Can not sleep. She has been a tenant for 10 years in the Benimaclet neighborhood of Valencia, last week she received a call from the owner of her apartment to tell her that on September 1 she has to be out of it. “I am back in the market, and it is not the same as ten years ago, the world has become even more greedy. I charge 1,600 euros and I don’t see rents that go below 1,300 and I can’t stop thinking about what my son and I are going to do. Where are we going. Dreaming is over, almost even living,” she explains. She prefers to remain anonymous, but hers is a testimony of a “normal person,” she insists on explaining. She has a university education, works for a large company and pays her bills religiously.
She relates that she has been a tenant since “I left my parents’ house twenty-five years ago. And despite this, sometimes I dream of living in a less greedy world. In which if the neighbor raises the price to a million and a half, not everyone will follow him.” Because she appeals to ethics, despite everything. She knows, because she senses it, that starting in September her apartment will be rented to several of those students who populate the Benimaclet neighborhood, where she and her teenage son have already moved. Faced with the setback of the notice, last week he started looking for an apartment and reality has been giving him knocks that are now starting to hurt: “On Friday I was visiting an apartment for 850 euros, and in order to get in they ask you to charge three times above, 2,600 euros. Even if I tighten my belt and we don’t leave the house, I don’t have any option,” the tenant assumes.
Yours is an example of the many vulnerabilities that are being created in this housing access crisis. “Tell it, it’s not just young people who suffer the whiplash of this market,” the woman insists. “Unfortunately, the profile that can rent today is very restricted because the rents are very high,” they explain from the Valencian Real Estate Association (Asicval), for whom the situation is “dramatic.” Neither single-parent families, like the one illustrated in this report, nor people who one day decided to live alone are going to have it easy.
The idea is underlined by Fernando Cos-Gayón, director of the Housing Observatory Chair at the Polytechnic University of Valencia, and who has been warning for months about the extreme situation that is emerging in Valencia and its surroundings. “People who have an average age between 40-50 years and a salary below 2,000 euros fall into a classification of difficult access to home ownership, but they will not be able to access rentals, I’m afraid,” he states. The UPV Observatory analyzes the housing market quarterly and Cos-Gayón assures that lately there has not been much flight from traditional to tourist rentals – due to the perception of tightening of the regulations that will occur soon – but he points out that in rentals by rooms, an increase in operations is being recorded.
It is this modality that the woman protagonist of this testimony explores, “pushing” her son to early independence so that he lives in a shared apartment and she does the same. “It may be an option for him to live in a 500-euro room. I can afford that, because a real estate agency has told me that with what I earn, I could rent something for 645 euros, so if I do that, I would even save 145 euros. I swear I would, but I can’t, there’s nothing at that price. Will I be the only poor thing? No I dont think so. And, why if I’m not the only one is this happening in Spain? ”She asks herself insistently.
Ana Belén Montero, responsible for Public Policies and Social Protection of CCOO-PV, puts the emphasis on the salary, who highlights that “housing prices rise much more than salaries rise” and criticizes that today it is necessary to pay 30 % and up to 50% of the salary to be able to live. Solutions? For Montero, it is necessary to end “the policy of speculation, put limits, also on tourist housing, and raise awareness among the working class that housing is a right and not an object of speculation.”
For the UPV expert, it is as “urgent” to build new construction as it is to reform the Housing Law, since, he maintains, “there has been so much effort to protect the tenant that the owner has been unprotected and homes are not coming onto the market because there is fear.” to lose it.” But the tenant says that “no, it’s not the market. It’s greed.”
