In the apartment blocks of my childhood everyone looked very much alike. In my aunt Toñi’s house, which was under official protection, there were couples who worked in black and white, he in the fields and she who washed the stairs, families whose supermarket was Cáritas, and immigrants who had recently arrived in a Spain that, as Aznar told us, was fine. In the house of Sofia, a classmate whose parents were doctors, there was a dentist’s office and several apartments of families who, like her, went to the opera during the week, which to me made them equal to royalty. When my postman parents separated, they both went to live in apartments with people whose purchasing power was very similar to theirs, which was very small at the time: There are many things about divorce that almost no one says, and one of them is that it is a class privilege.
They separated the same year he was released There’s no one living here, 2003. The community of Desengaño, 21 was also quite homogeneous, at least at the beginning. It was in the center of Madrid and there were a couple of sisters who had inherited an apartment, a family who struggled to pay the bill every month, a gay couple, a pensioner who had been hidden the forty-year-old son who remained at home after the divorce and two young girls who had rented him their second home, as well as the doorman and the video store clerk.
When the episodes aired and the banks stopped granting mortgages for the house, the car and the child’s communion, the writers cleverly incorporated other figures, such as the rentier. There is no other series in Spain that has better reflected the evolution of the family economy and housing situation in recent years There is no one living here and his successor, What’s coming. Because when things started to go wrong, the creators created a new fiction, this time set in a PAU.
If they had continued to chain the series until today, the video club Desengaño, 21 would now be a CBD shop, several apartments would be tourist, one would have been bought at random by a Venezuelan for 750,000 euros and another couple would be in the process of being acquired by an investment fund to transform them into four or five 20 square meter apartments. The target would not be Emilio but one of those immigrants who, as Ayuso says – and as our political, business and media elites of the right and left think, whether they verbalize it or not – come because someone will have to do shitty jobs, not everyone will be project Manager.
Now the blocks are not homogeneous but within them there is diversity, a value much celebrated in recent decades. In the city centers there are several investment funds, several tourist rental platforms and several foreign investors, as immigrants are called when they have money.
In the suburbs and cities, even the neighbors on the blocks look less and less alike. I see it in mine, built when it came out There is no one living hereinitially for the popular classes. Now the original owners live together, boomers working class, with middle class like me who buy or rent their apartments at a bargain price and immigrant families who, like that of a neighbor of mine, share an apartment with other families, each in a room and with strict rules: they cannot use the living room, the kitchen has opening hours and they must, obviously, eat in the room. But Spain continues to do well, even if whoever tells us this now doesn’t have a moustache.
