The price of the rents in the south of Tenerife have skyrocketed. In municipalities like Arona it is almost impossible to access housing within more or less logical prices, so, unfortunately, live inside vehicles It has become almost commonplace. In this case, a couple has been living on Las Vistas beach for months. Your situation is extreme.
In the program Herrera at COPE Canarias, have shown the case of Lucía and her partner, who has been living on Las Vistas beach for nine months. They live in a tent because they cannot afford rent. “We live as God helps us,” she noted in Cope.
“We don’t have bathrooms because they close them at six in the afternoon, or you go to a bar and have a drink and go to the bathroom, or nothing. To shower we go to friends’ houses once a week,” she pointed out.
Lucía and her partner were evicted from the apartment where they had been living for 13 years: “We came to Las Vistas beach because we had no other place. There are many people living on the streets, many people from outside. In our situation I only know us. In Los Cristianos they are doing everything on vacation, the housing thing is the worst.”
Cars and vans are becoming an alternative to living in the south of Tenerife
By Nacho Martín. “I fear that we are going to get used to a van becoming the housing alternative for many people,” explains the social worker and coordinator of the Base 25 insular housing program, Alejandra Hernández, which develops Caritas and that finances the Tenerife Council. A program that tries to confront a growing problem that, perhaps, is becoming bigger than what the majority perceives, taking into account that a reality that has long been common in conversations is beginning to creep timidly into political discourses. of friends and families.
This program aims to advise and accompany families who are at risk of losing their sole and habitual home, whether due to foreclosure, evictions due to non-payment of rent or precarious evictions: when there is no documentation that proves ownership of the home. , something not too uncommon in the Canary Islands and in areas where the transmission of property has traditionally been informal, from parents to children and from grandparents to grandchildren.
And the reality is that their work increases and the solutions available to them, such as the search for alternative housing for families who are evicted, are increasingly more complicated. “It’s a titanic struggle,” she explains. “Before, from the highway down it was vacation housing, with the conditions it has, and, from the highway up, there was residential housing at affordable prices. This has changed. Now everything is on vacation,” emphasizes the coordinator, who warns that “this is going to get very ugly.” From the highway up, in the medians, there was social relief for the evictions or loss of rent that occurred from the highway down.
Although years ago, these situations affected people with certain characteristics and incomes, mainly the lowest, now there is a generalization of the phenomenon of difficulties in maintaining rental housing or finding an alternative. “With homes starting at 700 euros per month, the problem is no longer for people with low incomes, but also affects the middle classes. There are those who would have to allocate 80% of their income to rent,” he warns. But people with incomes of 1,500 or 1,600 euros must allocate 50% of it to live without sharing.
Therefore, it is no longer a problem of low-income people, but rather the real risk of losing their home has ceased to extend to middle incomes and is spreading like a plague that affects low and medium incomes, which, in addition , they face leonine conditions to have a house rented to them, with requirements that are increasingly difficult to meet.
