Luis (not his real name) has been looking for a room for eight months. He lives in Vitoria and his landlord wants to sell the five flats he rents. “He says he’s retired and he’s sending letters to all the tenants,” she says. “For example, a couple also lives in my apartment. “I’ve been calling since February and it’s crazy: there’s a shortage of rooms.”
Collecting his Basque Income Guarantee Income and trying to make a replacement, Luis, desperate, placed an ad on a posting portal. “I’m looking for a standard room”, said. Yours isn’t the only one. Similar requests are also proliferating on the internet. There are homes that do not allow tenants to register, a practice that gives rise to the opposite market: rooms or apartments are allowed only for registration, but there is no right to live.
“I have encountered many things like this,” says Luis. “They don’t cut corners. You’re interested in a room and they tell you: This is a contract made without being lived. They register you, you pay 300 euros, you pretend to live there and make a living. It is a fictitious registration to access help. Because the other option is a room without registration. In social services They told me there was a housing problem. He said that if they evacuated me, they could make a fake registration for me and give me a place in a shelter.
private registration
The law requires everyone living in Spain to register in their municipality’s register. He has also designed a number of projects since 2015. “exceptions” including the possibility of registering a shanty, a caravan, a cave or even the complete absence of a roof. This requires the intervention of the social services of the city council, which confirms that the person lives there.
Things get complicated when it comes to rooms. Immigrant associations, domestic workers, social movements and housing rights advocates have been condemning this in various parts of the country for some time.
In the Valencian Community, organizations such as Valencia Acull, such as El Periódico de España, condemn this, reports the newspaper ‘Levante-EMV’ published by Prensa Ibérica. Social services of different municipalities “refuse” registration to people who “have a rented room, reside in substandard housing or slum apartment.” The same media also reported that it was necessary for a woman to do this. 200 euro extra per month to register for a room. In 2020, Catalan social organizations collected on a map the municipalities that recorded the most complaints due to lack of registration without a fixed address.
“Leases without registration rights are very common in the Basque Country. This is because those rented under contract do not have the right to sublease and If more than one person is registered, the owner can find out“Germán García from the refugee aid platform Ongi Etorri Errefuxiatuak explains.” Property owners who do not register for fear of treasury. They bring six people in, charge black people, and nothing comes of it because they’re not registered. So the opposite situation arises: they let you register, but they don’t let you live. You can pay 200 euros per month for this right. There are also those who charge more for the room they have the right to register for. Unfair 300 euro; with the right 400. “This affects foreigners, not just foreigners.”
Access to services
Onti Etorri Errefuxiatuak is one of the associations that signed the campaign “I am your neighbor, but I cannot exist without registration”In this way they asked Basque municipal councils to guarantee the registration of people who live in a municipality but cannot prove it.
“The registry is the gateway to many rights. “Without registration, access to healthcare, basic education for minors, social benefits, residence permits, voting… are difficult,” they write. “For many people, this is impossible to achieve. There are people who live in an apartment out of solidarity, kinship or friendship, but cannot register for various reasons and have to pay a ‘registration fee’ in another house. Or working from home within the company and their employers do not give them the right to register.
They explain that municipal councils have an obligation to register people living on the streets. What these organizations are asking is: General windows to which room cases are directed open. “If social services are aware that a person is living in a room but do not allow him to register, they should register him with a social office,” continues García, who is not a fan of forcing the landlord to register people. “It happens to domestic workers, too. If the City Council comes and finds that they are living in a house that they do not want to register, They can be fired the next day.
Regarding the current situation, he says: “The situation may be like this Those who live on the street have a record, those who live at home do not. They both have rights. The nonsense is that living in an apartment does not have this. Let’s create an administrative mechanism that will allow people who live in apartment buildings and cannot prove it to register so that they do not harm other people.
Can your landlord deny this to you?
Tenants’ Union spokeswoman Valeria Racu says payment by registration is a reality in Madrid: “We see this many times in Wallapop and Milanuncios. Same thing Immigration or Social Security dating market. The registration barrier is experienced by non-EU immigrants who, due to the Immigration Act, are required to register to normalize their situation. Moreover “Young people and people with fewer resources are finding that renting rooms on sham contracts is their only option for accessing housing.”
However, he adds: Landlord cannot refuse tenant registration. According to the information provided by the Madrid City Council, if there is a person living in a house but not included in the rental agreement, You only need permission from the contract owner (not the owner); If the owner is not registered, one of the registered adults must declare that he or she lives there.
“Registration is a right that opens the door to other rights and is not dependent on the will of the homeowner. It happens because we normalize housing as a market good and it is used as extra work. If it happens, we would encourage people to organize into housing associations and Report it because it’s illegal.”Raju ditch.