An 87-year-old Spanish woman was forcibly evicted Wednesday from the Madrid apartment she had lived in for more than 70 years, in a case that highlights a growing housing crisis in the country.
Video showed Maricarmen Abascal, who is a wheelchair user, being taken out of the building in the Spanish capital’s Retiro neighborhood on a stretcher and driven away in an ambulance.
Supporters had gathered outside her building overnight on Friday, with dozens of police officers holding them back as some tried to stop the eviction from going ahead. In a social media video posted Friday by the Madrid tenants union, Abascal gave thanks for the support she had received.
Abascal’s lawyer, Beatriz Duro, described the force used in the eviction as “completely disproportionate and unnecessary” and decried the intransigence of the building’s owners.
The case has brought new attention to an ongoing housing crisis in major cities across Spain, as gentrification has caused rents to skyrocket and the stock of affordable housing to shrink, leading to fierce public anger.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of people marched through the streets of Madrid to protest the eviction, some setting off flares. They carried placards reading “Not one more eviction, not one less neighbor, we are all Maricarmen” and “right to housing at a fair price.”
At the end of the march, protesters sat down in the Puerta del Sol plaza, some pitching tents. They remained in place early Sunday as dozens of activists staged a sit-in. A model of a vulture, decrying so-called vulture funds, hung above the camp.
Earlier in the week, tenants unions and other housing groups held protests and rallies in 16 cities, including Granada, Logroño and Zaragoza.
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An investment fund acquired Abascal’s building in 2018 and sought a steep increase in her rent, and she had been fighting eviction for more than five years, according to the Madrid tenants union.
Duro said court officials and representatives of the fund, Urbagestión, had refused to suspend the eviction despite a pending court filing, humanitarian appeals and evidence that public authorities were working to secure alternative accommodation.
“They’re all inhumane,” Abascal said in a Spanish television interview the day before her eviction. “It’s as if I’m living with a machete at the back of my neck, ready to be chopped off at any moment.”
Duro also said an anonymous individual had offered to cover the rent payments, but the landlord declined to sign a new lease.
“We’ve been trying to negotiate with the landlords right up until the last moment, and they’ve flatly refused everything,” she said, decrying “a lack of humanity” in her treatment and “all these public resources” channeled into enabling the eviction.
Urbagestión did not respond to a request for comment.
The fresh wave of anger comes after protests in recent years against overtourism in Barcelona, where activists say a surge in apartments being used for short-term vacation rentals has contributed to a shortage of affordable housing.
The European Union announced new rules earlier this month aimed at tackling the housing crunch caused by short-term rentals in tourism hot spots.
Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the eviction as “a social tragedy that we cannot accept either as a country or, of course, from the perspective of public institutions.”
Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Sánchez accused Madrid’s conservative regional government of pursuing luxury penthouses while ignoring demand for social housing.
Irene Hernández López, a 31-year-old test engineer living and renting in Chamberí, about 2 miles from Retiro, said what had happened to Abascal was “outrageous,” and she was worried similar evictions were already happening to other tenants around the city.
“Housing has become a product that people do business with,” she told NBC News. “It no longer matters that it’s your personal world, where you live and where you do your life.”
Hernández López, who pays 500 euros ($570) for a room in an apartment she shares with two others, said that she was looking to move because the property was old and needs repairs but that the rental market in Madrid was “terrible,” with prices “rising extremely quickly” and very little available.
“Some rooms are 500 euros or 600 euros and you think, ‘How am I supposed to live here? How can I pay 500 euros for this?’” she said. “I do think prices should be regulated, because wages aren’t going up while housing prices keep increasing. I don’t know how we’re supposed to keep going.”
Dan Nicander, secretary-general for the International Union of Tenants, said the situation in Spain was something his organization had seen in many countries in Europe.
“It’s a part of the financialization problem, seeing housing as an asset more than a home to people,” he told NBC News.
It’s “really tough” for the people living in the houses to do anything about it, he added, saying the responsibility lay with politicians “to regulate the market in a way that it shouldn’t be that easy to buy and invest and then not [be] using the houses as homes.”
“Housing is a right,” he said. “It’s a fundamental right, first and foremost. It shouldn’t be a commodity.”
