Mia was a 3-year-old girl in 2017 when she made the drawing below. "This is me, and this is here, my mommy." She made the portrait hours before the judicial procession arrived at her house in Barcelona to carry out the eviction. “But did you also have to draw your mom?” they told her. “Yes, mommy is here,” she replied, pointing to the blur in the lower right corner. That's how she saw her mother, homeless and in a maze with no way out.
Evictions of families with minors in their care have skyrocketed. Barcelona is the proof. An investigation denounces that these judicial releases have increased by 30% in the Catalan capital since the covid pandemic. Two out of every ten Catalan households with children allocate 40% of their income to paying for housing, which leaves those affected practically helpless in the face of “other basic needs”.
Years go by and the housing problem continues to be lacerating in Spain, and especially in Catalonia, where "almost one in ten minors lives in overcrowded homes." Catalonia shares this sad podium with the autonomous cities of Ceuta and Melilla, according to a report that has just been made public by the NGO Save the Children and that winks at a funny television series: Here there is no one who lives.
The reality that the work draws, however, has nothing comic about it. If the pandemic has already aggravated the crisis, the current situation may mean another twist. "In the current context of inflation, the increase in rents and mortgage payments due to the sudden increase in interest rates can return many families with sons and daughters to the most acute phases of residential exclusion."
Nothing that was not known. Even the UN, recalls Save the Children, has shown its "displeasure at the profound mismatch between housing needs and political responses." The outlook, the document concludes, is "terrible (...), the housing crisis in Spain has acquired an unbearable dimension." It is a lacerating and multifaceted problem, although one of its worst faces affects childhood.
Between 70% and 80% of evictions (almost 700,000 in Spain in the last 15 years) affect families with minors and adolescents. It is a "bulky and unusual figure in the EU context", says Save the Children, which has even more worrying data: two out of every ten children and adolescents live in unhealthy houses, with leaks, humidity, soil problems and foundations or rot in window frames. Children like Mia, three years old, hopeless.
