This weekend I passed by the settlement that was evicted today in La Sagrera, where the AVE high-speed train station is being built. It was heartbreaking: single-person shacks built with corrugated iron sheets covered with plastic tarps held down with stones; clothes hanging to dry on lines tied to branches; electrical wires, the remains of bonfires, shopping carts, and trash everywhere, with an abundance of plastic bottles and jugs. The occupants came and went through holes they had easily cut in the wire fence. Frightened neighbors, a feeling of insecurity, and more than one theft. They had been there for months, with Adif, the landowner, doing nothing.
It was the very image of the shantytowns that have returned, of the precarious existence of many people who eke out a living on the outskirts of cities because it's better than going back to where they came from.
And also today, at the same time, a mobilization of hundreds of people prevented the eviction of an apartment building on Sant Agustí Street, in Gràcia, barely 300 meters from the very exclusive and centrally located Cinc d'Oros. A foreign investor wants to convert the apartments to rent them out by the room.
The housing situation is calamitous. Education, healthcare, mobility, the future of young people, the birth rate, and the language are not much better... In these conditions of national emergency, can politics continue as usual? Where is this age-old government-opposition dialectic leading us, with its voice cuts, videos on social media, the Catalan government talking about the "good corner," the opposition cultivating its share of the truth, and the City Council painting the city yellow because the Tour de France is coming, as if Catalan society weren't drowning in its problems? It's time for major national agreements—achievable, practical agreements that improve people's lives—before those who claim to have solutions but only have scapegoats arrive, and before we're lost beyond repair.
