He dedicated the last few days to rest. It’s no different. Because, at 87, the age at which others dedicate themselves to living a peaceful old age, Maricarmen Abascal had to shout, protest and give countless interviews. For a week, when the television was turned on she appeared. Everything, to continue living in the house she has always lived in, the one she shared with her parents and her brother, the one where she saw her grow up. Everything, to prevent her, at 87, from being evicted.
“Maricarmen stay!” Many shouted in Madrid’s Retiro neighborhood on Wednesday when a court decided to postpone its launch. Because Maricarmen is much more than an isolated case: it is the symbol of a city against evictions. He’s not the only one. Seven years ago, in 2018, it was the turn of Pepi Santiago, resident in via Argumosa 11, in the Lavapiés neighborhood, which was her home for two decades. But her story ended badly for her and those who supported her. At 65, after 12 eviction attempts, Pepi ended up on the street. The Tenants Union remembers it perfectly because that episode, that brawl, contributed to advancing the current Housing Law. It has rained since then, although many things have remained the same.
Seven years later, Pepi is 72 years old and lives with her two daughters in an apartment owned by the Municipal Construction and Territory Company of Madrid (EMVS), obtained three years ago through a lottery in the Usera neighbourhood. “The day they kicked us out, having no housing alternatives, the Madrid City Council sent us to a squalid guesthouse in Cuatro Caminos. There we had to stay in a room for six months until we couldn’t stand it anymore,” recalls Fernanda Santiago, Pepi’s eldest daughter, 35 years old.
Pepi’s story now repeats itself with the face of Maricarmen. For both women, eviction comes at retirement age. But that’s not the only thing that unites them: at the time of the launch communication, both paid just under 500 euros for their rent, one in Retiro and the other in Lavapiés, two central and particularly gentrified areas, two territories that those living in Madrid have lost to investment funds and rentiers willing to make the most of holiday rentals. Both are represented by the Tenants Union, created in 2017, and in both cases a fund chose an unambiguous method to inform them that they were no longer welcome in the house they had always been in: to triple the rent at any moment.
They did it because they can, because on paper the two properties belong to large real estate companies. In the case of Maricarmen, Renta Corporación Real Estate; In Pepi’s case, the fund was Máximo Aguado Grupo Inmobiliario. Everything changed for them when these companies came into play. This is also why they are a symbol: their pattern is repeated in hundreds of cases of Madrid victims of the market. building speculation. They represent many.
So much so that on the day of Pepi’s eviction, the president of the government, who was already Pedro Sánchez, declared that situations like that of Argumosa, 11 years old, could not happen again. Since then, however, there have been more than 60,000 evictions. The then president of the Community of Madrid, Ángel Garrido, declared that, of course, the families would be moved to public housing as soon as possible. A year later Pepi was still living in boarding houses. Manuela Carmena’s government has also committed to relocating families to social housing. He didn’t comply either. After having linked together several temporary projects, three years ago Pepi and her family had to resort to an EMVS lottery, which gave them an apartment in Usera. Pepi, however, sadly says that he no longer goes to Lavapiés regularly: “Live where you live, they have already kicked us out of Lavapiés.”
Seven years later, he thinks that almost nothing has changed and that all the good words he received then were a dead letter: “They never reached the end. Now we have a house because we were lucky,” he says. “Our case received a lot of media coverage. We went everywhere and social pressure did a lot, but it wasn’t enough.” For a while they continued to support the fight against more evictions, but then they lost faith that things could change.
Pepi’s then lawyer – and now member of the CAES (Commission for Support and Social Studies) – Alejandra Jacinto, spokesperson for Podemos in the Regional Assembly, explains that there are paradigmatic cases that mark Spanish housing policy: “They are the symbol of popular resistance against tourism from urban centres. Pepi’s eviction was much more than an eviction, especially in the Lavapiés neighborhood.”
The Pepi case, Jacinto recalls, contributed to modifying the Law on Urban Rentals (LAU) so much so that, for example, the Government extended the duration of rental contracts to five years, a period during which the contract is automatically renewed if none of the parties raises objections. Under the previous law, the lessor could unilaterally withdraw from the contract at any time.
The failure to clear Maricarmen falls within the category of cases that influence the political class. The popular José Luis Martínez Almeida came forward to speak on the topic. His statements, however, far from calming things down, fueled the fire: Almeida limited himself to recommending that Maricarmen turn to social services, words that were interpreted by the opposition and the Tenants’ Union as a lack of respect.
Maricarmen herself, in fact, reminded the mayor that she had already turned to these services, which did not give her any solution. “She could be the grandmother of any of us,” explains Jacinto. But neighborhood solidarity does not guarantee success, far from it. In the case of Pepi, who also had United Nations resolutions in her favor, the eviction was carried out anyway, even if it took three different courts to reach an agreement. On the day of Pepi’s launch, more than 200 police officers were present.
The spokesperson of the Tenants’ Union, Valeria Racu, remembers this well, highlighting the communicating vessels that unite Pepi and Maricarmen: “It makes no sense for someone to be evicted after 70 years of living in a house. The two have in common that behind them there are funds specialized in real estate investments that buy properties and simply want to obtain greater profits and profitability. It’s about throwing away an entire life of women in difficulty. It must be stopped. Argumosa, 11, showed us this, and this is what we find ourselves in now. We must fight to the end not only for their housing, but for everyone’s.”
