“We are immersed in a crisis of access to housing and attention has been turned to construction, but we are faced with a tsunami of apartments that have very serious pathologies and, if their rehabilitation is not seriously addressed, sooner or later they will fall into disrepair. And this is also the right to housing.” This is the alarm, through the mouth of Joan Maria Soler, launched on Thursday by the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Barcelona (FAVB) and by five neighborhoods of the city where it is estimated that there are 8,000 houses with “serious structural defects”. The bulk is concentrated in the Besòs neighborhood (5,000 homes, 2,800 at serious risk), La Pau (2,500), Trinitat Vella (432), Poblenou (314) and El Carmel (five very serious and dozens not so serious). They share that they are peripheral, have low or very low incomes, and that their socioeconomic composition makes it difficult for communities to be cohesive and have purchasing power to undertake large projects. They ask for more adequate management of the complex social situation and public and convenient credit lines. There are already people who have had to leave their homes, who live among props or even some in apartments that have lost their certificate of occupancy.
In the Besòs neighborhood, Juan Antonio Amaya (42 years old) is one of those who had to leave. She has been away from home for more than a year, propped up since the roof began to cave in. After a short stay in a hostel, he has been in a guesthouse for more than a year: “I haven’t sat on the sofa or opened the fridge for a year,” he says of the life he and his partner lead in the guesthouse room. “Do I have to do something crazy to get them to pay attention?” asks this neighbor whose family lived in the Somorrostro barracks. His building, in via Catania, has been propped up since 2019. The first props were paid for by the neighbors, they are in the basement and remain there. The property has a redevelopment plan drawn up, but it is clear that the neighbors do not even have the bank guarantee for the financing. Rafa, the president of the community, tells it. 71 years old, “exhausted and nervous after ten years”. “How many neighbors could afford the work? None. The work is unworkable.”
We are in the three poorest census sections of Barcelona. In via Marsala, parallel to Catania, lives Aurora Jiménez, 52 years old and with the apartment propped up since 2022. Also his sister’s apartment, on the same staircase. Here there were three times when rubble fell from the ceiling. “Once, it was at Christmas, halfway through the meal, the second graders dropped a stone like the one on the table,” Aurora gestures. “You can’t live like this, these are not conditions, sometimes you think it will never be resolved,” she says, pointing to the exposed ceiling of the bathroom and explaining that, according to the municipality’s program, her property has a rehabilitation project scheduled for 2027. Tired of waiting, she put plasterboard in the living room to avoid seeing the humidity. He had to throw away the furniture at that time as he lived “months and months with losses”.
From the FAVB, Soler recalled at the press conference that overall, in Catalonia, and due to aluminosis alone, 300,000 homes are affected. Last year, in Badalona, five buildings had to be evacuated due to structural pathologies. And in Esplugues, the one known as El Barco, had to be demolished. Representatives of the associations told on Thursday how these neighborhoods of Barcelona see mayors, promises, projects and requests for public funds pass by, without their situation improving. They are also areas that have seen the millions of dollars that would have represented next-generation funds pass through. The extent of the works, the complexity of the management and the delays make it impossible to access the funds which, moreover, require the completion of the works by June 2026.
With his experience as a testimonial, Custodia Moreno, from the El Carmel neighborhood, explained that in the neighborhood they are “back with the flag”, even if the situation is not as serious as in El Besòs or Trinitat Vella. And he put his finger on the sore point: there are well-intentioned projects, appreciated by residents, but which end up generating frustration due to delays and management problems: “The Municipality’s Plan de Barris offers us a Mercedes and it turns out that, due to mismanagement, a series of blocks have remained incapable of being redeveloped. We need to implement long-term global projects”, he asked.
“You can’t live like this, these are not conditions,” says Aurora, who has lived among the props since 2022 and her property won’t have a renovation project until 2027.
FAVB president Miquel Borràs confirmed that regardless of whether the affected buildings were originally public or private, “their neighbors are paying for the administration’s inaction when it was time to do so.” And he listed the rosary of plans, laws, management formulas, percentages of public financing, interventions, agreements with employers, unions and public bodies… One of the big obstacles, neighborhood representatives agree, is the formula of “self-management with the support” of the administration, in which the neighbors must take charge of the process with the help of a private “rehabilitation agent”. “Many times the vulnerability or precariousness of neighbors prevents issues such as obtaining a guarantee or financing,” he said, favoring legal action in the midst of any problem. The management causes “scandalous situations”, such as fining neighbors for the state of properties where projects have been interrupted, or buildings in such poor condition that they fail the technical inspection necessary to access subsidies. When a neighbor is forced to leave, he said, you end up in “a bureaucratic and technical labyrinth, resulting in desperate situations.”
The representative of Besòs, Tereixa Pardo, warned of the serious situation of a neighborhood to which the administrations have promised projects “since 1977”, and where there are families who have been living for years between stops and some even far from home. The rehabilitation plan proceeds at the pace of a rheumatic tortoise. Pardo spoke about the vicious circle in which buildings are immersed whose poor condition causes a change of neighbours: who can leave, the apartments lose value and the new neighbors have less chance of tackling the works: “Niches of poverty have been created where there are problems that are impossible to deal with, here progress cannot be taken for granted. We are not asking not to pay, but for public management and financing lines that can be distributed proportionally”. “The situation is alarming, the famous self-management is not feasible here, even if the apartments are now private, originally the construction was public,” he said. And he repeated, as he has done for years: “The current point is the risk of life, if one day there is a misfortune, those responsible will have their name and surname.”
Miguel Romera, representative of the association of the neighborhood of La Pau, an industrial area from the 1960s “with a terrible construction quality and a high degree of vulnerability” explained that the situation there is “a little more structured than in El Besòs”, but that “the entire neighborhood was built with aluminous concrete” and that the neighbors are struggling with renovation works. “The Municipal Institute of Urban Planning proposed to us that it be an urban regeneration area, but almost nothing has been achieved: there was talk of twenty inspections and only nine were carried out, and none have been resolved, while the blocks are deteriorating”.
Roberto Rodríguez, on behalf of Taula de la Trinitat Vella, talked about the urban regeneration project launched in 2018 in this suburban neighborhood. “They promised us that they would leave them new in 30 years and of the 452 houses on 75 properties, in May this year they told us that the conditions have changed: they had promised coverage of 85% of the cost with public funds and it dropped to 40%”. “It is no longer feasible in our neighborhood, it cannot be taken for granted,” he assured and regarding the Next Generation Funds he regretted that they require 30% to be allocated to energy efficiency, when the priorities of these properties are different. “Urban rehabilitation is not a luxury, it is a necessity. The opportunity that these projects represent, due to delays, changes in coverage criteria generate a lot of frustration, it is a question of justice,” he concluded.
The City Council responds that it is “carrying out the city’s urban regeneration program with the aim of improving the conditions of urban habitability and the environment, with a global character and aimed at reducing vulnerabilities in the quality of life in the city and strengthening social resilience”. Municipal sources assure that it is “a strategic program” and regarding the deadlines of the Next Generation funds they specify that they work with the Government and the Government so that “the time limit of the actions that regulate the funds makes the works started before 30 June 2026 valid”.
