New Orleans   Even if we hadn’t just returned from visiting various organizations in Spain with the Organizers’ Forum, we would have been following the dramatic protests by thousands in Madrid who mobilized to turnback the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from her apartment.  None of this solved the overall Spanish housing crisis and in fact the Prime Minister has now called for elections after an emergency housing relief measure failed in parliamentary voting.

Not pretending to have a comprehensive grip on Spanish housing policy, our meetings did produce some insights on the housing situation there.  Compared to much of Europe, Spain has very little public housing, perhaps only 10%, largely because of earlier government policies that allow tenants to purchase their units.  During the housing meltdown there, much of the issue had to do with a peculiarity of the housing mortgage market.  When a loan went bad in Spain and the property was foreclosed, the property went back to the bank, as usual.  The lender continued to be responsible for paying off the loan or at least the difference between the original loan balance and the market value at foreclosure. Foreclosure provided families no financial relief, but added new housing costs to their previous mortgage payments creating homelessness and lifetime financial burdens.  Major private equity companies, Blackrock in particular, scooped up thousands in this situation.

The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages or in Spanish, Platforma de los Afectados por la Hipoteca or PAH, was organized in 2009 in the crisis throughout Spain.  Members of our delegation met with PAH-Barcelona at their monthly meeting while we were there.  During the height of the crisis meetings regularly were attended by 50 to 80 people on a weekly basis.  There were less than 20 there in the evening the Organizers Forum visited, but it was a good meeting with full engagement both on individual issues at one level, discussions on policy, and planning for future actions.  PAH believes strongly in horizontality, which doesn’t mean no structure, as one might suppose, but a fluid, decentralized way of running the meetings where everyone has a role from greeting new people at the door to presiding over the meeting from time to time.  There is no pretense that a family’s foreclosure is easy, or even possible, to resolve, but PAH specializes in what we would call member-to-member listening and assistance to create space and confidence for the family to engage and survive the process.  This model spread around the country then and its legacy still informs the cycle of disciplined meetings and mass mobilizations.  One of the founders and leaders of PAH was later elected as mayor of Barcelona for example in their efforts to win reforms at every level.

The 17-year history of PAH and the rise of other housing and tenant organizations in Spain is ample evidence of the enduring housing crisis in the country, as recent events also demonstrate.  Even as some foreign ownership has been blocked and reforms have been won in some cities on Airbnb and second homes, none of this has created sufficient affordable housing or brought justice to all of the families that lost their homes and still need housing or debt relief.  We met with cooperative housing groups in Barcelona, but sufficient scale to meet the crisis is illusive there as well.  The fact that housing and affordability can bring down governments in Spain should be a lesson to governments everywhere, even if the solutions are difficult and expensive.