Housing mobilisations. Cartoon of 19/10/2024 in CTXT
Translation of the cartoon. On the left, "yesterday" (A child paints a house on the wall). On the right, "today", demonstration. Banner: "Housing is a right, not a business".
In 2023, house prices rose by 4%. By then it had already been rising for ten years, according to data published by the National Statistics Institute (INE), but we all know that this is not a problem of the last decade.
I don't remember any government really concerned about this issue. A permanent social emergency in which speculators continue to win the day in the face of inaction and fear of intervening in the housing market. All housing plans are patches and posturing.
Fair rent. Cartoon of 20/03/2021 in CTXT
Translation cartoon:
2006: You'll never get a house in your fucking life
2021: You'll never have a house in your fucking life and no money to rent it.
Those who grew up seeing that they could not afford to buy a house now see how the new generations can no longer even afford to rent. There are even cities where people are condemned to live in tiny, squalid rooms and other cubicles for much more than the rent of a modest "complete" house. While hovels have always existed, at least they were cheap and used to be temporary.
Now, people have decided to take to the streets to remind this government that not really getting to grips with the housing issue will come back to haunt them, but we are screwed because the turnist replacements are on the prowl and they are the same ones who inflated the bubble and encouraged the wildest speculation, many of them for their own benefit and that of their colleagues.
The mobilisations of 13 October in Madrid and other localities were the beginning of something that could spread as a stable and permanent movement (as it was in the past). The proof is in Valencia, where the first encampment was set up and is still holding its ground today.
By the way, those who are now throwing their hands up in the air over a possible rent strike, among them journalists and opinion makers who are supposed to be very knowledgeable about things, did not know this passage of our country's history that RTVE rescues when Barcelona stopped paying landlords: the 1931 rent strike, "a success that cost blood". Some 100,000 families joined the strike against high housing prices, which lasted four months.
"It was a pitched battle, with more than 200 people arrested and six or seven dead, because at that time strikes were solved by killing". As a result of the general strike, they began to "negotiate down rents all over Barcelona".