In Madrid's Retiro district, an 87-year-old woman named Maricarmen was removed from the home she had known for seventy years — not by time or fate, but by the arithmetic of a housing market that had outgrown her pension. Her eviction, engineered through a legal loophole by an investment firm that tripled her rent overnight, became a mirror held up to a society struggling to reconcile the logic of capital with the dignity of long lives lived in place. Spain's housing crisis is not new, but in Maricarmen's face — tearful, grateful to strangers — it found a human scale that statistics rarely achi
87-year-old's eviction exposes Spain's housing crisis as rent surges
An 87-year-old pensioner was forcibly evicted from her home of seven decades after a property firm raised her rent beyond her ability to pay, leaving her without housing.