Speaker 1crown coins winning never sounded so good what would you do if you won big at crown coins casino real people win real prizes every single day hi this is michael from georgia i won 40k and finally renovated my home visit crown coins.com sign up in seconds enter code crown and get a free lucky wheel bonus you may win up to 10 000 sweeps coins crown coins.com that's c-r-o-w-n coins.com no purchase needed code valid for new users only void were prohibited by law 18 plus terms and
Speaker 2conditions apply crown coins casino al jazeera podcasts today why thousands in spain
Speaker 3are protesting the housing crisis another housing
Speaker 4crisis for spain's residents where prices are soaring and fewer people can get on the property ladder
Speaker 3rents are soaring wages are stagnant and affordable housing is out of reach but how did it get this bad and what's next for spain i'm manuel rapalo and this is the take my name is jaime palomera and
Speaker 5i'm an economic anthropologist and my main focus in life is to solve the housing question the housing crisis and especially the inequality that this housing crisis is generating
Speaker 3welcome to the take let's start with these protests taking place in spain tens of thousands of people in different cities let's start with what you saw on saturday what are people demanding people are really really upset
Speaker 4they rattle their keys and called for a general strike
Speaker 5the mounting anger and out of dissatisfaction with the current situation i
Speaker 6came because we tenants need to
Speaker 7be listened to and it is
Speaker 6good
Speaker 7to
Speaker 6fight
Speaker 7a little bit against what all landlords in general are doing with the use they are making of their housing i'm also a tourist and i've been traveling around the world tourism is indeed good but it's also good to protect people who live in these places
Speaker 5so young people and not so young people are really anguished about the fact that it's very difficult to foresee a future where you can have a home and have kids the way your parents and grandparents did so there's a lot of anger at that and people are just like demanding solutions but also people are organizing it's really impressive to see the extent to which like people that you know felt that had an individual problem are getting together and creating these new so-called tenant unions that have been growing very fast in spain and in other countries
Speaker 3and the turnout that we're seeing at these protests is people from literally all walks of life right young people old people that what they have in common is that they're struggling to find homes can you talk about what that's like for the average person in spain today how difficult has it become to find affordable housing
Speaker 5yeah so right now for anybody that's not a homeowner already trying to get on the housing ladder trying to get a home is like entering a monopoly game when that game has already started so it's like you're gonna try and you know buy a house but you know if you've played the monopoly game ever before you'll see that when the game has already started the other players already own many streets and have built you know buildings houses so for many people it's like they're entering that game and it's very hard to buy a house and what you do is you're just paying rent all the time and before you know it you're really like impoverished and you're just looking at the other players playing while you're having you know a sandwich and just like watching netflix
Speaker 3i'm just troubled by some of these statistics that i've been learning one in particular i'll read it to you this is a recent data in spain 85 percent of people under 30 still live with their parents due to unaffordable housing the question that i have over this with so many young people delaying because they don't have a choice what are the consequences of that what are the consequences of delaying this independence for so many young people for a majority of young people in spain
Speaker 5there are many many also like a lot of these people are already working they have wages sometimes they're good wages and they're seeing that it's really difficult to you know to envisage you know building a future for yourself so it's really hard on you and also that the problem is also that many of these young adults here is that they're not doing enough and that they should be more entrepreneurial those are the kinds of discourses that we're hearing all over the world it
Speaker 3sounds familiar right that's what young people hear from older people just pull yourself up from your bootstraps you've got a job you've got a wage that if i could do it you can do it but that's not the case right yeah
Speaker 5the thing the thing that like people should know that in 1997 in spain it would take you three years and a half of your full salary to pay for a house for a home and nowadays in a city like barcelona it's like 10 years of salary in mallorca you know the islands it's even more first thing that you think is like what am i doing wrong right and you blame yourself but what these new organizations these housing movements are doing is to point at the fact that there's a it's a collective problem like i don't know if you've heard of it but it's a collective problem it's a collective problem but it's a collective problem it's a collective problem it's a collective problem like many people are in the same situation um and also that there are political reasons behind this and that's key i want
Speaker 3to ask you about uh those collectives and the sort of organizational structure of the people that are now you know taking to the streets to protest this but you know you're an expert on this topic you've written about it but this is also an issue that affects you personally and i was hoping that you could talk about that aspect of things where you're living today can you talk about how this housing crisis is affecting your neighborhood and and your neighbors
Speaker 5so i'm 42 years old i have you know i live with nudia my partner we have two children two beautiful girls and you know we work really hard and we're i mean we're not among those that are really having a you know a hard time but it's really difficult to think of doing what my parents had done already at my age when my parents were my age 42 they had already bought their home 12 years ago and they had already paid for it they were already home owners and me i've been for more than 17 years now i've been a tenant so it's really really hard to think of owning a house and what's happening around me is that a lot of people are really desperate like what's happening now is that okay so two generations were able to buy their home but since the great financial crisis of 2008 almost 20 years ago you buy a home or not depends on whether you'll inherit or not whether your parents will give you money to buy or not and that's really that's at the root of the crisis the political crisis that we have now you know a lot of young people people younger much younger than me they're saying in the polls that they don't believe in democracy and they feel that a dictatorship might uh be more useful and i think that has to do with the crisis of liberal democracies because where does that crisis come from for me what i think is that when people are working so hard 14 hours a day to build a future for themselves and for their children and they cannot achieve that dream so the whole idea of the meritocracy you know collapses it's hard to
Speaker 3blame these folks right yeah and you know this isn't just an economic impact that this is having this is having this social impact this is having an impact that overturns people's lives that overturns families lives what are some of the cases that you've seen
Speaker 5actually you asked me something that i didn't fully respond to which is how it's affecting our neighborhoods but i'm gonna respond to that into what you just asked me so for instance i'm gonna tell you the story of a woman who lives in mallorca the island of mallorca in spain it's a beautiful island it's full of tourists and there are a lot of wealthy people buying a lot of land and housing so she lives in mallorca and she just managed to um get a like a public job as a teacher at a school in ibiza so the thing is she got a job as a teacher in ibiza but it's so expensive to live there she cannot find a room that's less than 1,200 euros and that's a lot it's like most of her salary so what she does every day she takes a plane every day from Mallorca to Ibiza and she teaches there and then at the end of the day she takes a flight back to Mallorca from Ibiza and she does this every day in the week so it's like it's a completely like it looks irrational from if you look at it but that's happening all over the world so it's really dysfunctional as an economic model more with
Speaker 3Jaime after the break winning never
Speaker 2sounded so good
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Speaker 6terms and
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Speaker 6week on true crime reports how was a pedophilia and torture cult allowed to operate in plain sight in chile for nearly 40 years why did the chilean government not only allow this to happen but support it hear from the victims themselves in true crime reports subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts so jaime you've actually written a
Speaker 3book about this topic specifically it's called el secuestro de la vivienda that translates to the kidnapping of housing the or the sequestration of housing this is a book that was just released in spanish you argue that the housing market is rigged in favor of wealthy investors and the rich and the poor and the rich and the rich and the it's rigged in favor of landlords what makes this so and who benefits the most here so economists focus
Speaker 5all the time on supply and demand and they say if you increase the supply then prices will come down but they don't look at like the existing housing that the homes that are already built how how they're distributed who owns them and the thing is that over the last 20 years the very wealthy have bought accumulated a lot of homes so just to give you um a figure here a fact so in spain since 2008 the rental market has boomed so there are 1.3 million new homes in the rental market these are not newly built homes they already existed before 2008
Speaker 3this is part of the confusion that i think a lot of people have seeing this from the outside because there's a there's always this the immediate perception is oh this is a housing shortage yeah but that's not necessarily the case
Speaker 5yeah that's the thing that like the rental market has boomed so the reason like if you focus on the supply you're missing really what's going on the reason why there's so much so many new rental units is because a lot of working families and middle-class families are not going to be able to afford to live in the middle class families have lost their homes over the last years after the great financial crisis after the covid crisis there have been so many evictions so these these are people they used to pay their mortgage they cannot pay so they lose their home others are just when people get older in order to get you know good care nursing home they have to sell their home so the question is who's buying all of those homes so it's basically the wealthy people who already have a home and they're not going to already owned a lot of assets and what do they do they use why do they buy so many houses so many homes because they use it to increase their rents and so there are so many things that you can do with a house that you cannot do with any other product they can be kept vacant and their price still goes up they can be used as touristic rentals like clandestine hotels or you know they can be used as like ordinary rental units but the reason why wealthy individuals are buying a lot of homes and not just homes but also essential resources for life is because these are by definition non-competitive markets it's very easy to increase the price of these goods there's no competition really it's very hard to create you know anything close to the area of a free market and this allows them to drive up the price and you know it's a much more profitable investment than many other financial product products and and this is happening a lot in our economies like you're in the u.s i'm in spain in europe in weak economies those with money with a lot of money the easy thing to do is buy homes because it's really profitable you
Speaker 3said something really interesting right now we referenced this is something that happens in weak economies and i don't think that the perception around the world when looking at spain is that spain is a weak economy or some sort of struggling nation it i think it's very shocking to people who are seeing these protests and thinking is is the housing crisis really that bad can you talk about that how has spain's economy changed and what is that doing to shape the current crisis that we're seeing so okay
Speaker 5so for instance right now spain is growing by three percent and everybody's like wow that's a miracle because like europe is kind of like a miracle and i think that's a miracle because i think that's a miracle kind of generally stagnating and the reason is like the reason why this happened why this is happening is because the touristic industry is booming and so there's a lot of job creation but like with really low salaries so even though the spanish government has increased salaries real salaries are not growing they're going down because the cost of life is so high especially again houses which is the main investment that any family will do so it doesn't matter if the government increases for instance in spain there's a minimum wage and it's relatively high now i mean it's been increased or it's you know close to what other european countries have but it doesn't matter because as long as the housing price continues to grow by 88 percent every year people's real wages are going down and that's
Speaker 3what leads them to take to the streets yeah um let's talk about that organizational structure there's this sort of collective building that's that's been going on for a long time and i think that's a really important thing that's been going on and building up you work with the tenants union in spain you're actually one of the co-founders of a tenants union in catalonia what are you hearing from people what is the answer to the crisis that people want to see one of the
Speaker 5demands of the demonstration was that first of all like the price of rents should go down by 50 and you you could think wow that's a lot yeah but the thing is that prices have gone up whereas you know wages haven't so that's the first thing the other demand is that people who are currently tenants can be safe like feel that they're not going to be evicted next year people are saying okay i want a rent that's affordable but like that's not you know gonna like squeeze like choke us but also i want to be sure that you know when the agreement comes to an end every year that i cannot be evicted and my family you know all of us have to move etc so a lot of people are coming to terms with the idea that they'll never be able to buy a house like their parents and what they're demanding is that the rules of the rental market are changed the spanish
Speaker 3government the european union is obviously paying very close attention because these protests are now tens of thousands of people on the streets they cannot be ignored what's been the sort of response from the spanish government what's been the response from the european union because from my understanding the eu now has its first ever housing commissioner so there are some steps being taken what do you make of the steps that have been taken or the responses that have
Speaker 5been given my experience i've met many politicians and many people in different governments over the years so they always say that we're in favor of affordable housing and when i ask them okay but do you think that housing in general should be cheaper that the price of housing should go down generally there's either silence or you know an uncomfortable laughter and what i've come to realize over the years is that most politicians in power they don't want to bring the price of housing down why is that it's mostly because they don't want to bring the price of housing down they think that housing is a macroeconomic factor so if the price of homes go down then the value of the assets in the hands of banks and big firms also goes down and this worries them but The thing is that whenever people are asked in Spain, are you in favor of the price of your own asset going down? If that means that it will be more affordable for people to buy a house, 75% of people say yes, because it's not just a generational problem. Like older people, like my parents, my grandparents, they're all super worried about like what's going to happen to their children, grandchildren. They can see that there's a real problem. And I'm saying this because very often people like commentators like to talk about, you know, a generational clash, like, you know, like generation, like war against different generations. And it's not really the case. They're really, really anguished. There's a general anguish about the current situation. But going back, the Spanish government in particular is one of the governments in Europe that's like more openly. At least discursively, what they say is that they're openly trying to address the housing crisis with different changes in norms and rules. But they've done, it's very limited what they've done. Very, very limited. And unless they start facing that structural changes are needed, we're not, like things are going to get worse and worse. There's a point in which people will like say, this is enough. And this is what's happening in Spain right now.
Speaker 3Jaime Palomera, thank you so much for joining us today on The Take.
Speaker 5It was a real pleasure.
Speaker 3Anytime. And that's The Take. This episode was produced by Khaled Sultan and Amy Walters, with Philip Llanos, Spencer Klein, Marcos Bartolome, Sari El-Khalili, Kisa Sera, Ashish Malhotra, and me, Manuel Rapalo. Our sound designer is Alex Roldan. Our video editor is Alex Roldan. Our audio editors are Hisham Abu Salah and Mohanid Almelham. Alexandra Locke is The Take's executive producer. Ney Alvarez is Al Jazeera's head of audio.
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