Property speculation in Spain leaves entire families homeless

teleSUR English

Vulture funds in Spain evict families to turn homes into temporary ‘colivings’. The Tenants Union reveals that a single company has bought 200 apartments, systematically evicting residents like Clara, who has lived in her home since she was 4 years old, to rent them to foreign students. Although Catalonia limits the traditional rental price, these funds take advantage of legal loopholes to impose unregulated temporary rooms.  #Spain #StopEvictions #DignifiedHousing #FundsBuitre #TeleSUREnglish

Transcript

00:00We move on to Europe. The residents of several buildings in Barcelona denounced the wave of

00:04systematic evictions by the same speculative fund. Let's see the details with our correspondent

00:10Andres Flores in Spain. According to denunciations by the Tenants' Union of Barcelona,

00:18the company Vander has acquired up to 200 apartments during the last few years.

00:22Neighbors are openly denouncing that they are systematically seeking to evict them.

00:25The company seeks to create co-living housing, a fashionable trend where common living spaces

00:31are temporarily shared. Here we have found that the same fund has bought 14 buildings and is

00:39kicking out the neighbors when the contract expires in order to put up co-livings. Then there are

00:44blocks where they have already kicked everyone out and there are no neighbors left. Others where

00:48there are very few neighbors left, even a single neighbor surrounded by temporary co-livings for

00:52foreign students. And other blocks that are still at the beginning and all the neighbors are still

00:57there, but the requests to leave when their lease is up are already starting to arrive.

01:05To learn more about the case, we visited Clara. She lives in one of the apartments they are seeking

01:11to evict. I have lived in this house since I was four years old. We are a large family. I have two

01:20younger siblings and all three of us are in school. And we are also a single-parent family, which leaves

01:25us in a risky situation if we are evicted from this house. The rents in Barcelona are completely

01:30unaffordable. The consequences of the so-called vulture funds in the real estate sector are palpable

01:40worldwide. Their vision of housing as a business destroys the possibility for people like Clara to

01:45live in dignity in their city. Therefore, if we are kicked out, what is being broken is a family,

01:54a neighborhood is being broken, and a city is being broken. In the end, there are 14 buildings

02:00affected by this investment fund and what we have decided to do is to fight together.

02:03Clara, like so many others, decides not to give up and fight. Enric accompanies this movement and

02:14affirms that the state must take urgent measures. Here what happens is that in Catalonia there is a

02:22ceiling on the price of rent. They cannot raise the rent, but they can put other figures such as

02:26a temporary rental or a room rental, which has no limits. And this generates an incentive to kick out

02:32tenants who live there and implement this type of activity. In this sense, we have already said

02:37that making this regulation only for one type of rental would generate this problem. Therefore,

02:42what must be done urgently is to also regulate the price of seasonal rentals rooms and even limit

02:47the possibility of this use. Sin medidas contundentes desde el Ejecutivo. Without strong measures from

02:55the executive, situations like those experienced by Clara will continue to be repeated. Andrés Flores,

03:00Telesur, Barcelona.

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