In today’s Barcelona,where rents are skyrocketing, living in the city seems increasingly impossible and unaffordable. Will there be a solution to the rent problem, or will we all have to move out of the city? History repeats itself, and this is not the first time that Barcelona has gone through this situation. At the beginning of the 20th century, the people of Barcelona were also suffering from abusive prices that prevented them from living a quiet life and decided to cut their losses by going on strike to avoid paying rents that did not correspond to them.
In 1929 Barcelona lived its great moment of glory. The second Universal Exposition definitively put the city on the international map, allowing it to show its visitors the great renovation works carried out in the Expo site in Plaza España and Montjuic, the construction of the first subway, the progress of the Eixample and the wonders of Modernism.
But this progress had a dark undertone. The expo’s decor was built with thousands of migrant hands who had come (mostly from the Andalusian countryside) to work as laborers for the event. In just 20 years, the city doubled its population, and housing, which was scarce, began to shoot up in price due to high demand.
In addition, after the Expo bubble, unemployment and hunger skyrocketed, leaving workers in an unaffordable situation. After World War I, Europe had launched a plan for social housing that the Barcelona bourgeoisie was responsible for rejecting. All these elements created a perfect storm that in 1931, two years after the Expo, provoked a rent strike in the city.
The year in which the people of Barcelona stopped paying
The story has now been recovered by the comic Rebel-lió, La Vaga dels Lloguers del 1931 (Francisco Sánchez/Anapurna, Barcelona Llibres), which explains how in 1931 with the crisis skyrocketing, the CNT construction union, located at number 26 Mercaders street, promoted a rent strike that was harshly repressed by the Government of the Republic.
The strike arose after the Cambra de la Propietat i l’Ajuntament ignored the demonstrations that were repeated in the neighborhoods asking for a reduction in rent prices. The strikers demanded a 40% reduction in rents, and even the suspension of rents for those without income.
The strike had a special impact on the precarious housing neighborhoods built in haste to accommodate these waves of migrants, the so-called “cheap houses” such as those of Can Peguera or Bon Pastor. Here, the neighbors organized resistance networks and opposed evictions, bringing up the furniture that the police left in the street and creating economic funds to help the evicted.
Bloody end to the strike
The Cambra de Propietat appealed to the Central Government, which in August 1931 sent the Guardia de Asalto to the city. From then on, the furniture was not taken down, but thrown out of the window, and the demonstrators, who put pregnant women in front of them to avoid violence, saw how the Madrid storm troopers charged in the same way, killing six strikers in the confrontations.
The repression finally put an end to the strike. The entire CNT Economic Defense Committee that had initiated the protests was jailed and the Cambra considered their conflict won. However, the Committee calculated that in the period of the strike it had saved some 50 million pesetas in rents.
Protests against abusive rents continued over the years, but 1931 was the last year in which the people of Barcelona stood up to housing abuses.
Now, with the new mobilizations against the abusive price of rents, the rent strike is once again being used as a tool to force the government to take measures against housing prices. It remains to be seen whether, almost 100 years later, the strike will come to fruition again.