At least 39 eviction orders weigh on 58 public housing flats illegally occupied since 2017 in six buildings in the La Mina neighborhood, in Sant Adrià de Besòs. The evictions are scheduled to begin on June 8 and will continue on Thursdays until December, with days on which three or four evictions have been set at once.
The homes were built to rehouse neighbors from the block on Venus Street, condemned to demolition. That demolition was planned for 2028, but the delay in the relocations left the properties empty for almost a decade, a situation that led to the occupation of all the homes between an afternoon and a night in July 2017.
Protest before the City Council for the imminent evictions
This Monday, residents of the occupied flats gathered before the town hall of Sant Adrià to demand a housing solution given the imminence of the evictions. The notices of the judicial orders have arrived at the homes in recent months.
"The eviction is scheduled for December 10" - Jéssica Blázquez
"The flats were empty for seven years and many families entered because we needed a roof to live" - Jéssica Blázquez
El Sindicat d"Habitatge de la Verneda i el Besòs accompanies the occupants. From this collective, the change in criteria regarding the possibility of regularizing some cases through social rents is questioned.
"There were neighbors who submitted the documentation for social housing, why this change of criteria? They needed the rent one, two or three years ago, and also now" - Víctor, Sindicat del Besòs
Homes reserved for the rehousing of the Venus block
The municipal government maintains that the entirety of the housing in these blocks must be allocated to the rehousing of residents from the Venus block. In parallel, so far 55 of the 244 homes on Venus street have been boarded up, after agreements signed by families with the administrations to abandon them.
Those who accept a change of housing receive homes acquired by the administrations in La Mina. At the same time, the people who occupy these flats cannot access neither the homes taken in 2017 nor to others awarded to applicants for official protection housing, despite having been built about 20 years ago.
From the environment of the occupants it is maintained that the Consorci de la Mina came to relocate several families who could regularize their situation with social rents. They also reject that the delay in the rehousing of Venus responds to the massive occupation of 2017.
"The residents of Venus had to pay to relocate and, when the blocks are occupied, they were no longer intended for them" - Víctor, Sindicat del Besòs
Judicial resolutions and a conflict entrenched since 2017
The judicial resolutions derive from complaints filed years ago by the Consorci de la Mina, in which the Generalitat, the city councils of Barcelona and Sant Adrià, and the Diputació participate. The Courts of Badalona have issued at least those 39 expulsion orders, according to data from the Departament de Drets Socials and the City Council of Sant Adrià.
All occupied flats were raided between an afternoon and a night in July 2017. A month later, the Mossos d'Esquadra dismantled a plot to entrust the surveillance of 144 empty flats in La Mina to the leader of a family with arrests and convictions for controlling part of the drug trafficking in the neighborhood.
The episode also had a subsequent judicial derivative. In 2020, the Audiencia de Barcelona condemned for malfeasance the former deputy mayor of the PSC of Sant Adrià Juan Carlos Ramos for delivering envelopes with money to Ángel Amaya, known as Tío Cristina and patriarch of Los Manolos.
During these years, those affected from the Venus block avoided an open clash over these disputed properties. They did not claim them as their own nor publicly supported the occupants. Now, with the eviction schedule already set, the conflict enters a new phase in La Mina, with dozens of families pending an administrative or judicial response before the evictions begin.