The families of Buenavista del Norte affected by the evictions from the private development of Roycasa in Las Canteras that was acquired by a vulture fund, gathered yesterday in front of the headquarters of the Presidency of the Government of the Canary Islands, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife, to present your demands regarding housing.
They did so supported by the Vientos de Daute association, which claimed as “an opportunity for the region” to acquire these officially protected properties at a price of decent social rents. “It is a socially and economically depressed region and needs social housing that provides relief for families with low salaries,” declared Alexander Velázquez, lawyer and member of the association.
Those affected delivered and registered a letter addressed to the President of the Government of the Canary Islands, Fernando Clavijo and to the Minister of Public Works, Housing and Mobility, Pablo Rodríguez, in which they remind him that these are public housing from a promotion that at the time received money from the Housing Department and now they have been bought by a vulture fund “whose ultimate goal is to speculate and expel their neighbors from the neighborhood.”
All of this, they add, in the face of the “outrageous inaction” of public administrations despite the fact that the deficient housing stock in the Archipelago means that there are 25,159 people registered as seeking public housing and only 112 families have managed to be assigned one in the period between the years 2000 and 2022. Added to this situation are the 211,000 unoccupied apartments “that if they were put on the market could respond to a growing demand,” they point out in the letter.
In this sense, they ask the Housing Minister to make a new order of preference for protected housing in which Buenavista del Norte is included “urgently.”
The procedure in this case is full of irregularities. One of them is that the building is classified as a property because the development was delivered unfinished and therefore does not have a certificate of habitability. Currently, only five of the affected families are still there since the rest have been housed in other municipalities or with relatives.
“We do not understand that there has not even been a willingness to negotiate on the part of the public administrations, but rather to fold their arms and hand over the promotion to a vulture fund that is going to speculate on housing,” declared Velázquez.
The lawyer maintained that the regional government “is hiding behind saying that it cannot acquire this type of housing when in El Rosario it has done so under very similar conditions.” For this reason, he considered that “there is a lack of political will to find a solution since there is a broad legal framework that protects the demands we are making, we just need someone to interpret it and give it the necessary interest,” he stressed.
