Twenty residents of six properties in Barcelona are up in arms against a fund that wants to build housing.

BarcelonaAround twenty residents of six apartment blocks in Barcelona have jointly protested their owner, the investment fund Vandor, because it has decided to stop renewing their contracts in order to convert their apartments, where some residents have lived for decades, into room rentals. "Vandor has bought fourteen properties with a total of two hundred apartments for purely speculative purposes and is evicting the tenants," explained the residents of these blocks, along with the Renters' Union, at a press conference this Friday outside one of the affected properties, located at 62 Avenir Street in Barcelona.

Most of the blocks are in the Eixample district, the Barcelona district that has seen the most transactions of this type in the last decade. The process is similar in all of them: it consists of the arrival of an investment fund that acquires the vertical property, stops renewing contracts and renovate apartments to sell them later for a higher price or the becomes cor accommodations. In the latter case, they can ask for almost the same price per room as the tenant was paying for the entire apartment, and thus circumvent the rent cap of the state housing law, which just turned two years old. In fact, this is the situation experienced by the residents of these fourteen Vandor blocks—in some of these blocks, all the apartments are already accommodations—where the rentals of existing rooms are managed by the company Cotwon, with prices reaching 900 euros, according to the Renters' Union.

The last neighbor of the blog

In these six blocks demanding collective bargaining, and soon to be seven, there are different situations, such as that of Rosario, who lives in an eleven-unit building at 69 Entença Street, and is now the last resident. "In December 2023, they told me they wouldn't renew my contract and filed an eviction lawsuit against me. In buildings like mine, there are a lot of young people in shared apartments, often Americans, who make a lot of noise, and it's dirty because they don't do proper maintenance," this resident explained at the press conference.

Residents of these affected buildings explain the same thing and that the owners have offered them 20,000 euros to leave, an amount that the funds often offer to residents so they can quickly dispose of the apartment and renovate it. Another affected block, with twelve apartments, is the one on Concordia Street. "There are only four households left. Two have permanent contracts, and the other two have contracts expiring soon," a resident of the blog told this newspaper. She attended the press conference on behalf of her blog.

Collective bargaining

"There are elderly people, families with young children. The situation of people who find themselves in a situation of uncertainty is very diverse, and we ask that they do something," explained Martina Ges, a resident of 62 Avenir Street. Her case is the same as the others, and they have also seen how Vandor has closed the door on collective bargaining, which is what their bargaining house is all about. This newspaper has tried to contact Vandor, without success.

"We call on the rest of the residents to join; we want to grow this organization. What we will not do is let it go unnoticed. What is happening here is not exceptional: the gap between seasonal and room rentals allows prices to rise, evading control," said Mr. Agonès's spokesperson. Residents stay in their homes and then negotiate with the owners. "We demand the renewal of the contracts and also that they comply with their 30% obligations," said Aragonès, referring to the requirement to allocate 30% of apartments to social housing in the event of major renovations.