The cold exacerbates the problem of settlements in the Barcelona area

BarcelonaIt happened in Sant Andreu, but it could have happened anywhere. And it happened in the early hours of Tuesday, but it could have happened on any cold night this year or any of the past few. Periodically, a fire burns down one of the shacks in one of the settlements in Barcelona or its neighboring cities, and the spotlight momentarily shifts to a reality that has long been a concern in the Catalan capital. It's a problem that spreads throughout the region and is exacerbated when, as these days, the cold weather arrives.

The most recent snapshot of the phenomenon in the city of Barcelona is from October and shows 536 people—including 94 women and 97 minors—living among the 62 settlements and 48 occupied premises identified by the City Council. The city council—one of the few that maintains an up-to-date and public census on this phenomenon—doesn't specify the areas, but today it's easy to find settlements similar to Bac de Roda in different neighborhoods of the Catalan capital. Around the Sagrera station construction site alone, just a few meters from the shacks that burned down this Tuesday, there are five more scattered about. There's also a large one in the Zona Franca—awaiting eviction—and others on various vacant lots or buildings in Sant Martí, Sant Andreu, Nou Barris, and Sants-Montjuïc. However, the number of people living in settlements in the Catalan capital has decreased in recent years. According to Albert Sales, a researcher at the Metrópoli Institute, the decrease is due to a specific reason: the city has been growing. As industrial zones disappear and construction takes place on the vacant lots the city previously had, the physical space available for these settlements is becoming increasingly limited. A clear example is the area around Plaça de les Glòries, where most of the settlements have disappeared since the completion of the works. However, Salas warns that the reduction in the number of people living in settlements "doesn't mean there aren't other forms of substandard housing that are very difficult to quantify," such as people living in commercial premises, those occupying ground-floor spaces, or those living in severely deteriorated industrial buildings. Frequent evictions from these types of spaces are not a definitive solution either. "Experience tells us that people who are evicted look for other solutions," Salas points out. Often, in fact, they end up setting up another settlement—initially even more precarious—in a different location. This is what has happened in many cases with people evicted in recent months from settlements in Vallcarca, Ciutadella Park, Joan Miró Park, and the park near the Estació del Nord train station. Another unknown is how many of the people who lived in settlements in Barcelona have moved to other municipalities in the surrounding area. Since this falls under the jurisdiction of each city council, there is no general census, which makes calculations difficult. Two weeks before Arrels conducts its annual count of homeless people, the director, Beatriz Fernández, points out the "concern" about where those affected by the recent evictions from informal settlements (such as the one in Ciutadella Park) have gone. "The count will show the new locations of homeless people, but we don't know if they have gone to visible places," she says, noting that there are increasingly more homeless people in towns and cities surrounding the Catalan capital.

A law pending since 2022

When seeking a solution to the problem, Sales warns that it cannot come solely from social services, which are overwhelmed by the increasing number of people evicted from the housing market. Therefore, she emphasizes that the only way forward is through structural measures that improve access to housing. "We cannot keep sending pessimistic messages that this has no solution. Facilitating access to housing would benefit us all and reduce the burden on social services."

From Barcelona City Hall, on Tuesday, the fifth deputy mayor, Raquel Gil, stated that the council is contributing "the maximum possible resources," but warned that "the phenomenon exceeds the capacity of any single city." For this reason, she called on other institutions, primarily the Metropolitan Area, the Provincial Council, and the Catalan Government, for collaboration and resources to "provide more appropriate responses" to this situation. The Catalan Parliament has had the homelessness law in process since 2022. This initiative, promoted by sector organizations and Professor Antoni Milian, aims, among other measures, to require municipalities with more than 10,000 inhabitants to provide accommodation, laundries, showers, and storage facilities for the homeless. The initiative fell victim to political instability because, with the collapse of the previous legislature, it was reintroduced. Although the deadlines were expedited, the parliamentary groups extended the period for submitting amendments to the initial text. At this point, Beatriz Fernández—whose Arrels Fundació is one of the law's promoters, along with Cáritas and the Assís Foundation—attributes the blockage to disagreements over whether the resources should be provided by the municipalities or by the Generalitat (the Catalan government).