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Maricarmen's family, her lawyer, the Madrid Tenants' Union, and Urbagestión Desarrollo e Inversión SL, the company that owns the apartment from which she was evicted last Wednesday, have reached an agreement so that this 87-year-old woman with a 50% disability can return to her home.
Maricarmen was evicted from her home on September 23 by a court order, after the rental company Urbagestión bought her apartment in 2018. The company wanted to raise her rent above her pension, and after three attempts to evict her, they succeeded on the fourth.
The agreement reached now remains pending ratification by Maricarmen herself, according to sources from the Madrid City Council, which has acted as a mediator.
This woman was evicted from the home in the central Retiro neighborhood of Madrid where she had been living for the last 70 years for being unable to pay the rent increase requested by the company that bought her apartment.
She was paying 500 euros in rent (inherited from an old rental contract) and was now being asked for 1,650 euros, a figure she could not afford with her pension of 1,300 euros.
The company demanded the termination of the contract upon buying the apartment; Maricarmen sued and won in the first instance, but the Provincial Court of Madrid overturned that ruling and the Supreme Court ended up siding with the property owners, who are in the hands of the investment fund Urbagestión.
The case of this elderly woman, who has been admitted to a public hospital since being evicted from her lifelong home, became the straw that broke the camel's back regarding citizen discontent over the housing problem in Spain and unleashed a new political storm on the eve of the Parliament's debate on a legislative initiative regarding rents for which the socialist Government does not yet have sufficient support.
On Saturday, tens of thousands of people took to the streets in Spain in support of Maricarmen and to protest against the housing market, and several hundred remained camped out in Madrid's central Puerta del Sol, where a similar episode occurred in 2011 to demand an end to the two-party system in Spain and protest against the crisis.
The hundreds of protesters who have remained in this square since Saturday, organized by the Tenants' Union, hope that the Government led by Pedro Sánchez will approve tomorrow the 'Maricarmen' royal decree that must include, among other measures, indefinite rental contracts, although current negotiations do not seem to indicate that this will be the case.
To achieve the validation of this package of urgent measures in the Spanish Parliament, the Government must obtain the support of other political forces, something that it does not currently have secured, not even from its own coalition partner, Sumar, which does not rule out a "walkout" if the text does not go through "in its entirety"—with their demands—tomorrow.
The socialist branch of the Government stressed this morning that it was "striving" to approve an "ambitious and transversal" decree that includes a battery of urgent measures to defend the right to housing in ten areas.
Among these are protection against evictions, the prohibition of speculative purchases by vulture funds, the stabilization of rental contracts, regulation of seasonal rentals, value-added tax for tourist apartments, or tax incentives for tenants or for the purchase of a first home.
Although the text will not include the automatic renewal of rental contracts—as requested by the protesters and the Tenants' Union—so that landlords cannot make unregulated rent increases at the end of a contract.
[Publicidad]