Hey y'all. I'm an alt-acc of a user over here, made it for opsec purposes to post specific news regarding my home region, i.e. Spain.
Maybe this isn't news worthy to everyone, but I wanted to post regardless because it's important to me (Spanish): Rent prices in my hometown rise to 8th highest in Spain
With an interannual rise of 13%, of which 6 percent points over the past three months, the prices now stand above 20€/m² for the first time ever. This is the town I've been born in, raised, and lived until I was 23, and now that I'm back in Spain after some years abroad I've been outpriced from the town where I grew, as have been many of my friends. 20€/m² may not sound like a lot to fellow USian comrades, but salaries in Spain aren't what they are over there. An average salary may be something like 1600-1800€ a month for a full time job, so a very modest 60m² flat would set you back monthly 1200€ of that.
I wanted to share my pain, my family and some of my friends are here, and while I didn't necessarily plan to live here all my life (and I don't live here now, partially because of the prices), it absolutely fucking sucks knowing that I won't be able to have a life here the same way my parents have had. When someone tells me about dangerous communism and forcible relocations during the literal direst times in modern history, I can't help but feel like people are absolutely blind to the millions who are economically forced to relocate in capitalism during times of peace and abundance. But I guess, as always, economic violence doesn't fucking count because I could technically choose to shove myself into a sardine-can apartment with 2 strangers while still dropping 1/3 of my income monthly to make the landlord richer. I have to live more than an hour away and buy a car and pollute the air and empty my wallet in the process to be able to see my fucking family. At least I can listen to socialist podcasts on the way telling me how monthly rent was 3% of the average income in the Soviet Union 55 years ago lmfao
No struggle to speak of, locally. There have been some sizeable protests in all of Spain because of rent prices, but the socdem government will obviously do absolutely nothing about it. My org calls for a rent strike, let's just say my share of optimism is purely revolutionary hahaha. Young libs call mostly for social housing and rent, but that's absolutely a half measure which socdems focus on since it's an easy key-dangling to do to build 1000 flats and to say "look we did something, but there's nothing more we can do", hence it being peddled in mass media.
I do think young people are truly worried about it, but they won't support rent strike because there's been super strong anti-occupy propaganda on TV for the past 10 years. For reference, home-alarm companies rose their profits by over 500% over the past years because of the manufactured fear against squatters. It's crazy, they've been dedicating half hour of prime time during news for years talking about squatters, lying using the "cops can't legally kick squatters out of your house" myth which half of the country believes, etc. There's even a well-known Nazi group called "Desokupa" which is praised in media as an unofficial service for freeing poor landlords from evil squatters (i.e. literal physical violence against the materially poorest people). Ridiculously enough, this Nazi group was TEACHING COPS HOW TO USE GUNS some months ago. If you wrote this in a move script about corrupt fascist police people would say it's not believable.