The social safety net measures, which were rejected in Congress on Thursday by the PP, Vox, and Junts parties, protected 60,000 vulnerable people across Spain, some 13,000 of them in Catalonia. One of them is Francesca Cervelló. This 63-year-old resident of the Putxet neighborhood in Barcelona has been dreading this day for months. "What will I do now? What will happen to me?" she asks in a conversation with AHORA.

From the tourist boom of the 1960s to the present day, the urban exploitation of the coast has continued virtually unchecked. Beyond some emblematic but very limited territorial actions, such as the natural parks of Cap de Creus, Aiguamolls de l'Empordà and Montgrí-Medes-Baix Ter in the north, the Llobregat Delta next to El Prat airport –now under threat– or the Ebro Delta in the south, the Catalan coast has suffered continuous constructive pressure for more than half a century, both under the dictatorship and during democracy. Protected natural areas have too often been used as a pretext to give other spaces a free hand to intrusive and very intensive building. Construction as an economic driving force, the need for income for historically underfunded local councils, the slow and hesitant environmental awareness and the tourist monoculture of many regions have been the factors that have caused the great urban spread that the Catalan coast has become.

The collateral effects of the covid-19 pandemic, still painfully among us, are like ivy covering the entire façade of our cracked social edifice. The metaphor is pertinent because housing is, right now, one of the greatest weak points. We had already come from a precarious situation, the result of the economic crisis of 2008, which had become bogged down and has now only worsened due to the economic ravages also caused by the coronavirus. The moratorium on evictions for people in social emergency situations has managed to stop the blow, but if, as planned, it ends with the end of the state of alarm on May 9, we will come across a new wave of homeless people difficult to manage. Many families will face the threat of becoming homeless with the end of the furlough scheme and the self-employed aid, measures that, if there is no further extension, will expire around the same time, on May 31.