“Room for rent for a girl who works, who has a contract, who spends little time at home, who cleans respectfully and tidily (…) who does not bring friends because it would be more expense for the room (…) who likes to clean when it’s her turn, “Don’t smoke or drink.” It is one of the advertisements, for a room in a shared apartment in La Verneda, in Barcelona, ??that the illustrator María Pichel found this week, when she took another look at Idealista, the place where life projects are collide with the reality of the real estate market.
At 36 years old, this illustrator and tattoo artist can be considered a survivor of the housing crisis in at least four countries. She calculates that in the last seven years, in which she has passed through Barcelona, ??Palma de Mallorca, Berlin, Bristol and Cali, she has not managed to spend more than six months in the same place. She now lives in Tolba, a small town in Huesca with 70 inhabitants where she has access to a house that belonged to her grandmother. He would like to return to Barcelona, ??where he has friends and “a life made up,” but every time he looks for a room with enough light and space for his work desk, he encounters not only exorbitant prices, but also demands from landlords who have a model of a tenant in the head: a kind of entity without a social life or emotional sex that spends the house to sleep and little else.
“They want you to use the floor as little as possible, to not exist, to be like a robot,” says Pichel. In fact, another of the ads he saw this week, to share not only a room but a corner in a loft-type apartment, explicitly asks for “someone who is passing through the city or in the process of settling in, who does not have many belongings.” . The last season that she was able to live in Barcelona was spent renting from a university professor with children who rented a room and the coexistence was good, but she was also asked not to bring people to (her) house.
Juan Porras is a real estate advisor in Madrid, with extensive experience in different areas of the sector, and he usually writes interesting facts about the subject on his X account (@ElHombreMalo). “Many people make movies about the best strategy for renting. And other people seem to have an aversion to sexual relations being practiced in their apartments,” he summarized recently after recounting some of the strangest requests he had received from landlords whom he helped find tenants.
“A colleague brought a very strange apartment, quite large with two bedrooms in a row. The owner was looking for two employees who were not a couple. Before, there were two girls in that apartment who gave us the impression of being girlfriends, but who pretended not to be in front of the owner. Many other people look for girls because they find them more formal,” she explains.
When they ask him to include these types of clauses in the rental contracts, such as the prohibition of inviting people or organizing parties, he explains to the property that they are not legal. “Contracts in Spain are full of clauses that are empty of content or directly illegal.” How, then, do the owners intend to enforce these arbitrary rules? “There are many janitors and doormen who collaborate a lot with this, of whom they ask ‘do you ‘where are you going?’, ‘where are you coming down from’? and then they tell each other. Also sometimes neighbors who share that moral framework with the landlady.” According to Porras, the mistake is in confusing “heritage with residence.” The heritage belongs to the owner, but the residence belongs to the tenant, and he can, within the law, do whatever he wants in the house he pays for.
The idea of ??the civil servant as an ideal tenant may make economic sense. He is, after all, someone with a stable job not affected by the fluctuations of the market. But some landlords adorn that figure with more attributes, explains Porras, they idealize a figure of a formal young man or woman, who has spent years studying, is not around for many parties and returns home on weekends. MIR students also enter that imaginary. “They want someone who comes home late, watches the TV for a while, and goes to sleep.”
Traditionally, couples with two salaries were and continue to be the most desired tenants, but that also fluctuates, Porras points out. “Breakups are more traumatic and months can come in which the person who stays cannot pay the full rent. There is another profile of investor owner who sees the apartment as a source of income and prefers several roommates because they are easier to replace. These are usually people who do not agree with the current duration of contracts established by law and prefer a more ephemeral situation to update the rent.”
The latter is confirmed by Carme Arcarazo, spokesperson for the Llogateres Union: “there are already entire blocks in Barcelona that only accept that profile, single people up to 40 years old who share a flat, because in this way the number of salaries that go into a house is multiplied and “There is more mobility.”
In the nightmarish experience that is usually the search for a roof, there are stories for everything, ranging from the anecdotal to the clearly discriminatory. The editor Julia Martínez, 30, posed as a friend’s partner to get her previous apartment. “We lost two apartments to couples, even though we went with the deposit and everything. And we decided to try it like this. We were well dressed, I was wearing a coat that I never wear, we held each other’s arms and said: do you like it, darling? It worked.
Photographer Gregori Civera had to promise his landlord that he would not take “pornographic photos” in the apartment. Carolina [not her real name], a 45-year-old masseuse and “human cat” also showed that she was the partner of a friend of hers, with a very good salary, which even appears in the contract, because her profile, that of A self-employed, single woman of Latin American origin has a very difficult time getting a rental.
NGOs such as Provivienda denounce that up to more than 70% of real estate agencies accept discriminatory premises such as “children are not accepted” or “only Spaniards”. Needless to say, the foreigners who are banned are not white Europeans or North Americans. Barcelona City Council commissioned a study called Racism on Demand, made with 350 calls to real estate agents and found that 62% agreed to remove migrants from the selection processes in a rental advertisement.
According to Arcarazo, from the Llogateres Union, it is important “not to panic” and, in the face of a flagrant display of discrimination – they have done the test: if someone identifies themselves as “Jordi”, the apartment is available, for “Mohamed”, no – it is advisable to inform the interlocutor, owner or agency representative, that a lawyer or the union has been consulted. “Many agencies, sometimes even unbeknownst to the owner, take advantage of real estate racism to charge up front. They tell the migrant population, or groups like sex workers: if you pay me six months in advance, I’ll see what I can do.”
The Chamber of Urban Property of Barcelona, ??which brings together small property owners, prefers not to comment on the issue because their owners, they assure, do not commit this type of abuse. “We must not lose sight of the fact that the property is putting someone in their home,” says Mireia Espinet, a lawyer specialized in real estate law.
But it also clarifies that many of these clauses, which the owners insist on stating in writing in their rental contracts, contravene the LAU, the Urban Leasing Law, and are void. Those of a discriminatory nature, furthermore, clash head-on with Article 14 of the Constitution. “Include clauses such as ‘no smoking/pets prohibited’
According to Espinet, there is now a “magma”, “whether due to the influence of the news or political currents, which makes tenants more aware of what their rights are and some even dare to defend them despite the costs.” emotions that the judicial process can imply.”
Even so, a certain lack of knowledge and helplessness continues to prevail, since it involves a great effort to denounce which practices and the entire real estate market is based on the inequality of power between those who have a home and those who need it.
Arcarazo, from the Llogateres Union, points out that the solution would be a public body of inspectors who “ensure compliance with the law,” just as is required in the workplace. “It is good that there is legislative progress, but if we want to stop the feeling of impunity in terms of racism and discrimination, public intervention is needed,” he adds. Regarding advertisements like those found by illustrator María Pichel, so frequent in Idealista and Habitaclia, she points out that the rental of rooms is almost completely unregulated: “It’s the jungle.”
