The former owner of Casa Orsola accuses the city council of "paying privileged rents" with public money.

BarcelonaFinal episode of the series about Casa Orsola in Barcelona. This week, the City Council and Habitat 3 officially purchased the property for €9.2 million, following pressure from residents to halt construction.Two attempts to evict one of the blog's neighbors at the beginning of the year. Citizen mobilization forced the city council to find a solution to the conflict, which was finally resolved with the multi-million-dollar purchase of apartments that it will now manage "under social and affordable housing criteria" together with the social organization. Now the former owner of the building, Albert Ollé, wanted to put an end to his story with a letter in which he harshly attacked the municipal government—the current and the previous one—and defended the city's property owners.

Ollé says that the city council has allocated "public money to pay privileged rents for residents who are not even remotely vulnerable while thousands of Barcelona residents continue without the option of affordable housing," and maintains that the properties (now in the hands of the City Council) have become "a manual for orchestrated manipulation over the years." In fact, he criticized Ada Colau's government for "only achieving 65 subsidized apartments" in two terms and "private construction has come to a standstill." "The image is obscene: banners proclaiming the 'right to housing' hanging from a building supported by everyone's taxes to protect the incomes of the privileged," Ollé complains.

The former owner of Casa Orsola also believes that the city's landlords face "regulatory stifling and legal uncertainty" that force them to sell "rather than risk losing everything." Therefore, he has come out in defense of all the people who rent apartments in the city and has asked the City Council to provide them with more tools: "We must understand this clearly: the landlord is not the guilty party, but the essential solution for a healthy market. Penalizing them only impoverishes the available stock and scares away the investment we so desperately need." Ollé calls for greater security for landlords, incentives, and 24-hour express evictions in the city.

"Rescue Barcelona from demagoguery"

Ollé's letter concludes with a few words for the city's mayor, Jaume Collboni, urging him to reactivate new construction, free up land, and defend private property to "rescue Barcelona from demagoguery and restore the dignity it deserves." On Wednesday, the mayor reviewed the government's performance to date and praised the work done in areas such as housing, with the declaration of the city as a stressed area, the mobilization of land to try to build 1,000 public housing units each year, and the commitment to allowing the city to be declared a tourist destination in November 2008.