Post date: Jun 08, 2012 11:15:44 AM
SEVILLA, SPAIN (REUTERS) - Squatting is rare in Spain but it has been on the rise as unemployment soars and the country's property crash in 2008 left thousands of buildings empty.
Families in Spain are increasingly becoming squatters as the financial crisis worsens making many unable to pay their rent.
Some residents who have occupied an empty block in Seville, in southern Spain, are not your typical squatters however.
Carmen, 56, has two adult children and is painting her new living room a shocking pink with the care of a new homeowner.
She broke into the three-bedroom flat a few weeks ago.
Here she looks after her mother Angeles, a bed-ridden 88-year-old, and survives on just over 1,000 euros a month from her work as a temporary office assistant.
"When I saw myself ending up on the streets, I thought, how could it have got to this? It can happen to anyone, anyone. One minute you have a home and suddenly you end up on the street. It's really, really unbelievable," Carmen said.
"I want to stay here and I'm going to fight like everyone else to stay here and we want to pay to stay here. We don't want them to give us the homes for free, but they should put the homes at reasonable prices that are within our means."
Carmen and her family have joined 32 other families who occupied the building a few weeks ago.
They are part of the protest movement Los Indignados, who argue squatting is preferable to living on the streets and is a way to show the authorities the effects of Spain's crisis on ordinary people.
When Spain's decade long housing bubble burst in 2008, many people had their homes repossessed and developers found it difficult to sell new homes.
At the same time Spain has the highest unemployment rate in the European Union with almost a quarter of the population out of work, making squatting a reasonable conclusion.
Toni, 44, occupied another flat to ensure her 13-year-old son did not become homeless.
"I started to think that any day I could be kicked out of my home. So before ending up on the street with my child I started to look for a solution. Perhaps I could live on the street by myself but I couldn't let my son live on the street. So I had to take this step, sooner or later, I had to do it. So I took this opportunity and thought let's hope to God it works out," said Toni.
Like many other Spaniards, 44-year-old Toni is angry at the government for cutting education and health spending while spending billions of euros to rescue banks saddled with bad debt from the real estate crash.
Not used to breaking the law, when the families first arrived they sat in the dark for three days, blinds drawn, worried they would be evicted.
When no one came, they opened the shutters and started using the display flat as a communal kitchen because it was the only one with a stove and refrigerator.
Taking turns, they have mounted a 24-hour watch to ensure they are not evicted or robbed.
"We did not just want to have a home but to do a political act to show how the crisis is affecting families, ordinary citizens that have been paying their rents and mortgages when they had work and were able to do so. But now is not possible (to pay)," says unemployed squatter Irma Blanco, 35, the group's spokeswoman.
Just a short walk from the centre of the capital of the Andalucia region, the building was finished three years ago and has double glazing and new wooden floors but the developer was not able to sell the apartments.
There are an estimated one million empty homes in Spain.
The group is supported by Los Indignados, the movement famous for its giant street protests and that has now has formed neighbourhood assemblies all over Spain to support actions such as blocking court-ordered evictions of mortgage defaulters.
"We also wanted to return to certain values that humanize us and return to a sense of community, so we don't close doors on others and where people care about what happens to the person next door, and understand that one person's problems are everyone's problems, you have to resolve them together," Blanco said.
On Sunday (June 04) the police submitted the legal order from the owner to vacate the premises.
Reuters was not able to reach the building's owner, Maexpa, for a comment.
A spokeswoman for Ibercaja, the savings bank that funded the development said it was not planning to take any action.
She said Maexpa had stopped paying its loan for the building project but that Ibercaja has not started legal proceedings.
For the residents, living in the flats is better than life on the streets but still not easy.
The electricity supply was cut off recently even though the squatters wanted to pay like regular customers.