Evictions running at a record level in Spain

PAH said that as they haven't been able to have sight of official information on eviction figures and circumstances under which people are forced to leave their homes, the lobby has created its own data based on a survey of 6'000 people throughout Spain who can no longer pay their mortgages or rent and who at some stage had got in touch with PAH.

The lobby claimed that the majority of people who have been evicted are not registered under official government statistics. “People feel really ashamed about a situation which may be no fault of their own, particularly when they have young children,” Rafael Mayoral, a legal advisor to PAH explained yesterday. “Such families will just leave their homes automatically when they have no means to pay in order to avoid a police presence forcing the issue,” Mayoral said.

He furthered that the high level of evictions creates a real paradox at a national level because there are currently around 5.6 million homes empty in Spain, about a fifth of all property.

The founders of PAH, Ada Colau and Adria Alemany said that it is a myth that eviction is largely a shadow hanging over the lives of immigrant communities. Colau and Alemany have written a book already published in Catalan and which comes out at the end of the month in Castilian Spanish called “Mortgaged Lives.” In it, they say that the typical victim of eviction in the current climate in all 17 regions of the country is an unemployed Spaniard with children who has a mortgage of between 100'000 and 200'000 euros.

The deepening of the economic crisis has prompted the setting up of a Popular Justice Project which aims to get laws governing mortgages altered, to stop evictions and to get rents fixed by local government as opposed to private landlords. There have been individual successful attempts, including one in Son Ferriol in Palma, to stop evictions of homes with children.