Spain squatters take over buildings after foreclosures

BARCELONA - In this quiet suburb, children giggle as they kick around a soccer ball in front of their building. Their mothers trade tales nearby, their loud voices filling the entrance.

A father darts around the kids as he heads out to run a few errands.

It could be any Saturday afternoon anywhere in Spain except for some important differences. Homemade signs, calling for human rights and affordable housing, hang from every floor of this building. The elevator has never been operational. The water supply fails constantly.

The apartment building, with its gleaming faucets and brand-new hardwood floors, is home to 15 families who have been squatting here illegally for months.

Known as Bloc Salt, the squatters' home is one of many created because of the hundreds of Spanish families who are served eviction notices daily and the thousands of properties that sit abandoned across the country since the Spanish housing bubble burst.

"In this country, we have people without houses and houses without people," says Marta Afuera Pons of the Mortgage Victims' Platform (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca). It only makes sense, she says, to start using one problem to solve the other.

One in four Spaniards is out of work, which in a country that boasts one of the highest rates of home ownership in the world means many families fall behind on their mortgage payments and face foreclosure.

At the same time, the number of empty buildings across the country swelled after a building boom went bust.

The Spanish government estimates that there are more than 650,000 finished properties that sit empty across the country, alongside nearly half a million properties that were left idle while under construction.

Bloc Salt has become the poster child of a national campaign to fill Spain's empty homes with evicted families. The building's five floors are home to 37 people - 17 of them children - who call each other by their first names, share meals and raise chickens in the building's front yard.

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Spain squatters take over buildings after foreclosures