The housing crisis in Ibiza has a face and a name of its own. Monica Sanchez, a working mother, has been living in the same three-bedroom apartment in Vila for five years with a legal rental contract and, as she explains, paying the 1,400 euros a month on time.
Everything is shaken when, in November, the owner informs them that he will not renew the contract. “It leaves my family in a situation of total uncertainty,” he says in a letter sent to a public housing agency to which La Voz de Ibiza has had access.
“Similar apartments start at €2,500.”
From that notice, the pilgrimage through real estate portals and agencies begins. What Monica finds draws a familiar landscape for many Ibizan families: skyrocketing prices and almost impossible conditions.
He reports that, after weeks of searching , apartments similar to his only appear from 2,500 euros, and in “most cases even 2,800 euros or more”. In addition to that, there are properties for rent only for companies, with entry conditions that he describes as “unacceptable”: months in advance, agency fees, very high salary requirements, bank guarantees or requirements “comparable to the granting of a mortgage”.
Meanwhile, her salary reality goes the other way. Monica explains that in these five years
All this, he argues, places his household in “a scenario of high risk of residential exclusion”, because “we cannot afford the current rents nor is there any real availability of affordable housing”.
Formal request: to be recognized as a family at risk of homelessness
In her letter, Monica does not limit herself to describing the situation. She asks that the administration officially register her case and consider her as a family unit at risk of homelessness.
It requests to be included in access to public or subsidized housing, in residential emergency programs and in housing alternatives for families with dependent minors, in order to prevent them from being “in a situation of homelessness”.
It also calls for an investigation into whether the current context of the rental market in Ibiza, with “abusive prices and unacceptable conditions”, may be speculative practices or contrary to the right to decent housing, and that, if necessary, the case be referred to the competent body.
Monica also requests that she be informed in writing of any resources, assistance or options available to her family.
“We don’t share apartments because we are normal families, with children.”
In the final part of the letter, the Ibiza resident raises the tone and generalizes her situation to that of many other working families on the island. “We working families cannot afford rents that double or triple our income,” she stresses, before pointing to a very common reality: overcrowding and the obligation to share housing with strangers.
“We don’t share apartments because we are normal families, with children, who need stability,” he insists. In his opinion, the situation has become, “for all practical purposes, an abuse that puts our dignity and our basic right to housingat risk.”
A challenge to public decision-makers
The letter closes with a kind of challenge, addressed to the heads and technicians of the administrations responsible for housing. Monica invites them to do the same exercise as she did:
He proposes that they carry out “just one week of fictitious housing search in Ibiza” to see “first hand the desperate situation” that many families live in. And he warns about what may come when the tourist season approaches: “And we are in December; when the season starts to approach, I prefer not to imagine the nonsense that is coming”.
While the landlord prepares not to renew her contract and the market offers her only rents of 2,500 euros and up, Monica’s letter is recorded as one more testimony to the growing gap between wages and rents in Ibiza, a gap that, as she herself summarizes, threatens to expel from the residential map those who sustain the day to day life of the island.
