Housing camp in Madrid will continue “until it has to be”

“I am until I have to be,” Lusa says this sevilhana “star and commercial”, sitting within one of the hundreds of tents that are in the protest camp installed at Porta do Sol, in the tourist heart of the Spanish capital and at the door of the presidency of the autonomous government, led by the Popular Party (PP, right).

According to the Union of Tenants and Tenants of Madrid, the association that coordinates the protest, there are close to 400 tents in the square at this time and 600 people slept last night on site.

The goal is to keep the camp at least until Tuesday, Council of Ministers day, to pressure the government, led by the Socialist Party (PSOE) to pass a decree repeatedly promised by the executive with measures to prevent evictions of vulnerable persons and other measures to protect tenants and promote access to housing. According to official data, there are 45 daily evictions in Spain.

Minutes before talking to Lusa, René Martin finished an online meeting with the computer he took to the protest. He is also guarding the tent next door, whose owners have gone to work during the day and will return at the end of the afternoon for a new night at the Sun Door.

“ I always go to the demonstrations and I've wanted something like this to happen for a long time. It's hard to get out of the routine and take a step. And when I saw that a big step had been taken, I went to buy the tent and came here. It had to be,” he says.

René Martin mainly does telework, has no children and has the means to buy a tent and join the protest: “All can be. This is the moment.”.

René Martin has lived in Madrid for five years and has moved home six times. He has already gone through an attic in the center “where he could not stand” because he paid 800 euros, with his then boyfriend. Now she lives with a friend, in an apartment in the suburbs that is the family of her roommate and for which she pays “a little more than the expenses”.

You know that “you’re very lucky” because if you want to live alone or even build a family “it’s impossible”, because neither “two average wages of 1,200 euros” can afford to rent or buy a house.

Romana Flores, 27, also an actress, from Málaga and René's friend, enters the conversation to tell Lusa who lives in a house with two other people today, but has already shared an apartment with five others “and not only students, some very old mis, over 60 years old”. All without possibility of living in other conditions, for the wages they earned or following divorces.

“I came to Madrid to realize a dream, not to be enslaved,” Romana says, to synthesize how she feels the problem of skin housing.

Like René and Romana, most of those camped at the Gate of the Sun are young and people under 40 with difficulty projecting a future because of the cost of homes.

Around the camp are, among the now fewer tourists who pass through the site, dozens of older people, most retired, in support and solidarity with the youth who protest.

“ They're here for all of us, too. We also had to be inside [the camp]”, shouts a woman to a man outraged that the square is occupied and unable to cross.

José Luis Juste, 70 years old, approaches a spokesperson for the Union of Tenants and Tenants of Madrid and asks what bank account he can make a donation to help the camp stay as long as necessary.

“It is a barbarity that young and old people are in the hands of the ‘vulture funds’,” Lusa said, referring to investment funds such as the one that bought the house of Maricarmen Abascal, the 87-year-old woman evicted last week from the house where she lived in Madrid since 1957 and whose case has mobilized tens of thousands of people for protests in Spain, including the camp of the Porta do Sol.

René Martin will have to leave the camp to rehearse and play in the tetro play he's working on at least two nights this week. When that happens, and if necessary, a friend will stay in the tent, so the protest will stay alive and the Sungate will remain occupied. The same will happen with 25 - year - old Davia Iglesias, a waiter, who will coordinate working hours with a friend to keep busy the tent they took to the camp.

Like René, he shares a house “with three bedrooms and two bathrooms” with two colleagues and considers that he is “very well”, but “everyone” around him “needs a house and has no access” for what is and will continue on the Sun Door “for those who cannot”.