Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca or PAH – Platform for People Affected by Mortgages is a Spanish grassroots organization that takes direct action to stop evictions and campaigns for housing rights. PAH was set up in Barcelona in February 2009 and now has 150 branches across Spain. It was established in response to the 2008 financial crisis that triggered the bursting of the Spanish housing bubble.
Report by Antonia Utrera.
The following is the introduction to the video provided by PAH:
Blackstone, the world’s largest private equity fund dealing in real estate bought into Catalunya Bank, a Spanish financial institution that received 12 billion euros ($15.4 billion) of taxpayers’ money as a bail out. Blackstone buys non-performing loans at huge discounts but these loans are actually part-and-parcel of families, families that have lost their income due to job loss and are now about to be evicted from their homes. Everyday citizens receive neither aid nor solutions to social problems while banks and global financial billionaires profit from bailed out banks. For PAH activists this is abusive and unjust to all citizens. These homes belong to people not to financial profiteers. Foreclosures and evictions are rapidly escalating in Spain under Blackstone’s pressure, but the PAH has a message: this is a global fight for the right to housing, we won’t stop, and we will win.
Message of the Platform of Affected by the Mortgage (PAH) to Blackstone:
Spain is the country with more and more evicted people and one of the countries with the greatest number of empty houses in all of Europe.
