July 18, 2012
by Jonathan Blitzer
By 7:30 a.m., two hours before the authorities are due to arrive to enforce the foreclosure, some 15 people are already assembled to stop it. A family of five mingles with friends and local activists in front of No. 20 Calle de Dolores Armengot, in the working-class neighborhood of Carabanchel.
A portly blond woman in a gray zip-up hoodie and red capri pants greets familiar faces as she darts around the building making anxious preparations. Her name is Marisol; she is the morning’s reluctant protagonist.
A 37-year old Ecuadorian immigrant and mother of five, she took out a mortgage on a small apartment in the building in 2007. At the time, she and her partner were making 2,400 euros a month. Now she is single, jobless and living on roughly 350 euros a month in state aid. She can’t make her mortgage payments. Her only chance of staving off eviction is to convince the bank — the recently bailed-out mortgage giant Bankia — to grant her an alquiler social, a rent agreement adjusted to her withered income.
Throughout Spain, in hard-scrabble neighborhoods like Carabanchel, two narratives of the housing crisis are coming to a head. Hardened skeptics say Marisol should be left to her own fate, but by that logic the bank executing this foreclosure would have already gone belly-up. Bankia is getting help from the government, even while many suffering Spanish homeowners like Marisol are not.
Between 2007 and early 2011, approximately 300,000 foreclosures were set in motion, according to housing advocates [pdf]. Today, at the nadir of the recession, the situation is even worse.
The government could provide some relief by pressuring banks now reliant on state aid to renegotiate mortgage contracts inked during the years of plenty. But for now many banks are left to their own devices, which effectively absolves them of their heedlessness during the boom years.
Back then, piloted by political appointees on their boards, regional savings banks like Bankia sold mortgages to fatten their already bloated real estate portfolios all with the acquiescence of regional governments, which welcomed the spikes in development projects.
A sign taped to Marisol’s window captures the prevailing sense of injustice: “They Bail Out Bankia And Evict People.” Bankia got its out. Local activists are now desperately helping Marisol try to find one of her own.
She met them when she went to one of their Thursday gatherings seeking advice. Nationwide protests over austerity last May gave rise to community networks trying to stem the local hurt. The Asamblea Popular de Carabanchel, as this local assembly is called, is known for its spirited core of activists and close-knit sense of community.
As we talk, Marisol points to an activist named Tatyana, who circles around the block with Marisol’s six-month-old infant asleep in her arms. Ten local schoolteachers have offered their names as guarantors for the rent arrangement Marisol hopes to secure with the help of a lawyer supplied by the housing advocacy group Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca.
At 8:15 a.m. another neighbor-activist shows up with two megaphones. He gives one to a bespectacled companion standing in front of Marisol’s building, while he walks to the street corner and starts announcing the situation to neighbors and passersby. The crowd is swelling. It chants: “Neighbors, get up; they are evicting on your doorstep.”
At 9:35 a.m., the appointed hour, two representatives from the courts and one from the bank — known collectively as the comisión judicial — arrive to execute the foreclosure under the escort of some 20 policemen. The crowd, about 40-people strong, is blocking the entry. The protesters remain peaceable but have not budged from the doorstep. They blow horns and shout unceasingly.
It soon becomes clear that the three representatives have no intention of approaching the building.
The bank hadn’t expected such a spectacle. The person it sent lacks the authority to negotiate analquiler social. While she calls her superiors, the two court representatives and Marisol’s lawyer pace expectantly along the side street, trying to hammer out a deal.
At around 10:30 a.m., they call Marisol over. The negotiations are inconclusive. The bank will return in two weeks, presumably better prepared.
Source: The New York Times
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