Anatomy of the national ‘squatting’, that is, of the illegal usurpation of housing. The phenomenon, which started in Europe in the 1980s, has experienced in Spain, according to data from the State Administration, a rebound of up to 40% from 2018 to this part.
It is a housing element that is especially high in Catalonia and in coastal areas such as the Balearic Islands, Murcia, Valencia or Andalusia. In just one year, between 2020 and 2021, the acts recognized for crimes and misdemeanors have gone from 14,621 to 17,274 cases, far from the 3,849 of 2011.
When half lease
Increasing the phenomenon due to the latest economic crisis, and as a consequence of the pandemic caused by covid-19, a new variant of occupation has taken root in Spain: ‘restlessness’.
In the last two years, ‘restlessness’ and therefore the ‘restless person’ -who settles in a dwelling, after renting a contract, and who stops paying shortly after- has come to mean 70% of this wrongful crime. typified and regulated as denounced by bar associations, platforms of those affected by squatting, Think Tank as Liberal Action or, experts in the field, such as Charo Huidobro -also vice president of the Galician Association of Criminology Professionals- and, in short, organizations that promote measures to a problem that touches more than a million cases, including private owners, banks and investment funds.
With no legislative changes since 2018, when one was launched, the majority consensus is that Spain does not have, like other countries in its environment, a sufficient legal framework to protect the owner, the great victim of a guarantee system.
Without a solution or due diligence on the part of the Administration, the owner or homeowner affected -among whom there are pensioners and unemployed people in need of liquidity, in addition to the neighborhood communities, damaged by the insecurity that in many cases appears – has come to assume the costs of the insufficiency of social housing in Spain.
The impotence of the authorities to be able to stop criminal gangs, organized mafias that offer homes that are not theirs, to tenants who are mostly foreigners, undocumented and vulnerable, has further aggravated the current situation.
Owners take on bloody cases
As a consequence of this legal framework, with the consequent ‘call effect’, the owners assume bloody cases. And as an example, a button: they pay the IBI of illegally occupied households; the payment of supplies such as electricity and water -so that companies do not cut them off-; the cost of other types of taxes, in addition to the assumption of mortgages -which do not stop passing the receipt month after month-. Finally, they do not have that heritage either, when it is necessary for them.
The faces
The prominent expansion of ‘restlessness’ in Spain comes largely from the development of Royal Decree Law 37/2020, by which, since the pandemic, the evictions of vulnerable people without a housing solution are prevented.
The profile of the new squatters is different. It is no longer so much the vulnerable without any resources that tries to go unnoticed and not attract attention.
Today, with the Royal Decree Law, the Social Services report is more than enough to paralyze the uprisings, without the need to verify if the occupier receives public aid and what he does with it. And this without studying whether there is fraud or an underground economy behind it. In any case, there is a wide literature and associations that provide you with the Squatting manuals with the steps to take.
And in the face of this, the defenselessness of the owner who has few resources, beyond the legal wait of years. This is the case of Nacho, a member of the Platform for People Affected by the Occupation (telephone: 642 45 64 26), and unable to recover his home in Robledo de Chavela (Madrid), occupied by a person who has installed a kind of protective animals, while one of his children goes to the Rolling Stone concert.
Neither as an owner nor as an entrepreneur does he receive aid. His wife is unemployed. The social shield of the Government of Pedro Sánchez does not reach them. In fact, he has prevented up to three launches to recover his house, a sale that would help him to pay off debts, and perhaps to raise his business.
Pilar has endured for almost three years the occupation in Coria del Río of a tenant with three children. She this one – about 40 years old – is not even the signer of the rental contract. She tells the occupant that she can’t work due to arm injuries, but that doesn’t stop her from hanging her dances on Tik Tok with swaying movements of her hips and arms. Meanwhile, Pilar explains how the judge has paralyzed the launch, with inconclusive reports from Social Services and without incorporating justification for not working, while she pays taxes, IBI and a mortgage of 700 euros. The world upside down!
political action
At the present time, those affected face the growing doubt of a new extension of the social shield -it ends on September 30, 2022-, which will lengthen the nightmare they live of not being able to see the launches that return their properties executed.
Saving the social shield from the pandemic, since the reform of 18 there has hardly been any legislative movement in this regard, except for some actions by the opposition to the Government.
The most active party in this matter has been the Popular Party. On January 31, 2019, and with the signature of Dolors Montserrat, the PP presented a Law Proposal against illegal occupation and for neighborhood coexistence and the protection of the safety of people and things in the communities of owners.
Given the lack of response, on July 17, 2020, the formation then directed by Pablo Casado, and with Cayetana Álvarez de Toledo as spokesperson for the Group, registered another Organic Law Proposal, of a comprehensive nature, against illegal occupation and for the neighborhood coexistence and the protection of the safety of people and things in the communities of owners. The emphasis is on the fight against organized mafias. The proposal was debated in 2021 and fell due to the lack of sufficient support.
Recently, in April, we have seen the response to Vox’s request to the Government, for information and documentation from the Ministry of the Interior on illegal housing occupation data, fragmented by Autonomous Communities and provinces, since 2011, and with the absence on the part of of the Executive of future projections or estimates of this type of event.
In the month of May, specifically on the 31st, PDeCAT registered another Law Proposal for urgent measures to deal with the illegal occupation of real estate. Not surprisingly, Catalonia is the Autonomous Community that suffers the most from the phenomenon of illegal occupation in Spain.
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