Maira is Venezuelan, she is 40 years old and since 2020 she has lived in Granadilla de Abona, Tenerife. She does it as a squatter in an apartment with no windows and a single door, the one she faces outside, which floods every time it rains and where the floor is made of stone. Hardly sunlight enters. The ceiling is full of moisture. The walls that separate her rooms were built by her and other relatives of hers. The place, in short, was abandoned before someone arrived. Now the bank has bought the property and has given Maira two years to find another home. And in her search to find a new home, all are disappointments.
“They don’t accept children, they don’t accept pets… Everything is too expensive. And they force you to have a minimum of two payslips, in addition to paying a three-month advance as well. The cheapest I have found are apartments for 600 euros and with one or two rooms. I am a kitchen assistant and I earn 1,200 euros. I can’t allocate half my salary just to rent”, laments Maira.
Prices in Granadilla de Abona are high. But they are much more so now than before. Between 2015 and 2020, the value of the square meter of rental housing in this southern town of Tenerife increased by 39.6%, according to the Rental price index published by the Ministry of Transport, Mobility and Urban Agenda each year. No other town in Spain has experienced such a rise.
Pending the famous Housing Law, announced more than a year ago but which has not yet been approved in the Cortes Generales, there is no way to regulate a market that continues to expel the local population and forcing many people to survive on the margins of severe poverty. The average income in Granadilla is 14,300 euros per year, one of the lowest in the Archipelago. Maira’s case is one of an endless list.
“My parents are adults who no longer work. My father receives aid every three months, a benefit of 1,200 euros. And with that he has helped me to do the market and so on, but sometimes it’s not enough. Whenever I can, I go to Cáritas to give me something, because with what I earn I don’t make it to the end of the month either, ”he says.
Maira believes that rents have gone up because of immigration. That there are landlords who take advantage and “live off what they rent” because they have inherited two or three houses and make a profit from it. She cares little for everything that may be behind her. She only sees that the cost of living has multiplied. “What you used to buy with 50 euros and lasted a month, now not even a week.”
In Granadilla de Abona, a municipality with close to 50,000 inhabitants, different variables come into play that have led the neighborhood to lead a classification that surely no community would want to do. In 20 years, the town has gained more than 30,000 new residents, becoming one of the regions with the highest population growth in the entire Canary Islands. Supply has not matched demand. And now the institutions, such as the town hall or the Canarian Housing Institute (ICAVI), are in tow.
“There is a lot of demand for housing. We live in an area where there is an airport nearby, which acts as a commuter town because many people from the north and south come to live since work is here, in hotels and restaurants. In El Médano, the most touristy part, there are many apartments dedicated to holiday tourism also…”, summarizes María de la O Gaspar, second deputy mayor of the Social, Equality, Health and Housing area in the Granadilla de Abona City Council.
In several academic publications This image of Granadilla is also offered: that of a region that, since the first impulses of tourism in the 70s, and the subsequent intensification of the process from 1995, undergoes very rapid residential development aimed at housing workers .
“This town functions as a dormitory area for the main island tourist space. Due to its proximity, it becomes the best housing alternative and this leads to a powerful price bubble. Other municipalities, such as those in which the tourist areas themselves are integrated, must have had high prices for a longer time and that is why the growth is not so important”, clarifies Juan Samuel García-Hernández, a researcher within the Department of Geography and History. from the University of La Laguna (ULL).
Social housing, on the other hand, has not arrived. Gaspar confesses that since 2011 not a single official protection apartment (VPO) has been built. There are businessmen who have started construction and then left it halfway, as is the case of the dilapidated building where Maira and her family live. According to him Canary Islands Housing PlanGranadilla de Abona is the third municipality, behind San Cristóbal de La Laguna and Santa Cruz de Tenerife, that registers the most VPO applicants, a total of 553, although it is probably an underestimated figure.
“The national government should pass a law so that rents do not rise so much. In Social Services, we see that vulnerable families are not getting the rent, which is what we need here. There are many buildings that were not finished at the time and that have now been occupied by these families, who have no other place to live”, adds the councilor of the consistory.
“There is hardly any housing supply in the Canary Islands anymore, and what little there is is inaccessible to the working class. A rent should not exceed 30% of the SMI, but nevertheless it is taking almost 80% of it. The situation is unsustainable, and even real estate agencies are beginning to offer garages without habitability certificates as homes”, points out Pilar Puyi, from the Tenerife Tenants Union.
Added to this is the penetration of tourist apartments, which at the moment there are about 1,100 establishments, most of them in El Médano, the enclave most visited by foreign travelers. There, Génesis, 28 years old and with a daughter, can only rent a room for just over 200 euros. With a salary of 1,000, she is not enough to become completely independent.
“It is impossible. And sometimes they tell me they don’t accept children. Right now I am saving to buy a house, but not in Spain, because here any rent costs a minimum of 600 euros. If I worked in a hotel, in addition, I would earn a little more. But I’m in a bar. I don’t get here with this salary”, says the young woman.
Irayda, 29, works in one of the stores in El Médano. She assures that the apartments that used to cost 350 euros a month are now worth at least 500. The justification for why rents have risen so much is found in tourism: “Landlords find it more profitable to rent in the short term than in the long term. That should be regulated, ”she demands. She also happens to be rents in the Islands rise more in the poorest municipalities than in the rich onesas shown by the figures of the Rental Housing Price Index (IPVA) of the National Institute of Statistics (INE).
For his part, Giovanni, 39, is a pizza maker and has lived in El Médano for a decade. He affirms that before he used to allocate 50% of his salary to the rent, and that is why he quickly looked for a partner, to offset the costs. In his opinion, everything has gone up a lot, like never before. And the Canaries have gone from being “a paradise” to something else. Curiously, Giovanni, despite being Italian, assures that he does not look for rentals run by foreigners. When asked why he doesn’t, he replies that most of these landlords just want to “make a profit”.
