Llucia Ramis: "Still mortgaged, I'm terrified I won't be able to pay for the apartment"

BarcelonaLlucia Ramis (Palma, 1977) arrived in Barcelona to study at university and here she has built her life, relationships, jobs, friendships. For years, until after she turned 40, she lived distressed by the ever-increasing 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 Un metro cuadrado (non-fiction prize from Libros del Asteroide; in Catalan published by Anagrama), where she analyzes the housing crisis from her experience as a tenant in Barcelona. The essay incorporates journalistic headlines, figures, and expert positions that have addressed the issue in recent years, but also the intimate and emotional impact that the city's transformation 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 is built in a place that does not belong to you. What remains of us in those places that have marked us so much? Have we transformed them in some way? Then, during the pandemic, many people asked me why I wasn't going back to my 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 that not knowing if you can stay in an apartment for a long time has conditioned your life?

— Absolutely. I'm still scared now, still mortgaged, I'm scared. If I can't afford the apartment, where do I go? People can go to the village or to their parents' house. Do 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 worked more jobs than I should because I'm very afraid of not having a job and not having money for the apartment. All my life I've had this anguish 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 shabby 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 this doesn't happen. The eternal provisionality begins: the apartments are provisional, the jobs are provisional, the 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 is still much worse.

— And here begins an awareness about the housing issue, but one that is very focused on people who are mortgaged and evicted, which is very serious. People don't pay much attention to the increase in tenants, which causes more difficulty in finding an apartment, especially when our salaries are cut, in my case my collaborations. I got extremely distressed, and at 37 years old I went back to sharing an apartment 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 an apartment. And you end up sharing an apartment 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 re-start and re-start and re-start, always beginnings that lead nowhere.

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

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

In the book you collect concrete and revealing figures, such as the fact that the average rental 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 flats.

— And from public land, which has passed into private hands at a price that people have later speculated on. And since 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 renters, it is much deeper: everything has been done wrong for decades. Since the Franco regime, this society of owners and not of proletarians" has been promoted 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, "considering how much it cost me!".

President Salvador Illa has promised 214,000 homes, half 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 that they return to their parents' homes. And you can't tell people that they can do business with housing but that they cannot 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 patch.

— Migrations have always been like this. But it is true that the fact of creating property owners, and Franco already knew this, makes you protect what is yours, makes you close yourself off in 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, defaulters, the homeless... As you generate suspicion towards the other, who is below, you need to be one of those who are above so as not to be suspected. This makes property owners increasingly want tenants with more purchasing power, not just to do business, not because they are speculators, but also because, in case they don't pay me or they stay to live, when this cannot happen.

Note that 80% of the occupations reported in Catalonia are of vacant homes and properties owned by vulture funds. On the other hand, you also state that vulnerable owners practically do not exist. One out of every four rental properties in the State is 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 defaults will appear in the media, and it will seem like there are very many when they are a minority, and that will give arguments to vulture funds, real estate agencies, and those who profit from it.

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. Kicking someone out of their home is the most inhumane thing there is, and I don't know how, in a rich society like ours, we have normalized evictions; the visible and the silent ones, when they don't renew your contract or they 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 disarticulates the power of the social fabric and of the city's government itself.

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. Airbnb and tourist and seasonal rentals have appeared. "Tourism consists of selling what is not yours," you write.

— I heard this from anthropologist José Mansilla. Sell the climate, the beach, the people, the Ensanche, the landscape. First, that this cannot be sold. Second, what is the real price of selling this. When we feel like extras... we are! How is it that this hasn't stopped?

Because many people live off it.

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

In the book you explain that you lost paradise but by triple measure: 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 being limited, everything is seen sooner. People from Ibiza tell us Majorcans that they are five years ahead of us.

And Mallorca compared to here, five more?

— Or less. I was in Malaga and I got very scared: it's more Ibiza than Mallorca now, and it's gone very fast, since the pandemic. It seems that at some point it has to explode, but in Venice it has never exploded. 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. I do have this feeling of coming from the future. In the same way that there is morriña, which is missing your 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, often 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 yourself from minute 1, you would already have the apartment paid off?

— But I didn't know if I would stay to live in Barcelona and, besides, I was a mileurista until I was 35 years old, I wouldn't have been able to afford it either. When they offered me the mortgage, in the midst of the crisis, I had 12,000 euros in the bank. I am self-employed and I don't know what collaborations I will have each year. But currently, people who have a public job cannot afford an apartment, people who have a fixed job cannot afford an apartment, anyone who separates right now with a child, there is no way to stay in the neighborhood where the child is schooled. This does not affect low incomes and young people, it affects everyone, and it will affect even more.

Sure, what is considered 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 they 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's harder to take root.

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

From the start, 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 believe we must start to understand 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 large companies, large banking corporations, large vulture funds. Rehumanizing means reconnecting. We have been giving up spaces and we must understand that in the end we can reclaim the street.

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

— The neighbor who can lend you a bit of salt is the same one who can help you in a much more complicated situation. We need to get to know the person next door again, because we have normalized not knowing our neighbor. The other thing is to demand political accountability, because this issue is the gravest thing we have experienced in 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. You can't say that to win votes. It's urgent. And yes, things can be done. At the very least, movements like the Tenants' Union have made tenants start to think they are not alone. It makes you feel very alone. It was high time this started to be talked about.

Last week an ad appeared on Idealista for a "great opportunity" because in a bare ownership 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 means that people are worth shit to you. Precisely, in the book I cite 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 morality 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 get all these people out to put a big hotel here, I will. Perhaps seeing it will make people react. Or perhaps not, because people are so dehumanized and so atomized...

In the last count, it showed that 2,000 people live on the streets in Barcelona...

— There are people who are in a situation of great vulnerability, with and without a roof over their heads, and we pretend they are not there. And we are closer to those people than to being millionaires, but I don't know for what reason we think we can become millionaires.