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If health and education are essential services in Spain, why not housing?
Earlier this year, I found myself in the city of L’Hospitalet de Llobregat to
the south-west of Barcelona. It lacks the fame and tourist hordes of the Catalan
capital, but the two places are connected by the same dire housing crisis.
Guided by Júlia Nueno, organiser of a grassroots tenants’ movement, I found a
community of neighbours in L’Hospitalet who hold their meetings in a public park
yet are managing to take responsibility for something the authorities are
failing at: putting a roof over people’s heads. Their challenge is daunting in a
corner of Spain that still bears the scars of the 2008 economic crisis and
remains in the grip of the Covid pandemic.
L’Hospitalet de Llobregat is the second-largest city in Catalonia and one of the
most densely populated in Europe. Its proximity to Barcelona has attracted
generations of migrants over the past six decades. Spaniards from the south of
the country arrived in the 1960s, later giving way to people from Ecuador, the
Dominican Republic, Morocco and many other countries. Today, many of the
municipality’s 260,000 residents work in low-income jobs and live in overcrowded
conditions in small, cheaply constructed flats.
Increasingly, they are joined by young people priced out of Barcelona by
gentrification, property speculation and extortionate rent rises. Those fleeing
unaffordable rents in Barcelona unwittingly perpetuate the problem; when they
arrive, rents in L’Hospitalet also rise and locals wind up unable to afford
homes they may have rented for a decade.
Since 2019, people threatened by eviction have been able to turn to the local
chapter of El Sindicat de Llogateres, a renters’ union founded in Barcelona and
active across Catalonia.
Renters’ unions are nothing new in Europe, but what these people are doing to
reset the relationship between tenants and landlords is out of the ordinary. I
decided to make a film for the Guardian about Sindicat members in L’Hospitalet
that would also tell the stories of some of those who struggle, often invisibly,
on the outskirts of the city where I was born.
Victor, in his 50s, from Ecuador, for example, is stuck in a three-year lease
for his tiny flat. His rent, once €690 a month, has risen to €805 a month and
his landlord is now squeezing him for €900 a month – which equals his wife’s
salary in two full-time jobs as a cleaner.
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