Suicide of two sisters increases real estate pressure in Spain

The suicide of two sisters hours before being evicted this Monday from a flat in Barcelona (Spain) The failure to pay 9,000 euros once again shows the crudest face of pressure real estate in a city where, despite the initiatives taken, the average rental price reaches 1,200 euros per month.

The two women were 64 and 54 years old and stopped paying rent in 2021, just when their mother died after contracting Covid, which on Monday led the neighbourhood residents to believe that the pensioner was the only one with income in the house and with her death no one paid rent again.

The case was unknown to housing assistance NGOs, with whom they never made contact, but also to the people in the neighbourhood, as the sisters did not seem to have shared with anyone the situation that led them to end their own lives.

Núria, the eldest of the two, was the only one who left the house, to run errands and go shopping, and also the only one who had her own name for the neighbors, since the youngest hadto “years without going outside”, they assure.

“The news has taken us by surprise because we did not expect it or imagine that they were in that situation,” a neighbor told EFE.

The woman claimed that the two sisters “They didn’t have much neighborhood life” and I only knew the oldest one, with whom I sometimes had informal chats in the hallway and little else because “I barely left the house.”

An unknown case in the neighborhood

The municipal housing services did not make a vulnerability report because during their visits “They were never able to contact anyone” neither “the messages were answered” what they leave.

On Monday, City Council specialists went to provide psychological support to the residents. “I knew Núria. Although she hadn’t come for a while, she used to go shopping at the delicatessen once a month and we would chat. Her mother’s situation affected her, she always wore a mask and asked me to keep a certain distance,” Dolors, owner of a delicatessen just a few metres from the building, told EFE.

Unlike the neighbours of the building, who mostly heard the news in the early afternoon, she found out what had happened in the early hours of the morning, when she opened her business, although she did not know the identity of the sisters, nor that they were going to be evicted.

The delicatessen owner regretted that the price of rent in the Sant Andreu area has caused many of her clients to leave “have left the neighborhood.”

“This was a very quiet neighborhood and it was very nice, but now a 1,000 euro apartment here must be terrible”he concluded.

This is the second known case of suicide due to eviction in the Spanish region of Catalonia in 2024, an outcome that housing protection organisations have been well aware of for more than a decade.

Before these sisters, Alex, a 70-year-old resident of the city of Sabadell, took his own life after being evicted after thirty years living in the same house.

A group of tenants in this region reported: “Evictions are the crudest and most obvious way of attacking the lives of the most popular and precarious classes.”

The Barcelona Platform for People Affected by Mortgages called for a rally on Tuesday under the slogan: ‘‘They are not suicides, they are murders.’

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