Gloria Rodríguez was interviewed in 2011. On 31 October of the same year, the bank kicked him out of the house with his 5-year-old son and his 10-year-old daughter, because his former husband, having stopped paying the portion of his mortgage, was unable to pay the loan himself. The Gasteiztarra still has that day nailed in his head and when he passes in front of his house he enters to cry. “Dismissal was a spark, just the beginning of the struggle. The bank, even though it appropriated the house and sold it by auction, asked me for the EUR 22,000 that was missing to pay all the mortgage and that is what I had to pay all these years. It's a vicious circle: I've had to borrow from the Life Fund in order to be able to pay what you've asked me, and you've chained me for eight years, I've also had to endorse my mother's house and I knew that the moment I didn't pay I would do it against my mother. You carry this load on your back day after day, for life. And I'll tell you the truth: if I haven't thrown off the bridge, it's for my kids. They went to live with their former husband, when he was the cause of the debt! But we didn't get into my mother's house, and I've also had to pass my children's pension. Now I live in a room and am about to pay my debt to the bank because of what I have been paying for in my work, I have finally started to see a little light…”.

Unfortunately, similar cases became too frequent from 2008 onwards. The outbreak of the banking crisis caused a real massacre and to respond to that, the Platforms of Affected by the Mortgage were born, the first in Catalonia in 2009 and a year later in Euskal Herria. “We called it crisis, but it was not a crisis, but a massive fraud, the fraud of the banks. Many citizens were unemployed or in a precarious situation, and evictions were happening, with no time or capacity to react to the victims, because they were not informed of the possibility of legal aid, because they started eviction processes without room for negotiation… When they realized, many were on the streets and also still had economic debt with the bank. The platforms emerged from the anger and condemnation that all this had generated; the media were also far above it in those years,” explained Stop Desahucios Arturo Val del Olmo de Álava.

In its beginnings, evictions were
mainly suffered by neighbors of foreign origin, who were in a situation of greater vulnerability and lacked a network of protection around them. But soon protection networks were also insufficient and the victim's profile became more plural. In fact, the evictions led to more than one family member in line, as they joined each other in the mortgage bonds. “The profile of the woman with children has been one of those we have often seen – Ángel Larrea, a member of the Navarre platform, tells us – because the couple has separated and often the man has left, leaving the woman with all the debt”. Val del olmo and Larrea have known countless dramas, not only because people have been left homeless, but also because banks have continued to demand a huge amount of money, up to EUR 200,000. “People have debts that directly condemn social death.” Members of the platforms have seen people who have developed mental illness without being able to cope with this drama, frustrated relationships, suicides… “People have internalized layoffs as a personal failure, because we have been sold that everything is the fault of oneself.”

In the long shadow of the mortgage it has been joined in recent years by those who cannot afford too expensive rentals, and now a new profile is approaching the platforms: citizens living in a house no, in a room, in a precarious situation. “And the people who come to us are not all the people who suffer, but the tip of the iceberg. For shame, etc., there are not many who carry the whole process in silence and on their own,” added Larrea.

The members of the platforms are
clear that the citizens’ movements and the European Court’s resolutions have gradually gone, as pressure has increased, the banks have been polishing, receiving and negotiating with those affected, “but as far as possible they have only put resistance and obstacles, acted in an abusive and shameful manner, taking advantage of the superiority and power conferred on them by the system. They have moved when we have publicly denounced, but the citizens who have not come to us, those who have not had an echo and our support, have not had any ease in front of the banks,” explains Val del Olmo. For example, one of the great struggles is to pay off the outstanding debt of the entire mortgage in exchange for giving the house to the bank, a debt that the banks have forgiven the large builders, but not the families. Banks had 70% of mortgage debt to developers and builders and 30% to families or private individuals, but in 2015, for example, these developers were spared 32,000 euros of debt in exchange for homes or land unduly completed by banks, while families were not spared 7,000 million debt.

They say that it has happened in the same way with politicians: the pressure of the people (among them, the 1,500,000 firms presented in the Spanish Parliament) has led them to present laws and measures, “to whitewash their faces in society, to demand good practices from banks, to create a role of intermediaries between clients and banks… But they have been insufficient measures,” they say. And we have had another example: the bank could start a process of eviction in the Spanish State for the non-payment of the mortgage for one month, and the European Court had to say that this clause is unfair. What has the Spanish Government done? The company has limited the non-payment of three months to initiate a eviction process. And another reprimand of Europe: To leave the house for not paying three months is abusive. The authorities are reluctant to take the matter seriously.

The citizen platform has managed to get the platform out of numerous stones that have been cut off on the road. For example, along with the awareness of society, social mobilization and the above mentioned pressures have forced institutions and banks to take action. And they have managed to stop many layoffs, which the banks have already frequently paid off the debt in exchange for the house, which in many cases can be offered social housing to the victim… “We have solved specific cases and we celebrate each eviction as a victory, but eviction is exactly the same”. We have also been highlighted by emotional support for victims: “We help them eradicate the feeling of guilt and moral condemnation, and we believe that this has saved many illnesses and lives, because people come to be destroyed.” In addition, the platforms have nullified and socialised the behaviour of the banks: they have found that mortgage contracts were fraught with unfair terms (huge interest for late payment, minimum payment clause, possibility to claim full mortgage payment for late payment…). “It has been seen how great fraud and how serious violation of rights is everything. We’ve achieved things, but it’s still not enough.”

Excessive rents and impossible layoffs when
we interviewed Gloria Rodríguez in 2011, we gave the data that year: In Hego Euskal Herria, on average, there were almost eight evictions a day. To date, we still have worrying figures: last year there were 1,611 evictions in Hego Euskal Herria, of which more than four a day, and 70% for non-payment of rent. The average rental price in Gipuzkoa is €1,130 per month. The option of social renting is scarce, since the supply of social housing is much lower than the need and demand of these dwellings. In addition, Alokabide himself, the Basque public entity that channels social renting, evicts people, because it does not adapt the quota to the situation of the tenant, and for example, if it loses work, it cannot pay the fee that was initially fixed.

However, Val del olmo and Larrea have warned that the real data are much more serious, since those who have laid off in practice are not often presented to us as such, but not renewing the contract to the tenant means that he has often been fired, or that not all those who have negotiated a eviction with the bank are included in the statistics as evictions, although they are left homeless.

We have been stressed the importance of taking into account two other realities in order to have a global vision. On the one hand, this year dismissing a people does not mean that there are no more people fired: in all these years there have been many people fired, and there are many who have not turned this situation around, those who live behind the back of the debt, those who cannot rent a house (because it is too expensive or directly the owner does not rent them, because they will not be unstable)… “Most of the families who were dismissed at another fund.” On the other hand, now that many layoffs sit on the bench negotiating eviction and not on the street, there seems to be virtually no redundancies, but that is not the case. “Today they are more subtle layoffs, not as spectacular as before, but layoffs.”

Housing laws and new bill. Seed of hope?
The citizens' indefensibility to the banks is so great that the European Court has had to listen to Spain on more than one occasion. In the CAV, the Housing Act was recently approved with the votes against the PNV and pp. Among other measures, it provides for a fee to be charged to empty dwellings and for the administration to assume ownership of the dwelling that remains empty in extreme cases. “But in order for them to be implemented in practice, we will have to continue to put pressure on society, because there is no will on the part of politicians, they are so linked to economic power – Arturo Val del Olmo has criticised. For a start, let public institutions give the way to housing that is empty!”

In Navarre, the housing law was approved last year and was approved in 2013. Thus, it states that the Government of Navarre can take over the housing of the family that has been evicted for five years, precisely to avoid eviction; or it raises the possibility of imposing fines on the empty houses of the banks and the Government of Navarre is registering empty houses.

With regard to housing, the Government of Spain has the most powers, and so far only scattered measures have been adopted, without a consensus. By March, however, the government wants to launch a new Mortgage Law in response to a number of orders coming from Europe so that people do not leave so easily. The law will not include the obligation to offer an alternative hostel before it is evicted.

Congress also approved last September to discuss the ILP that the Mortgage Affected Platforms want to bring to Congress since 2011 and that has always been blocked. The main points of the bill are the cancellation of the debt contracted with the bank in exchange for housing and the retroactive nature of the measure, the impossibility of dismissing without offering a housing alternative, the fight against energy poverty, the promotion of public housing and the expansion of social housing. Indebtedness is a long-standing struggle and it would be a great achievement to do so legally, but if it were to do so it does not appear to be retroactive, as the majority of Congress has opposed it. “If everything we propose in the law were to go ahead, the layoffs would end, but not all parties dare to face the bench. In the meantime, we are making progress – says Val del Olmo – in removing unfair terms from contracts and in obtaining increasingly dignified solutions, but there are still many empty homes, many people with little social housing and a lot of need. We are optimistic because we believe that society will continue to mobilize and demand housing until housing is truly a fundamental right.”

Gloria Rodríguez's future doesn't have such a dark color. He says he's going to start living a little bit with debt cancellation with the bank. “I’ll have 300 euros more a month! I will be able to spend the month with a salary of EUR 900 and I will have EUR 300 more, not for me, but for my children. The shoes they once and for all want in order to buy them, something they need, some whim… That’s a luxury for me.”