Posted on 07/28/2013 2:20:43 PM PDT by 2ndDivisionVet
MALAGA, Spain, Jul 28 (IPS) - "You live there for free, don't you?" asked a woman as she passed by the Buenaventura "corrala", a community in a building in this southern Spanish city occupied since February by families evicted from their homes for falling behind in their mortgage payments due to unemployment.
"We don't want any handouts. We want to pay, through a social rent scheme," replied 42-year-old Yuli Fajardo, who was living in a tent before she found shelter along with some 40 other people in one of the 13 spacious apartments in this four-storey block of flats in the central Malaga neighbourhood of La Trinidad.
Occupations by homeless families of vacant buildings owned by banks or real estate agencies have multiplied throughout Spain since the economic and financial crisis broke out in 2007.
But as a collective phenomenon, the new wave of squats started in the nearby city of Seville with Corrala Utopía, a block of 36 apartments belonging to a bank that has been occupied since May 2012 by around a hundred people, 40 of them children, Juanjo García of the 15-M (the May 15 “indignados” - Spain’s Occupy movement) housing committee in Seville province told IPS.
They call themselves "corralas" to indicate that they are community and neighbourhood associations, similar to the concept of the typical buildings of that name with common courtyards and services that proliferated in working class neighbourhoods in Madrid and other Spanish cities in the 16th to 19th centuries.
The new squatter communities receive support and advice from social movements like 15-M, the Platform for Mortgage Victims (PAH) and Stop Desahucios (Stop Evictions).
The National Institute of Statistics (INE) reports that there are some 3.5 million vacant housing units in this country of 47 million people - nearly 14 percent of the housing stock - mainly in the hands of banks. There were a total of 363,000 evictions because of mortgage arrears and foreclosures between 2008 and 2012, according to a report published in January by PAH.
Yanira, 20, and her 18-year-old boyfriend José were renting a house until they lost their jobs and took refuge in Buenaventura, one of the four corralas in Málaga.
Montse, who has an 11-year-old daughter, also lost her job and could not afford to pay for housing. Macarena, the most recent addition to the community, lives on the ground floor with her two small children, after her "alcoholic father threw us out on the street."
"Do you think any of us would be here if we had an alternative?" asked Fajardo, who regrets the unsuccessful attempts to negotiate social rents with the bank that owns the building, and says that according to a Málaga court ruling, the corrala is due to be evicted on Oct. 3.
Buenaventura has just been sold by the bank to a private investor, lawyer José Cosín told IPS.
"We asked for an opportunity for marginalised, poor and socially excluded people to make a go of it. We carry our stigma like a brand on our skin, and we are judged by it," said Fajardo, adding that "decent housing is a human right."
The root of the problem, according to García, is "the commodification of the right to housing" during the construction boom that preceded the bursting of the real estate bubble five years ago.
There are now thousands of empty housing units and thousands of homeless people unable to make their mortgage payments because they were left jobless. The unemployment rate is 26.3 percent, according to INE figures for the second quarter of the year.
In Seville, 10 vacant buildings have been occupied by families that are being advised by 15-M. The squatters are unemployed, work in precarious jobs such as construction, are young people with good educational levels who have left their parents' homes, or are over 65, García said.
"We are fighting for a roof over our children's heads," said 28-year-old Lidia Nieto, a member of the Las Luchadoras corrala in a new building in the La Goleta neighbourhood of Málaga belonging to a real estate company, which has been occupied since April by nine single mothers with their children.
Nieto lives on the ground floor of the apartment block with her eight-year-old son Yeray. She has a weekend job cleaning businesses and offices.
"We saw this empty building and decided to occupy it," she told IPS while she chopped vegetables discarded by a nearby shop "because they are damaged and can't be sold." She used to live with one of her sisters and her parents.
"We saw ourselves living on the streets with our children. Do you think if we had proper jobs we would be living here? I've been unemployed for two years," she said.
"Collective occupations are completely legitimate and are based on practical and ethical reasons," said Iván Díaz of the Seville 15-M housing committee, at a conference in Málaga.
Squatters in new corralas are demanding that electricity and water meters be installed, so they can pay for utilities.
María, who lives next to Corrala Buenaventura, told IPS she is on good terms with the squatters. But the vendor at a nearby fruit shop said he had heard that some neighbours complained about noise at night.
The Málaga city government cut off water to Buenaventura on Jul. 18. But after the families protested by camping all night outside the town hall, the authorities re-established the water supply the next day.
The government of the autonomous region of Andalusía, where Málaga and Seville are located, approved a decree-law Apr. 12 on the social function of housing, establishing the need for a stock of social housing units.
The regional law also provides for the temporary expropriation - for a period of three years - of the housing units of families facing imminent eviction, “in cases where there is a risk of social exclusion or a threat to the physical or mental health of persons."
This measure, appealed in July by the national government of rightwing Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy on the alleged grounds that it is unconstitutional, has benefited "only 12 families for three months,” complained García, who said it fell far short and was plagued with “flaws and defects."
The European Commission - the EU executive arm - and the European Central Bank criticised the Andalusían anti-eviction decree, arguing that it could undermine the stability of the banking sector and economic recovery in Spain, according to a Jul. 10 report.
Social rent scheme ... collective phenomenon ... utopia
Push harder to the Left. See if that fixes your society. Don't give up. Keep moving Left ...
The odd thing is that Spain has ghost towns like China. Block after block of apartments that were built and left mostly uninhabited.
The empty buildings and the unemployed squatters have the same origin: socialism.
and the breakdown of marriage and family, where adults have partners and families help each other and fathers and mothers team up to support their childrem
imagine the terrible situation theses children are growing up under, living in tents with economically marginal adults caring for them. Greeks are placing their children in state orphanages because they don’t have homes or food for them
At least in the last US depression many people still had family ties and family ties to the country, my mother’s family lived with her grandmother in the country and they grew food and her Dad hunted, she can still describe eating muskrats
If the US keeps deteriorating like Europe, there won’t be any kind of social backstop for a lot of people if govt social services collapse under the sheer weight of millions of un/underemployed with no skills and a lost awareness of self sufficiency
If they don’t like their own squatters, it will be interesting to see how they will deal with the hordes of Mideastern and African impoverished but still fervent refugees who are making a historic migration into the lands formerly known as Christendom.
Call it what they want to-I know what “corral” is, and it wasn’t intended for people-but this sounds like a voluntary one.
No wonder my ancestors left Spain a few centuries ago-they didn’t want to live in one of those...
Muslim Spain lasted from about 711 to 1492 — just over 700 years. There’s been a 500 year break from Muslim rule. It seems that that break is about to end.
Exactly. In this little selection, we hear about a young couple shacking up and about mothers with their children. No marriage. No fathers. Just the good will of the state set against the evil banks who will not take "social rent" (whatever that might be).
And why not? Islam could restore some social order that evidently disappeared when these people decided Christianity was just too hard for them.
I watched last weeks episode of Top Gear (BBC), in which they were testing in Spain. The ghost cities were unbelievable. Brand new buildings with thousands of rental units, empty. In fact, everything was empty...hardly a soul in sight. They were able to create their own race course in the streets and used the runways of newly made and abandoned (I believe close to a year) international airport. It looked like something out of a post-apocalyptic movie, yet all new/modern structures.
“The odd thing is that Spain has ghost towns like China. Block after block of apartments that were built and left mostly uninhabited.”
—
So does Ireland.
.
Like the ghost cities in China I guess
“a lost awareness of self sufficiency”
That’s the money quote. When that’s gone, it’s over.
Yes, you’re right. When things go bad, there’s a big difference between people who have a solid family and people who don’t.
” In fact, everything was empty...hardly a soul in sight.”
Sounds like downtown Akron, Ohio!
The pain in Spain falls mainly on the insane. That is by those who embraced socialism, leftism and godless atheism.
With God are blessings, favor and prosperity. Without Him just the opposite. So much for enlightened, regressive statism that our wise founders utterly rejected and with good reasons—case in point.
Stupid leftist article. These were the same types that have been “squatting” in these places for about 20 years now. They were not all “perroflautas,” meaning dog and flute (recorder), the sort of young losers that you see in any big city begging while tootling on a recorder and leading a mangy dog around at the end of a rope. But most are your typical anarchist or runaway or person with family problems.
That said, there is a problem with foreclosures in Spain, because under their bankruptcy law, people still have to make their house payments even if they have gone bankrupt and lost the house. This means that they can never simply get clear of the debt, most of which was encouraged or provided under the Zapatero government, which insisted that home loans be made to the unemployed and students. Of course, with its “green energy” project, the Zapatero government was also destroying all the jobs these people might have been able to get.
Some of the foreclosed people I described above have even killed themselves upon eviction but all this is being ignored. The Socialists set all this in motion and now have backed away, and the current non-Socialist government is not dealing with it effectively.
What Spain really needs is a revision of its bankruptcy laws. Let the decent people start again.
I was stationed with my husband at Naval Station Rota (near Sevilla) in the 1980s; our son was born there. Even then, there were huge problems with socialism. The unemployment rate was high because social security taxes made hiring nearly impossible for all but the largest businesses. A large number of people ran small businesses and hired family members because they didn’t have to pay the taxes on them. Joining the EU might have pushed the day of reckoning back a few years, but the bottom line is that socialism is unsustainable.
It’s a real shame. Spain is a beautiful country.
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