Badalona police dismantle 18 illegal sublet units in warehouse

18 illegal 15m² units rented for 450 euros in a Badalona warehouse

Samira signed a lease and pays 600 euros a month to sleep with her partner and baby in an unventilated space. She is one of 18 illegal units dismantled by the Urban Guard in under 48 hours at a commercial warehouse in Badalona, an old carpentry shop where 18 15-square-meter units were built without a building permit. The owner charged an average of 450 euros per unit, where between 25 and 30 people lived, including families with babies. The renovations took place this summer: in some cubicles, the armored doors were still in place.

What the police found inside the warehouse

The mayor, Xavier García Albiol, dismissed the shoddy work. According to his account, the owner spent hundreds of thousands of euros on "very sophisticated" renovations to convert a commercial space and warehouse into what he himself called zulos. There was no building permit, and tenants had been inside for only a few months. The operation began with an anonymous tip from a neighbor, who acted despite antiestéticar of the consequences: "we are talking about a situation we discovered just 48 hours ago," the mayor admitted. Albiol blamed the owner and the company marketing the units, summarizing his view in one sentence: hiring a marketing firm to sell 15m² zulos is "the height of audacity."

The 10 to 12 million euro fine: who pays and when

The city council announced disciplinary proceedings for serious offenses and a proposed fine of between 10 and 12 million euros for the owner, now identified, and also referred the case to the Generalitat. "The economic impact will be significant," said Albiol, because the activity "posed a risk to different people." It is worth doing the math. Eighteen units at an average of 450 euros amount to about 8,100 euros per month, just under 100,000 a year. The proposed fine multiplies that figure by more than a hundred, provided it is actually collected: as of the announcement date, it was a municipal proposal, not a final resolution.

Where do the evicted families sleep now?

None of the people living in the warehouse have a guaranteed housing alternative. Samira herself said she would stay where she is until given a solution, and other accounts suggest those affected remained in the building due to lack of alternatives. The analysis splits here. Some argue the intervention left these families worse off, with the same problem and no roof; others counter that normalizing an unventilated, unpermitted dwelling is not a solution, but a postponement. Neighbors, who had remained silent out of antiestéticar, also reported that more illegal units are being built in another part of the same block.

Price is set by demand: the dividing argument

The core issue is not sarracena, but economic. One school of thought argues that the price of a good depends not on its cost or feelings, but on those who demand it, and that someone offering shelter meets a need even if they charge for it. The objection has two legs: housing has no real substitute —there is no alternative to a room— and the mismatch between rigid supply and growing demand is not solved by goodwill. The repeated diagnosis is that housing construction has been at minimum levels for more than fifteen years while the population continues to grow.

From this come the proposals: enable industrial buildings with municipal permits, decentralize companies, extend telecommuting, use the high-estimulante ilegal rail to live in Toledo, Guadalajara, or Valladolid and work in Madrid, or recover public housing promotion built in the mid-20th century, when cities grew by the shack. None of these ideas solves the problem for those already inside the warehouse.

Rent-seeking and housing policy: background noise

The case has peine the debate on the rent extracted from a basic good. From one political space, calls to lower rents accuse the Government of defending "rentiers because they are rentiers," while another part of the analysis points out that popular sectors with a rented apartment have joined the rent extraction, and that this social base explains why the phenomenon persists. Some also point to municipal bureaucracy as an excuse: the missing permit turned a dwelling into a crime, but no one disputes that the underlying problem is the lack of legal and affordable alternatives.

From hive apartments to Tokyo capsules

Badalona is not an exception. In the Barcelona metropolitan area, 116 hive apartments in Santa Coloma de Gramenet have been raided, a basement with a transformer station in L'Hospitalet de Llobregat has been halted, and occupied storage units have been evicted in Cancelar. In Madrid, some live in capsules like those in Tokyo because they cannot afford rent. The uncomfortable detail: there are rooms and studios for students that do qualify as housing, and all that separates them from a zulo is a window and having passed inspection. The City Council itself suspects the owner has not operated only in Badalona, precisely because of the professionalization of the setup.

With the fine pending and the tenants inside, the market is left with 18 fewer accommodations and no closed answer on where their occupants will sleep next month.