a historic high, favored by the real estate business. Just to give an example, if in 2015 the average rent price for an 80 m² home in the Balearic Islands was about 700 euros, today it has already exceeded 1,600 euros. It is no wonder, then, that in 2024 more than 10,000 people took to the streets of Palma under the slogan 'Mallorca is not for sale', demanding housing as a right, and that since then, protests have followed in the Islands that have mobilized more than 100,000 demonstrators in favor of the decommodification of housing.

This social concern –that is, the extension, neighborhood by neighborhood, of the cry ‘no people without homes, nor homes without people’– has had as its academic translation the rise of scientific studies on the housing issue, especially focused on the impact on the most unprotected and impoverished sectors of the population. Works on gentrification, economic and ecological predation, occupation and other arts of resistance and protest, public policies on the matter, and commodifying impacts, among many other spheres, reinforce the meaning of the entire set of demands and mobilizations. In the Balearic Islands, together with academic voices linked to Geography, Economics, History, Political Science, and Comparative Literature, among others, for more than a decade various anthropologists have been denouncing through research and presence in the media that housing understood as a commodity (like any other –a pair of shoes, a trip, work itself–) and the link with the tourism industry generates a cocktail of very serious social consequences that strips away any optimistic macroeconomic analysis or patch from one government or another.

With cuts in the face of the underlying crisis, the ‘regulation’ policy of the tourism model and the housing market has neither reversed nor slowed the expansion of the geographies of capital over entire neighborhoods and towns, which has skyrocketed the rate of labor exploitation, reinforced the contraction of wages, and created even more precarious jobs. In a context of runaway financial speculation, the difficulties of making ends meet have facilitated processes of housing dispossession and have contributed to the gentrification, no longer just of areas, but of entire islands, a fact that leads more and more families to the routine of eviction, whether more high-profile or silent (but always protected by policed civil and criminal codes). Several ethnographic studies conducted in our region point out how this residential expulsion and substitution –from neighbors to tourists– has a very clear class dimension. This is also reflected in the data from the Palma Housing Union (SHP) regarding the proliferation of tourist rentals, both legal and illegal, which, beyond the city, prey upon and destroy natural and rural environments. More than 40% of properties end up in the hands of foreigners –those rich and white ones, who do not receive death and criminalization when they cross borders. In Palma alone, more than 10,000 apartments are empty, of which 500 are in the hands of large holders.

Here and across the planet, Anthropology has studied how the commodification of housing and the real estate business feed on social bonds (from the work of each neighborhood to celebrations and community practices, co-opted at the service of tourist capital). Consequently, as members of the IAI, we believe it is urgent that we reorganize the scientific landscape of the Islands, so that the anthropological gaze and its tools of critical analysis (ethnography, defamiliarization, comparison) occupy an educational and institutional space that is currently non-existent (in part, due to the interests of power itself).

But beyond the academic field, as precarious workers from diverse sectors that we are (university students, teaching staff, civil service, third sector, culture, museums), we want to support the general strike on November 11th to defend the increase in wages and the decommodification of housing, the real suspension of evictions, the effective ban on tourist rentals, and the expropriation of empty apartments from large landlords to allocate them to social housing, among other demands. All of this, with the horizon that everyone has the right to free and quality housing.