Photo by Allan Vega

Over the past few days, Maricarmen has been at the centre of Spain’s housing crisis. Police came to the Madrid home of the 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen and removed her from the apartment where she had lived for 71 years. She is a woman with a disability, uses a wheelchair, and has spent virtually her entire life in that apartment. Both parents died there. She grew old there. She paid her rent for decades. But then the property was sold, and the real estate investment company sought to replace her old rent with one she could not possibly afford. For years, she had paid around €500 a month. The new demand was a 275% increase, raising her rent to 2,650 euros. Her pension is around €1,350 a month. On Wednesday, after making four attempts, they finally carried out the eviction. The police removed the people who had gathered outside to defend her using batons and tear gas as they cleared the way for the eviction. Maricarmen was eventually carried out of the building on a stretcher and taken to an ambulance, after which she was transported to a hospital. It didn’t have to come to this: people had offered to pay the difference between her pension and the new rent for as long as was necessary, and had even proposed buying the apartment outright so that she could remain in it.

There is something obscene about this image. To see an 87-year-old woman being taken out of the only home she has ever known while the police push away the people who have come to stand between her and the street. And there is something even more obscene about the fact that this can be perfectly legal. Because legality and justice are not synonyms. Just because something is legal does not make it just.

And look at who was on the other side of the eviction. It was not a family that needed the apartment because it had nowhere to live. It was not another elderly person desperate for a roof over their head. It was a real-estate investment company. Maricarmen’s apartment was ultimately owned by Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión, a real-estate investment company operating in the business of acquiring and managing real-estate assets.

This is what happens when a home becomes an asset. When a place where somebody has lived for seventy years becomes a number on a balance sheet. When the question ceases to be “Where will this woman live?” and becomes “How much profit can we make with this property?”

Maricarmen’s case is a small, brutal illustration of what happens when the social function of housing clashes with its function as a financial asset for the wealthy. A person sees a home. An investor sees an asset. And when those two visions come into conflict, it is usually the person who has to leave.

Not a crisis, but abuse

And Maricarmen is not alone. That is precisely what makes this so frightening. Evictions are happening every day. There are families being priced out, tenants facing impossible rent increases, young people unable to leave their parents’ homes and older people discovering that decades of paying rent offer no guarantee that they will be allowed to remain where they live. Forty-four judicial evictions are carried out across Spain every day,........

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