María del Carmen Abascal's case has drawn tens of thousands of people to the streets in recent days and led the Spanish government to present measures to address the country's housing crisis.
Page F3From§Eachthe milkman edition — 30 September 2026
Fund evicts 87-year-old tenant of seventy years; Spain addresses its housing crisis a week later
As it ran on the front
You will have seen that she is going home, and you will have read that as a reversal. It is not. A tenancy is a term of use and nothing else — use, mind you, never title — and seventy years of usufruct in one Madrid flat leaves the owner precisely where the owner was: a "vulture" real-estate holding company, unbothered, entirely within its rights.
On the twenty-third of September the police came. Hundreds stood outside the door. The government criticized the order; the order was executed regardless; those barricaded at the entrance were beaten aside. No rule failed there. Every rule performed.…
…(cont) Then the streets filled — tens of thousands of them, across the country — and a government arrived with measures for a housing crisis. Measures presented after the crowds, do note, not before.
And the price of having them presented? ... One eviction order, executed on schedule, and a week of crowds. Seventy years in that flat. Seventy, and not one of them a claim.
She is returning home. Returning, you understand. Not restored.
Each spring a man mends the fence. The field is not his. Not yet.
“Seventy years in one apartment, and a fund with police behind it takes it in a morning — not one rule got broken, and that's the part that should scare you. The government found housing measures inside a week, which means the measures were sitting in a drawer the whole time waiting for enough bodies in the street. Your landlord does not have to cheat you; the paperwork does it for him.”
“The order was lawful, a company enforcing a valid order is not a scandal, and look — she is back in the apartment, so what are we even discussing here. Did I say scandal? That does not sound like me. And frankly the government came forward with housing measures inside a week, which tells you the system is responsive, which is the story nobody wants to write.”
The receipts
An 87-year-old Spanish woman was forcibly evicted Wednesday from the Madrid apartment she had lived in for more than 70 years, in a case that highlights a growing housing crisis in the country.
By Nelson Galvan and John Catalinotto A Spanish “vulture” real-estate holding company used police Sept. 23 to evict an 87-year-old woman from the apartment she had been living in for 70 years.
· Eviction of 87-year-old tenant in Madrid highlights Spain's housing crisis from the morgue, 25 Sep 2026
This page is a back-issue: the story as it ran, receipts as they were. The current edition is at the front. The byline is a pen name for a column drafted by a machine and checked by the editor: how this is made.