The other night, while I was surfing, I came across the rerun on RTVE’s La 2 of the documentary Spain, the 20th century in color, which reviews a decade of the last century in each episode. The episode in question referred to the seventies and was scripted by journalist Manel Lucas, who is also the brilliant imitator of the dictator Franco in the satirical program Polònia. The documentary collected images of those turbulent times in Spanish society and showed the street demonstrations after Franco’s death brandishing political and social protest banners. I noticed one of them that read “Down with prices, up with salaries,” a motto that is still fully valid almost 50 years later. I am sure that the majority of young people in our country think the same; even though they are the best educated generation in our history, they are the worst treated in terms of salaries and future expectations. In particular, the million and a half who have completed higher education and live in poverty or the almost four million Spaniards who have paid work and are poor, according to data from the latest report by the European Network to Fight Poverty in Spain.
To this devastating report is added another equally dramatic one that we also learned about last week thanks to the Barcelona Metropolitan Housing Observatory, which warns about the serious crisis in access to housing, both for purchasing and renting. The study indicates that prices have risen three times more than salaries in Catalonia. This situation is especially cruel with young people between 18 and 29 years old. Half of them cannot even dream of renting an apartment in more than half of the cities in the Barcelona area. And let’s not talk about buying a new or second-hand home, because 45% of young people with work earn less than 25,000 euros gross per year, a salary that definitively distances them from having their own home. This expels them not only from the capital, but from the metropolitan crown and even from the province with the impact it has on the mobility of the deficient and collapsed public transport. The same thing happens in other cities, as you can read in Salva Enguix’s report on the Valencian exodus on the next page.
Faced with this very serious problem, young people choose to stay at their parents’ house or to crowd into flats with other roommates with whom they share the cost of rent. Living in these communes slows down the formation of new families with the consequent decrease in the birth rate. In short, the panorama is discouraging. Public administrations are well aware of these reports, but solutions are conspicuous by their absence due to many announcements and promises that have been heard for years. With the current model there is no way out for young people who observe how their parents and grandparents who carried the banners in the documentary had opportunities that they will never achieve.
