The ironies of life, housing, a refuge from the headaches of work, bills or politics, became one of the greatest concerns of the Spaniards. CIS lists this as the third most sleep-inducing issue in the country, after the economy and health. This isn’t the first time this has happened. More than 90 years ago, at the dawn of the Second Republic, the rise in rental prices, exacerbated by other factors such as the disappearance of jobs and the acceleration of urban growth, had already turned housing into a major problem in Catalonia.

So much so that in the early 1930s, it left behind a fascinating event: a major rent strike. Some estimate that there were more than 100,000 blue-collar renters who stopped making monthly payments to their landlords during that period.

Rent strike? The concept may be striking, but the history of rent strikes sparked by tenants banding together to stop paying all or part of their rent is extensive. Geographically. And it’s temporary. Similar protests have been recorded in Chile, the United States, Mexico, Canada, Argentina… And they may date back more than a century. But in its history, the tenants’ strike that occurred in Barcelona’s modest neighborhoods and surrounding towns in 1931 stands out for its impact and immediacy.

Is it just history? No. Following the brutal rise in house prices that Spain has experienced in recent years, and in a market where supply and demand are increasingly unbalanced, the idea of ​​a “tenant strike” has once again resonated strongly. The Madrid Tenants Union has called for demonstrations for October over the price increase, the first step of “increased mobilization” with a strike on the horizon.

“If one tenant stops paying, that’s the problem. If ten thousand tenants organize to not pay, that’s the problem with the landlords. That’s what the rent strike is all about, it’s a tool we need to improve.” Collective. There are already those who question the legal protection of such a measure.

1931 souvenir. The row revives the memory of one of the biggest tenancy strikes in the country, which took place in the Catalan capital more than ninety years ago. To understand what happened then and how and why tens of thousands of families organized to control their landlords, we first need to understand the context marked by three main factors: urban growth, unemployment and inflation. All three can be better understood with the help of numbers.

A growing city… In the first decades of the 20th century, Barcelona experienced relentless growth. Its wealth, promises of employment, and the expectations and work created by the 1929 World’s Fair caused thousands of families to pack up their belongings and move to the city.

The graphs of the Barcelona City Council show remarkable growth throughout almost the entire 20th century. While approximately 614,000 people lived in the metropolitan area in 1900, by 1950 the number was already more than 1.5 million. Modest one-storey and 40 square meter buildings, known as the “Barates Cases”, were built to accommodate families especially from southern Spain and the interior of Catalonia.

…and with difficulties. The 1929 exhibition served as an economic and demographic engine, but when it ended Barcelona was shaken by what the City Council itself called a “cruel crisis”. “The decline in the city’s construction industry and the global economic crisis triggered unemployment and inflation,” he recalls.

The strike reached rapidly rising levels in the construction industry. And if we take into account the large number of wage-earning families living on rent, a large part of the wages earned by workers is covered by housing; There are those who claim that this figure increased to 40 million after the increase in prices in the 1920s. % – and considering that food prices also increased during that period, the context that led to the rent strike of 1931 will be better understood.

It did not matter that the measures taken in 1920 to control prices and the forced extension of contracts, the famous Bugallal decree, that the situation with rents became directly “unsustainable” after the 1929 Exhibition.

Union role. The rent strike of the early 1930s in Barcelona is not explained solely by unemployment and the pressure on the pockets of salaried tenants. There is another equally relevant key: organization. After a period of mobilization due to rising prices, unemployment, and evictions, on April 12, 1931 – the same day as the elections that would result in the proclamation of the Second Republic – the CNT established a commission focusing on rents.

Earlier, in the autumn of 1930, a rent boycott had begun in Barceloneta and soon spread to other working-class neighborhoods, but the role of CNT construction workers in encouraging the strike was crucial. Both through the Commission for Economic Defense (CDE) and the newspaper ‘Solidaridad Obrera’, which encouraged poor residents to stop paying their rent and advocated forgiveness of rents to unemployed workers.

Iñaki García, editor, highlighted several years ago Country The nature of the mobilization supported by the workers themselves in Barcelona in 1931: “[Fue] “It’s a leaderless protest, a very popular and creative movement that abandons a structure like the CNT construction union to move into neighborhoods.”

I don’t pay. On May 7, 1931, four groups of Cases Barates in Barcelona initiated a strike call. In addition to demands such as improved connections with the city center, health and education services, a significant 40 percent reduction in prices was requested. It didn’t take long for the startup to scale. Barcelona City Council estimates that tens of thousands of tenants took part in the mobilization in August of the same year.

“In 1931, more than 100,000 working-class families stopped paying the rent on their homes,” he recalled from Memory in 2023. “The neighborhoods of Cases Barates, especially those in what is now Marina del Prat Vermell, were the nerve centers of the protests.” Coinciding with the presentation of the comic book ‘Rebel·lió’, the Democratic Council of the City of Barcelona focused on what was happening in the Catalan metropolis exactly ninety years ago. Not all calculations agree. There are some who estimate that 45,000 to 100,000 tenants may be involved in the strike, while others put the support closer to 90,000 tenants.

Long… and with tails. Mobilization spread through coups even in 1932 to neighborhoods and towns such as Sants, El Clot or L’Hospitalet, and Santa Coloma de Gramenet. Moreover, the Barcelona City Council assures that the rent strike continued “intermittently” during the Second Republic. The neighborhoods of Ferre and Guàrdia, where leaders of the neighborhood movement such as Victoria Ruiz Rodríguez, nicknamed ‘La Benita’, managed to stop the evictions, stand out. All this despite the resounding pressure to which the Property Chamber and the Barcelona Housing Board often responded.

Chronicles of the period highlight evacuations in which Assault Guards threw the furniture of evacuated families out of windows or arrested people remaining on boats set up as prisons, and neighbors organized for their resettlement. empty houses. Despite strong pressures, the strike achieved some success through agreements and strengthening of neighborhood solidarity, which in some cases managed to stop evictions. It goes without saying that thousands of tenant families have saved months of rent.

Pictures | Logan Armstrong (Unsplash) and Barcelona City Council

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