A family’s struggle to secure their home
It didn’t seem like it, but finally the anti-riot van of the Mossos d’Esquadra that had arrived this Tuesday at noon in Paseo de la Verneda, in Barcelona, is leaving. About fifty people – residents, workers in the uniform of the municipal cleaning service, collectives for the right to housing – celebrate their daily victory.
The Generalitat almost evicted a family. And in the end they suspended it for ten days. This is nothing, protests Paula, a young woman who acts as spokesperson for the Housing Union of Verneda and Besòs.
The uncertainty of the right to a roof
The housing group complains that the family was on the verge of becoming homeless when the last news they had from the administration was that everything was moving in the right direction to be able to make them a social rent and regularize their situation.
People with few financial resources who have ended up occupying a public flat, who have contact with social services, who at some point have considered the route of social rent, but who in the end have found an eviction notice.
A situation that repeats itself
This same Thursday, a similar episode took place in Ciutat Meridiana, in Nou Barris, also suspended at the last minute. In this case, Yolanda, a single mother of two children, had received the notification that she would be kicked out.
It’s a lottery. We know families who have occupied public flats and had them evicted immediately. We have experienced it, and there are cases where we have understood it. But then you find flats that for years no one has bothered to make a rent or anything.
The reality of vulnerable families
When someone occupies a public flat, it becomes impossible for that house to go to whom the administration – in its formal and regulatory procedures – would have planned to dedicate it to.
For this reason, be it a town council or the Generalitat, from time to time a public entity ends up deciding to intervene and evict a property.
The challenge of affordable housing
Barcelona’s housing emergency desk has been accumulating hundreds of pending cases for years. There are currently 751 families in the Catalan capital alone who have been recognized as entitled to a social flat, but have not yet been able to provide them with one.
The rental price has climbed to a new record and has already reached 1,171 euros on average in the new contracts that are made in Barcelona territory, above the interprofessional minimum wage.
Social urgency
Despite this, yesterday he had the explicit threat of becoming homeless within a few hours.
She, like so many others, is waiting for rehousing or the formalization of a social rent in what has been her home in recent years.
The social emergency, especially that of vulnerable families, is another consequence of the lack of access to housing.
