We need to fight for social housing instead of private ownership [View all]

[Ichingcarpenter]

We need to fight for social housing instead of private ownership. Spain’s anti-eviction movement shows how we can do it.




In Spain, the implosion of a bloated construction industry, massive unemployment, and a sharp decline in property values has left countless people facing eviction. As the members of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH, or the Platform for those Affected by Mortgages) emphasize in the recently released documentary Sí Se Puede!, eviction and foreclosure not only throw one out of housing, but society itself.

The film opens with a harrowing scene: three children sit on the stairs outside of their home, the youngest one quietly crying next to the suitcases that hold their belongings. The authorities begin to seal the door, rendering the family homeless. (Eviction is such a coercive act that even those tasked with executing it, such as locksmiths and police, have in some Spanish cities refused to do so.)

The film, which PAH has made freely available for screening, takes us through seven days with the movement in Barcelona — a welcome assembly, group therapy sessions, a political strategizing session, a national meeting of PAH nodes, a direct action against a bank, and several scenes in which PAH members confront bank managers to negotiate and discharge an individual’s debt.

It is incredibly inspiring. In a moment brimming with lament about ongoing austerity and what one PAH member calls the “rip-off that they call the crisis,” PAH turns the discourse of personal and individualized failures on its head. PAH has challenged the rhetoric of the state, the banks, and property developers who led people to believe that they could not lose by becoming homeowners regardless of their income or the nature of their employment.

PAH has also contested the ideology of ownership itself. As early as the 1950s, Spanish elites were waxing poetic about the liberal self-possessed individual, especially in the context of real estate and home ownership. As Franco’s minister for housing, José Luis Arrese, said in 1957, “We want a country of proprietors, not proletarians.”

Successive governments in Spain supported the real estate sector as the primary engine of economic growth, propping it up through financial and environmental deregulation that in turn fueled intense land speculation. It also radically changed the proportion of homeowners to renters.

Founded in February 2009 in Barcelona, PAH emerged in opposition to the devastation wrought by these policies. The movement has now spread throughout the country. Si Se Puede and the book Mortgaged Lives — written by two PAH founders, Ada Coulau and Adria Alemany — detail the anatomy of the real estate sector that was both vulnerable to the global financial crisis, and embodied the financial architecture and political ideology that has destroyed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Spaniards.


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https://www.jacobinmag.com/2015/01/spain-evictions-pah/