PROPERTY COMPANIES, it turns out, read headlines too. On September 23rd riot police in Madrid dragged away activists barricaded outside a modest block in the Retiro neighbourhood, broke down the door of flat they had been guarding and carried out its 87-year-old tenant on a stretcher to hospital. Five days, and tens of thousands of protesters, later, Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión, the firm that owns the flat, sat down with the woman’s lawyer and agreed to let her come home. The penitence of Madrid’s landlords rarely arrives so promptly, or with so many witnesses.
The tenant is María del Carmen Abascal, known to Spain now simply as Maricarmen. She moved into the flat on Alcalde Sainz de Baranda street with her parents in 1956; the rent-controlled lease passed from father to mother and then, in 2005, to her. On a pension of about €1,400 (around $1,590) a month, she has never failed to pay the old-regime rent, which with bills comes to roughly €500—about $570 —a month, according to El País. Jezebel, citing the Madrid Tenants’ Union, puts her pension at $1,478 and her rent at about $568. Either way, the arithmetic is unforgiving when your landlord wants €1,600 a month—$1,900, by Jezebel’s account—for the same four walls.
Urbagestión bought the flat in 2018, for a price that was, as El País delicately puts it, ridiculously low for the area—precisely because Maricarmen was in it. In 2020 the firm told her to leave, arguing the lease had already been transferred twice, and sued to end it. She won in a lower court, lost on appeal, and saw her case dismissed by Spain’s Supreme Court and Constitutional Court. Six years of legal rearguard action consumed most of her ninth decade. When the eviction finally came last week, she fought it from a hospital bed.
I did not manage to defend my home, but I have fought so that others learn to fight for theirs. My house has been my life. And now I have to leave it behind. But that does not mean I will not keep fighting. Please fight.
Spain obliged. Protests swelled to tens of thousands, in Madrid and beyond, and several hundred people pitched tents in the Puerta del Sol, the capital’s historic central square. Among them were about 200 housing activists from more than 20 European countries, in town to counterprogramme The District, one of Europe’s biggest property fairs. They decided to stay. Nadz Vogel, 29, of the London Renters’ Union, noted that he had never before seen a Spanish eviction reported in England. He had tried, and failed, to stop one of a 71-year-old woman in London a fortnight earlier. “They dragged us, they shoved us,” he told El País. “It’s a form of violence that tenants around the world know well.”
The assembled renters compared grievances like football scores. Teresa Mamede, a 31-year-old lawyer from the Lisbon Renters’ Union, wept as she described channelling the “rage” of eviction day, and promised to take Maricarmen’s case home, where Portugal’s government has just passed a reform scrapping limits on the price of new rental contracts. Britain, by contrast, banned no-fault evictions outright on May 1st under its Renters’ Rights Act, passed last autumn. Ronja Senkpiel, 31, brought the best news: Berlin’s rents may have risen by almost 70% in a decade, but Die Linke, a post-communist party promising to expropriate more than 200,000 flats owned by big property firms and put them under public management, has just become the city’s most-voted party. Its leader, Elif Eralp, could be Berlin’s next mayor, if coalition talks with the Greens and Social Democrats go her way.
Madrid’s own numbers explain the fury. Rents have climbed from $14.55 per square metre in 2016 to $26.49 last month, according to Jezebel; purchase prices have more than doubled, up 228% to $7,361 per square metre, while the average Spanish salary remains below $34,000 a year. Sluggish construction, millions of post-pandemic arrivals and a tourist boom—Spain expects a record 100m visitors this year—have squeezed locals out. The Bank of Spain reckons the country is short some 750,000 homes, a gap it expects to reach 1m within two years. The prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, professed personal concern for Maricarmen, an interest she greeted with dry scepticism the day before police came: “Does he not realize the quantity of evictions that there are daily? Does he not realize, or does he not want to realize?”
A tenancy, with interest
Urbagestión’s first retreat was clumsy. On Friday it offered “as a matter of urgency” to transfer—not sell—the flat to Madrid’s municipal housing company, EMVS, so the city could rent it back to Maricarmen cheaply under its Reviva scheme. EMVS refused: the scheme’s flats must be free of encumbrances, this one carries a mortgage the firm said it could not cancel just then, and Reviva has a waiting list with a pre-established order. The city council then offered to mediate; on Monday, after more than four hours of talks at the EMVS headquarters in Arganzuela, the company agreed to grant Maricarmen a new lease under a rental-mediation scheme in which the tenant pays no more than 40% of net income and the landlord gets free rent-default insurance. Ana de Miguel, the EMVS chief, confirmed the deal. Its terms are not yet public, and Maricarmen herself must still accept them.
“This is the first time in six years that the property owner has sat down to negotiate and is willing to do so,” her lawyer said on the way into the meeting. The Tenants’ Union, present throughout, warned that the encampment in Sol would continue: “This goes beyond that.” It plainly does. Members of Mr Sánchez’s party are pushing a housing decree, with rent freezes and eviction pauses, due to reach the cabinet on Tuesday. Federico Tomasone of the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation, speaking from the square, caught the mood: you cannot treat an old woman as a bicho, the trade’s word for a sitting tenant blocking a sale. “There are many Maricarmens everywhere.” The landlords of Europe, having finally met one, may find that an uncomfortable thought.