Gentrification in Lavapies is not such a difficult thing to accomplish, since one out of four buildings here are vertically owned, that is a high rate for a place like spain where there is a strong tradition of buying (or trying to buy) the house you live in.
Moreover, the biggest building owner here is the Catholic Church through some of its "hermandades" (organizations that do not usually consider ths inhabitants of their buildings as brothers, not even cousins in law)
The land owners, and the big real estates are now waiting for the houses to get worse and worse, the people to get tired of waiting for a "rehabilitation" and finally the houses to be left free for higher rental prices.
Quite obviously...the thing is that we have a law which obliges the council to expropiate the house if the owner doesn’t take enough care of the building.
How do you evaluate this? Well perhaps if your yard and kitchen have already been some twenty years like this:
(we mean the wooden stuff stopping the walls falling down,not all those people in the picture, which obviously no one would admit into his/her kitchen for twenty years)
Then, what happens? A classical apportation of the spanish political culture: the "vista gorda".
No one officially knows anything, till someone has to
assume tho work of making them know:
We have worked with some of the 170 buildings threatened by this vertical gentry, it is and will keep being mostly an empowerment oriented work, just like the "Ruined Houses Contest".
There are big projects to be done with the façades of the houses if we ever have some money.
But who will pay for this kind of public art?