Llucia Ramis: "Still mortgaged, I am terrified in case I cannot pay for the flat"

BarcelonaLlucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) arrived in Barcelona to study at university and here she has built her life, relationships, jobs, friendships. For years, until she was over 40, she lived anxiously because of the steadily rising rental contracts (she went from paying 240 to 750 euros) which meant she had to share a flat and move areas. Thirty years and ten moves later, she publishes A Square Meter (non-fiction prize from Libros del Asteroide; in Catalan by Anagrama), in which she analyzes the housing crisis from her experience as a tenant in Barcelona. The essay incorporates journalistic headlines, figures, and the positions of experts who have addressed the issue in recent years, but also the intimate and emotional impact that the transformation of the city has on its inhabitants.

Why are you writing a real estate autobiography?

— It had been a long time since I wanted to write about the apartments where I have lived because I wondered how the feeling of belonging to a place that does not belong to you is built. What remains of us in those places that have marked us so much? Have I transformed them in some way? Then, during the pandemic, many people asked me why I wasn't returning home. But I had been living in Barcelona for 25 years! I feel Mallorcan but I have been living here for more than half my life.

Do you think not knowing if you can stay in an apartment for a long time has conditioned your life?

— Absolutely. I'm still terrified, still mortgaged, I'm terrified. If I can't afford my flat, where do I go? People can go to their village or to their parents' house. I have to go back to Mallorca, 200 kilometers by sea, when my life is here? This has always worried me a lot and I've always done more jobs than I should because I'm very afraid of not having a job and not having money for the flat. I've had this anxiety my whole life and no one understood me.

But it is a very shared and generational anguish, isn't it?

— At first you think it's temporary. First the apartment is run-down because you're a student. Then you become independent, at 23, and you think sharing an apartment is temporary. You think it will get better, but the years go by and it doesn't happen. The eternal provisionality begins: apartments are provisional, jobs are provisional, relationships are provisional, everything is very unstable and you don't have the capacity to plan the future. And the real estate crisis arrives and those expectations go to hell.

It's still much worse.

— And here begins an awareness about the housing issue, but it is very focused on people who are mortgaged and are evicted, which is very serious. People don't pay as much attention to the increase in tenants there are, which causes more difficulty in finding a flat, and even more so when our salaries are cut, in my case collaborations. I became extremely anxious, and at 37 years old I went back to sharing a flat again because I couldn't find a way to pay for it. I thought the series Friends was an exaggeration and I was older than the characters in Friends and I was sharing a flat. And you end up sharing a flat with people you shouldn't, or with couples you've only recently met. Every time you sign a rental contract it's a countdown. My life was a constant restart and restart and restart, always beginnings that lead nowhere.

In the end, you ended up mortgaging yourself. Whether it's a moral defeat or a victory, the solution is to get into the game.

— Surely I couldn't live in Barcelona now. It's just that it's been very difficult for me. I've realized that, when I got a mortgage, I'm no longer thinking all the time "I have to look for an apartment". And I haven't had any problems with landlords, mind you. The great social inequality we have now within the same salary range is that a person has to dedicate 40, 50, 60% of their income just to housing. This person not only has to make double the effort, but they also have so much mental burden...

In the book you collect concrete and revealing figures. Such as the average rent price has risen four times more than salaries in a decade, which is linked to precariousness. Or how governments have not invested in creating public rental housing but for purchase, which has de-capitalized the country of these homes.

— And from public land, which has passed into private hands at a price that people have subsequently speculated on. And as we have maintained the banks [42 billion bailout], the Sareb [50 billion for the public real estate company]... It is not a war between owners and tenants, it is much deeper: everything has been done wrong for decades. Since Francoism, this "society of owners and not of proletarians" has been fostered and renting has not been encouraged. How do we reverse all this? Everyone gives the example of Vienna, but other solutions are lacking, because we do not have public land. And since this society of owners has been created, I don't know if everyone would be in favor of paying for someone else's rent with taxes, "given what it cost me!".

President Salvador Illa has promised 214,000 homes, half of them for affordable rent.

— We'll see. The problem is that the solution is also speculation, when there is more than one generation that has a very serious problem now. You can't expect the solution to be inheritance, that people can mortgage themselves or return to their parents' homes. And you can't tell people they can do business with housing but can't get rich from it.

You also explain the link between being a property owner and more conservative ideological positions, out of a protective instinct. It also happens at the other extreme: in the most vulnerable neighborhoods, they are also reluctant to the arrival of new vulnerable people. Everyone wants to protect their own little piece.

— Migrations have always been like this. But it is true that the fact of creating owners, and Franco already knew this, makes you protect what is yours, that you lock yourself into the zebra blocks, as we saw in the exhibition Subúrbia at the CCCB. But, in addition, there are two lines of dehumanization. One is language. There is a language that always questions people who have less than you: tenants, but also squatters, debtors, the homeless... Because you generate suspicion towards the other, who is below, you need to be one of those who is above to avoid being suspected. This makes landlords increasingly want tenants with more purchasing power, not just to do business, not because they are speculators, but because in case they don't pay me or they stay to live there, when this cannot happen.

Notes that 80% of the reported occupations in Catalonia are of empty homes and properties of vulture funds. On the other hand, you also state that vulnerable owners practically do not exist. One out of every 4 rental homes in the state are in the hands of companies or institutions. Of the remainder, half are multiproperty owners, and the other half own one or two properties.

— But whoever has a default, will appear in the media, and it will seem that they are very many when they are a minority, and this will give arguments to the vulture funds, the real estate agencies and those who do business with this.

The middle class has also tried to do business with this, and on a small scale has participated in turning housing into a financial asset.

— The other line of dehumanization is this: turning what is most human into a product. Forcing someone out of their home is the most inhumane thing there is, and I don't know how, in a wealthy society like ours, we have normalized evictions; the visible ones and the silent ones, when they don't renew your contract or set a price you can't afford. We have normalized being expelled from cities. All this because housing has been turned into an asset and cities have changed their social function to become a market. "Barcelona, the best shop in the world." The city stops being centered on the resident to focus on the consumer. Therefore, we are much more interested in the person who is passing through, who spends a lot. And this dismantles the power of the social fabric and of the city's own government.

This has to do with globalization, tourism and the gentrification of the city. From 4 million overnight stays before the Games, it has gone up to 37 million in 2025 in Barcelona. Airb’n’b and tourist and seasonal rentals have appeared. «Tourism consists of selling what is not yours», you write.

— I heard this from the anthropologist José Mansilla. Selling the climate, the beach, the people, the Eixample, the landscape. First, that this cannot be sold. Second, what is the real price of selling this. When we feel like extras... it is because we are! How is it that this has not stopped?

Because many people live off it.

— But less than we think. All these messages that without tourism we would be poor, let's see... Wealth may have changed hands. But even the bourgeoisie jumped on the bandwagon, because housing is faster and more profitable. That is, people who already had money have taken advantage of it and changed their economic activity. Tourism itself is not bad, the problem is the model, that more is better, mass tourism. What happens? When you invest a lot of money in housing and tourism, you have to make it profitable. How? By maintaining the monoculture. That's why they are now with the de-seasonalization of tourism and decentralization, and what this does is spread the monoculture even further and make other economic activities have less and less chance of functioning. Who can live in the center? And for whom is the center if not for the residents? La Sagrera is not the center and it is already very gentrified. Now it turns out that investments are in the peripheral neighborhoods, because they are much cheaper and the profitability is much higher. It's super perverse. But instead of stopping this, it is encouraged because the model has to be maintained. Together we are maintaining a model that harms us.

In the book you explain that you lost paradise but in a triple way: you lose childhood, the grandparents' house where you had spent your summers, and you lose the landscape. Coming from Mallorca is like coming from the future?

— Crystal clear. On the islands everything happens sooner, because since they are limited, everything is seen sooner. The people from Ibiza tell us from Mallorca that they are five years ahead of us.

And Mallorca regarding from here, five more?

— Or less. I was in Malaga and I got very scared: it's more Ibiza than Mallorca now, and it's happened super fast, since the pandemic. It seems like at some point it has to burst, but in Venice it has never burst. What has been the solution? That there are no Venetians. It can happen that there is a city where there are no residents, because so many people cannot afford to live there. Yes, I have this feeling of coming from the future. In the same way that morrinya exists, which is missing home because you have gone somewhere else, there should be a word that means you cannot live in your home because you cannot afford it, because you have lost the most valuable thing we have, many times out of greed, out of ignorance, because everyone does it, or because we are forced to do it.

In the end, do you think that if you had mortgaged at minute 1, you would already have the apartment paid off?

— In the end, do you think that if you had mortgaged yourself at minute 1, you would already have the apartment paid off?

Of course, what is low income, today, living in Barcelona?

— Above all, you cannot compete with these people who come from countries where they have much better salaries, who come for the good weather and because everything is easy, and can offer four times more than you. At some point someone will sit down and say that there are people who need to live in the place where they have lived for decades, where they have their ties, their children's school, their partner, their job. When you are renting, you have to put expiration dates on everything.

You have superficial relationships with things and places, it is harder to put down roots.

— Our generation, more or less, had one house in childhood, you had "your home", and if your parents separated you had two. My nephews have lived in three different apartments before turning 10. In the end, we adapt, of course, nothing happens, but you increasingly see more people in these situations. People who live together even though they are separated. Or people who live in Mallorca and go to see their son in Ibiza on weekends.

From the beginning you already warn that there is no easy solution, but could we throw out some optimistic idea?

— I think there are two. One is rehumanization. The investor, the owner, and the tenant have completely different realities despite sharing the same city. I think we have to start understanding how the other lives, that there are realities that are not our reality and that they are having a hard time. In the end, those who are complicating everything are not individuals, they are the big companies, the big banking companies, the big vulture funds. Rehumanizing means reconnecting. We have been giving up spaces and we have to understand that in the end we can reclaim the street.

That's why you make the note about Casa Orsola at the end...Casa Orsola at the end...

— The neighbor who can give you a little trouble is the same one who can help you in a much more complicated situation. We have to get to know who lives next door again, because we have normalized not knowing our neighbor. The other thing is to demand political responsibilities, because this issue is the most serious we have experienced in a democracy.

Mayor Jaume Collboni has committed to recovering Barcelona's 10,000 tourist apartments by the end of 2028. The elections will be in May 2027.

— Another speculation. It's not valid to say that to win votes. It's urgent. And things can be done. At least, movements like the Tenants' Union have made tenants start to think they are not alone. You feel very alone. It was time it started to be talked about.

Last week an Idealista ad was published announcing a "great opportunity" because in a bare property apartment there are tenants who have diabetes, scoliosis and are on dialysis. To think of the possibility of death as an asset of an apartment.

— For me it is the demonstration that there is no mercy. When you speak in these terms, it is that people mean shit to you. Precisely, in the book I quote that "no economy in the world is governed by the market, it is governed by people". It is the demonstration of the lack of ethics, of morals that exists in the whole issue of housing. And the idea of ​​turning the Gaza Strip into a large resort is the same concept: people bother me. If I can remove all these people to put a large hotel here, I will do it. Maybe seeing it will make people react. Or maybe not, because people are so dehumanized and so atomized...

In the last count, it came out that 2,000 people live on the street in Barcelona...

— There are people in a situation of great vulnerability, with and without shelter, and we pretend they are not there. And we are closer to these people than to being multimillionaires but I don't know why we think we can become multimillionaires.