In Argentina it is known as the “broom strike” because the image that has remained of it is that of some powerful black and white photos of working women in long skirts and aprons who in 1907 brandished their brooms to scare away the collectors who came. to the tenements to which they resided to claim the payments of abusive rents. It was one of the first international examples of tenant strikes and a mass protest over housing conditions.
It took place in Buenos Aires and other Argentine port cities, involving more than 30,000 workers, most of them Spanish and Italian immigrants who came to the country to work and stayed in the so-called conventillos, communal houses built around a cement patio in where latrines were sometimes shared by up to 70 people. Although the conditions of the houses were abysmal, the prices to access them tripled in three decades and it is estimated that by 1907 it was already much more expensive for a worker to pay rent in Buenos Aires than in Paris or London, even though his salary was much less.
Gervasio Muñoz, president of the National Federation of Tenants of Argentina, told this story in one of his interventions at the Social Housing Congress that was held at the beginning of June in Barcelona and drew parallels with some situations that now occur almost identical in the South American country.
In 1907, one of the conditions of the tenement owners was not to allow families with children to live, whom they considered more vulnerable and susceptible to non-payment, and now it is also a common condition, although illegal, when accessing A rental. “The law does not allow it, obviously it is prohibited to discriminate, but it is one of the most important characteristics of the real estate market, which is usually placed above any legislation. The anger and anger of the citizens are directed against the State, but whoever governs in the end is the market”, summarizes Muñoz, one of the representatives of the associations that has attended the congress.
During the pandemic, Muñoz explains, various associations from different Latin American countries came together to demand that their respective governments freeze rental prices and stop evictions and they succeeded, and that, he believes, marks a model to follow, the of international cooperation.
“It is a universal experience. Everyone, anywhere on the planet, is afraid of finding a letter from their landlord in the mailbox”, sums up Barbara Steenbergen, a German living in Belgium and head of the ITU office, the International Union of Tenants. “There is still a lot of difference between northern and southern Europe. In the south there are not yet many developed laws regarding social rent, like the ones we have had in some countries for decades,” she says.
Nor do the Unions have the same strength in Sweden or Germany as in Spain. In Sweden -says Jaime Palomera, founder of the Llogateres Union- the largest Tenants Union was born as a result of a strike in a block of flats in Stockholm, it is more than a century old and has more than half a million members. In Spain, the Tenants Union, which was born in 2016 (more than a hundred years behind northern Europe), has some 6,000 members.
The reasons for this disparity are many and diverse. In Spain, the model of home ownership, also sponsored by the State, was according to Palomera, the structural element that was most strongly supported since the Franco regime, from the sixties, until the 2008 crisis.
In addition, in countries like Sweden or Germany, it is very worthwhile to be a member, because the law recognizes associations as legal representatives, as is the case with labor unions, and any tenant benefits from negotiating their rent under the umbrella of a union. The new Housing Law ruled out the possibility of giving Spanish unions this power and recognizing them as parties to collective bargaining.
If in the north they have more robust legislation and more powerful numbers, in the south there is… effervescence? And pissed off "When the representatives of Germany, Belgium or Sweden come here they always want to attend our assemblies, the collective council sessions that are held in Madrid and Barcelona, and which are a very common model in cities like Los Angeles", because in other countries, the usual thing is to have individual counseling sessions when someone has a problem with their landlord, and not so much collective assemblies.
"From the outset there are many people who come asking for a lawyer and we tell them: come to the assembly, there will be five lawyers there and they are the ones who know the most," explains Palomera, who is no longer a spokesperson for the Llogateres Union but one of its founders, and now works as a researcher at IDRA, the Urban Research Institute of Barcelona.
“What happens when a person sits down and socializes their problem in front of 50 or 60 other people is that they become somewhat aware of the tenancy and of the working class and start shedding their middle-class coating. What defines you as an ideological middle class is that with your work, your training and your effort you guarantee a decent life, but if it turns out that when your rent goes up or your salary goes down, that shakes you, it is that deep down you are not As middle class as you thought. That's when you realize that if you don't organize yourself, you won't improve”.
The (not so) new tenant profile, as revealed by a recent IDRA study, is that of a highly educated person, between 35 and 50 years of age, who does not expect to be able to buy a home in the future or inherit, and therefore it is very likely that he will continue to be a tenant for the rest of his days. In Barcelona, the city where people rent the most in Spain, 65% of those who rent are over 65 years of age, which breaks with the idea that renting is a transitory stage and that buying a home has something of rite of entry into adulthood.
Although it is difficult for someone to define themselves as a tenant in the same way that they define themselves as a woman, as a Catalan, as a member of the LGTBQI collective or as a 'racialized' person, the representatives of the associations do believe that they are seeing a kind of creation of consciousness universal tenant. “This same week –says Palomera– there was a trial in Alcorcón because a couple did not want to assume a rent increase of more than 300 euros per month imposed by the Blackstone fund and more than 150 people came to support the fact that they are also Blackstone tenants” .
In Palomera's opinion, the two circumstances that generate the most awareness of the collective problem are this: sharing the same landlord, especially if it is a vulture fund, or living in a vertical block affected by a sale, as in the case of Casa Orsola. from Barcelona.
In the case of number 99 Calle Hospital de Barcelona, the Blackstone building that the City Council ended up buying, when the fund first threatened the residents with eviction in 2019, there were also protests by other Blackstone tenants before the headquarters of this conglomerate in different cities of Europe. After all, it makes sense to think that you have more things in common with another precarious tenant from any country than with a neighbor who is an owner or multi-tenant.
