ABSTRACT
In more normal circumstances, the house is home to an extended family. 1 An unemployed couple, a young daughter, the grandparents, sometimes an uncle as well. Today, it also teems with activists. They have been monitoring the movements of the police all night. ‘The girl needs to leave’, says the mother as she unlocks the door. The child is let out, and the entrance is chained shut behind her. ‘They are considering at all entry points’, says one activist as he approaches the mother, ‘they’re at the rooftop’. Standing in the house’s inner courtyard, they both look up, wondering if the police are really going to rappel down the side of the building. The year is 2013; the housing crash has hit rock bottom. Widespread evictions are by then a daily occurrence. It is a drama that attracts recurring headlines, as it strikes a nerve in a society like the Spanish, accustomed to generalised homeownership. In this case the house is a public rental, a relative rarity, one of Madrid’s few ‘social housing’ units. The family has fallen into arrears, and the local government will no longer accept repayment. The mother laments not having had time to send her daughter to school; ‘they’ve come in the dark’, she says crying with rage, ‘she shouldn’t have to witness this!’ The activists manage to calm her down after some time. She opens up a photo album, passes around pictures, and shares family stories. A brief moment of respite as the siege sets in. As police surround the house, an activist lawyer engages in frantic negotiations with the local government: ‘they want to clear the house to sell it to an investment fund’. Negotiations do not go well. At 9:30 am, judicial envoys arrive with an eviction order. Plan B it is. The activists start moving furniture around – to form a barricade. Some of them chain themselves to the outside gate; the family uncle is amongst them. The activists are members of a network of radical housing activists, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, the de facto shock troops of the anti-austerity movement. Their banners read: ‘no homes without people, no people without homes’. Ahead of them: thirty police officers, in full riot gear. They bring two sledgehammers and a battering ram.
