Property-owning friars: Church evicts elderly to profit

Mariano Ordaz, a 67-year-old pensioner, was finally evicted last Thursday from the home where he had lived all his life in the Embajadores neighbourhood, in Madrid’s central district, when the fifth eviction order was carried out. On four previous occasions, pressure from local residents had managed to halt the process; this time it was not possible.

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From early in the morning, a large deployment of National Police cordoned off the area with up to eight vans and four patrol cars. The spokesperson for the Madrid Tenants’ Union, Carolina Vilariño, summed it up bluntly: far too many officers to throw a pensioner out of his home.

Ordaz now does not know what he is going to do. He thinks he will be able to go to a shelter for a few weeks and a friend has offered him a room for around 400 euros. He has no other housing option.

A landlord with vows of poverty and more than 300 flats

The owner of the building is the Venerable Third Order of Saint Francis of Assisi (VOT), a religious institution which, according to its critics, manages its assets according to a logic closer to that of an investment fund than to that of a religious congregation. The order owns more than 300 flats in central Madrid alone.

Several tenants in VOT properties point to its peculiarities as a landlord: they were offered a rent slightly below market price in exchange for refurbishing the flat themselves, because the properties were in a very poor state. Maintenance of the communal areas was a mess: leaks, broken windows, lights that did not work, pipes full of rust.

Ordaz’s story fits that pattern. After the pandemic, he lost his job and could not afford the rent increases. When he was told he had to pay 800 euros a month plus an accumulated debt of 15,000 euros, it was clear to him it was impossible. He still had to eat and pay for electricity and water.

The order justifies the eviction by claiming that work is needed because of the deterioration of the building. But the Tenants’ Union takes the opposite view: it says the “deplorable state” of the property is due to the owners’ own lack of maintenance, and that they have used that deterioration as a pretext to carry out the eviction and empty the building.

The organisation argues that the Franciscan order is not a small landlord, but a body with vast, tax-exempt property holdings which also manages healthcare centres such as the VOT San Francisco de Asís Hospital.

No moratorium and the door open to thousands of evictions

Mariano’s case cannot be understood without the political context surrounding it. The anti-eviction moratorium lapsed in Congress on 26 February after right-wing parties voted against it. With its repeal, the Tenants’ Union warns that people like Mariano have lost one of the few tools they had to defend themselves.

The Union warns that this case opens the door to a wave of up to 60,000 evictions of vulnerable families across the country. Tenants’ organisations hold several tiers of government responsible: the Government Delegation, the central government for failing to repeal the Gag Law, the Housing Minister, the Community of Madrid and Madrid City Council.

A demonstration has been called in Madrid on 24 May under the slogan “Housing is costing us our lives. Let’s bring prices down”, starting from Atocha at 12:00.

Madrid, the most strained housing market in Spain

Mariano’s eviction is not an isolated case; according to neighbourhood organisations, it is a symptom of a broken market. The rental market has seen 44 consecutive months of year-on-year increases, a streak that began in March 2022. Since then, prices have soared by 33%, pushing more and more families out of the market.

In Madrid, the central district has seen a 21% rise in rents in just one year, with prices rarely falling below 2,000 euros a month. That a religious order with hundreds of flats in that same city centre chooses to raise rents until they become unaffordable, and then turns to the courts to carry out evictions, gives the case a significance that goes far beyond a dispute between landlord and tenant.

The rise in rents and house prices is pushing many Spaniards out of the housing market, despite the recent economic upswing. Wages have not grown at the same pace and, according to analysts, the boom in tourism and population growth in the cities, driven by immigration, have tightened supply even further.