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Founded in Spain in 2009 as an immediate response to the devastating effects of the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca – PAH) has since grown into a nationwide movement with over two hundred local chapters. Together, they have stopped thousands of evictions, negotiated with banks, forced legislative change, occupied fifty buildings, and, most importantly, rescued thousands of people from the edge of the abyss. It achieved all of this without backing from any party, union, or major NGO, and without full-time staff or external funding.

 As the PAH faced off some of the country’s most powerful institutions, its members learned how to organize themselves, how to look after one another, how to do politics from the street, and how to bring about legislative reform. They managed to change the dominant narrative that blamed the victims of speculation on the housing market, they’ve won broad popular support, and through civil disobedience, they forced political parties to pass laws and pressured wealthy property owners and international corporations to negotiate and accept their demands.

This conversation brings together PAH members to reflect on how the movement adapted during the pandemic, the changing profile of those facing housing precarity, and the evolving landscape of housing activism in Spain.

In September 2025, five years after the first version of this book was finished, some members of the PAH’s International Committee came together online for a conversation to reflect on what has changed and what we’ve learned since. The conversation, intended to update what was written previously, also became a beautiful moment of connection in which we enjoyed remembering and reflecting on the many things we have done together.

João: The interviews and conversations for the book took place in 2020. At the time, I didn’t write much about the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic because it was too recent and it was difficult to fully understand what was happening. So, the idea for the first part of this conversation is to talk about that period, what has changed since, and what are some new challenges that have emerged?

Juanjo: We did a lot of things during the pandemic, even during lockdown! Just a few days before the lockdown began, we had managed to get an extension of the morato-rium on foreclosure evictions;1 it was the first result of pressuring the new progressive Spanish govern-ment. During lockdown, we got an even more effec-tive moratorium, which has never been enough, but it’s important and is still in place today. We achieved this thanks to the public pressure, the calls, the campaigns on social media, and online meetings with the gov-ernment. It was a lot of hard work, which was mostly invisible because of the moment we were living in, but the PAH’s committees kept working online.

Some months after, we presented the initiative for a housing law, with the support of 250 organizations. The seeds for that were sown during lockdown. We managed to get the bill to Congress, but the ruling Socialist Party didn’t want to vote for it. Also, in the beginning of 2021, the Constitutional Court ruled out one of the measures we got passed in the Catalan Parliament, and we managed to organize a march, with all the distancing and security measures. It was powerful! Some months after, we organized another march for the housing law. It was hectic, even with the lockdowns.

João:  Regarding the moratorium, I think in other countries there were measures like that during the worst part of the pandemic, but people might wonder why in Spain it’s still in place more than five years later, although with modifications.

Gabriele: The pandemic made many things possible. For more than ten years, they had told us a moratorium on evic-tions was impossible. But in just a few days during the pandemic, the government passed a lot of measures we had been pushing for and they had always rejected. In most countries, it was not possible to sustain those kinds of policies over time, but it was in Spain because of sus-tained public pressure for over a decade, and even during the pandemic, that pressure was still organized online.
The PAH didn’t stop during the pandemic, it just had to reinvent and reorganize itself again. The lock-down started in March, and in April there were people working on writing new documents already, so people could use them to benefit from the new policies passed by the government. I remember the online assemblies that went on for over a year and were a way of seeing and listening to each other, being together, although in a different way; it’s not the same through the screen, but it was really important and made people recover strength. The first eviction we managed to prevent, in June 2020, was amazing. There were around three hundred people, stemming from all the different move-ments in Barcelona. It was really powerful. So, the key to retaining those policies—which are not enough, and we can’t stop saying it, but they have helped—was the ability to mobilize, to keep doing things and being active even when it had to be online.

João:  Because a lot has happened since then, I would like to not focus only on the pandemic. Maybe you can reflect on what has changed between, say, 2019, before COVID, and now.

Delia: 2019 sounds far away to me! Back then, people arriving at our assemblies had a mix of problems with mortgages, rent, and squatting. They were more middle-class folks who became vulnerable. But there has been a radical change since then, and most of the families who come to us now are in a much more vulnerable situation, with very complicated cases. A lot of other housing organiza-tions have appeared, and I think most people with the profiles that used to come to us now go there, while we are getting the more difficult cases.

On the other hand, I think there was more strength and organization some years ago, it was easier to orga-nize people and actions to exert pressure. It’s harder for most of the people who come to our assemblies today to get more involved. Sometimes there are language or cultural barriers, and they are also facing difficult situ-ations. We used to have evictions every day, and there were always a lot of people. Now we are stopping just a couple of evictions per week, and it’s hard to get enough people there.

There have been a lot of changes. The politicians, the vulture funds, the courts . . . all of them have changed, and we must keep reinventing our movement so we can fight back. We must keep thinking how we can turn things around to improve how we reach people and mobilize the masses, as we have done before. But when we are together with people from other movements during an eviction and we talk about that, I see this is not a problem only for the PAH. The people who are coming are in a much more desperate situation, and it’s harder for them to feel empowered and keep being part of the movement after their eviction has been stopped.

Bel:  We used to have many more mortgage cases. These take longer to solve, which means people get more involved and eventually stay in the platform. But now, in Mal-lorca, we have mainly people who are renting. In those cases, everything is faster, and when they get some kind of solution, they normally leave and don’t stay to help. Although now we are getting mortgages cases again, mostly old cases that previously managed to get a temporary solution and now they are in trouble again.

João:  I also have the impression people used to have more time to devote to the PAH, and now it’s harder for people to find that time.

Juanjo: We have some theories about that. I think it’s a gen-eral problem, as Delia said, not only at the PAH. On one hand, the profile of the people who come to our assembly has changed, and we are dealing with some of the most precarious people, compared to other housing movements. It’s mainly migrant families with a lot of other problems besides housing, which also makes it more difficult to find a good solution for their cases. On the other hand, the far-right discourse is advancing, and it brings fear to those same people. People are more afraid of going to stop an eviction now, especially when the police arrive. They are going through complex sit-uations and facing the police can be harder on them.

And finally, another change is that there is an abso-lute and globalized precarity in our society, but people are working. That’s the main difference between when the PAH started and now. Back then, we were almost all in unemployment. Now, even though we are as poor, or or even poorer, than before, we are working. This makes it difficult to attend an action or an eviction. You can’t get days off every week to be in solidarity and stop an eviction. Maybe you can go to the weekly assembly, but it makes it much more difficult to be involved on a daily basis. For me, those are the key factors: the change in people’s profile, the fact that we are working, the far-right discourses, and the repression we are suffering.

João: One of the changes that some you have mentioned is the fact that we now have a much broader housing movement, where there’s not only the PAH but a lot of organizations. How do you think this fact has changed things?

Delia: Those new organizations are really welcome, they are helping families, accompanying them, stopping evic-tions. In PAH Barcelona we don’t get many cases from people in the Nou Barris district or in the Poble Sec neighborhood, because they have strong neighborhood housing unions there. This has been a change for us. We keep getting people that come to us because they were told to do so by social services, by the city itself, by their lawyer, by word of mouth. But there has been a huge hike in mortgage foreclosures this year, and we were wondering, where are those people? They are suf-fering invisible evictions, just leaving their houses afraid of facing the court. Our compa Rosario was saying, there are fifteen to twenty evictions in Barcelona every day. Most of them are not going to any organization! We have a Stop Evictions Telegram channel where all the collectives share the evictions they have every week, and you don’t see twenty evictions being stopped every week.

There are also people attending two assemblies, their neighborhood’s and the PAH’s, and they trans-fer information from one to the other. Maybe they are teaching their neighborhood organization about the counsel they get at the PAH.

Juanjo: That’s it, where there once was only the PAH, now you have greater diversity. And people also diversify the places they attend, so you don’t get as many people as before. But that doesn’t mean that all the different assemblies are full with all the people in need that should be organizing. Sometimes I feel we are back to the point where it all started, when people arrived with guilt, fear, and shame, and that was the first barrier we had to break. The PAH made a change that lasted a long time, and people got involved really fast, but in recent years we are struggling with all that again. People are even afraid of appearing in a picture, afraid of retali-ation. People come to the assembly feeling ashamed, because they are hearing the same discourses we were hearing when we first arrived.

But on the other hand, with all the neighbor-hood unions we have, at least in Barcelona, we have a lot of families attending both organizations, as Delia was saying. They go to the ones close to them, in their neighborhood, and they also come to the PAH, because they know they will get different things. Some people have told us they go to their neighborhood union because of its proximity to their everyday life, and because there’s a lot of younger people who are willing to fight, but they come to the PAH for all the knowledge we have built over the years. They usually find the counsel that will make it possible for them to find a permanent solution in our assembly, but if they combine this with the support and mobilization in their neighborhood, it’s a win-win. We should build better channels to transmit the information we have to those different assemblies.

Delia: There is a lot of strength in those neighborhood unions, there’s a lot of young people. And during an eviction, people like to count on them, because they are not afraid of facing the police.

Maka: There have always been people going to a neighbor-hood association or other assemblies, and this has always been positive. Also, there have always been way more evictions than the ones arriving at a PAH assembly. But after all those years, the PAH’s assem-blies are still full of people. And yes, maybe the time people can devote to the PAH has changed, because people have more precarious work, or even multiple jobs. But we are talking about people attending both the PAH assembly and other assemblies; people have kept organizing.

I think it’s important to note that the PAH has cre-ated plenty of free and accessible resources, tools people can use on their own. This has also made it possible for other movements to have counseling assemblies, which is really positive. But if there’s something differ-ent about the PAH, it’s that it has always been able to be in the vanguard of the housing struggle, and I think that is due to its diversity. The PAH is always learning from itself, and from the different local PAHs, because not all of them work in the same way.

This exchange of knowledge between PAHs also started happening at the international level at some point. That’s something really valuable about the PAH: it knows it has to keep learning. We also have people in the movement—and in this committee—bringing knowledge from other places and other fields. There is this wealth of knowledge, and the awareness that housing is a process that changes constantly. Delia was saying the politicians have changed, but the PAH changes almost faster than politicians. What is most valuable about the PAH is the fact that it’s alive, and we can see this in many different processes.

Pedro:  I want to offer some contrast to what you are discuss-ing, because the PAH is huge, but not in the same way everywhere. Here in the Gipuzkoa province [in Basque Country] we used to have eight PAHs, but most have disappeared, and we are now only three. We don’t have the same numbers of evictions as in Catalonia, Madrid, or Andalusia, although every day there is an eviction in the province and not all of them come to us. So, we have a different scale of doing things. I remem-ber going to Barcelona with a compa from a Belgrade collective, and we attended a neighborhood assembly where they were not only talking about housing, but also education and healthcare. That was amazing, and we were like: “We wish we had something like that where we come from!” We don’t have neighborhood assemblies in Gipuzkoa, and every time I go to Bar-celona, I’m impressed by how it’s like a seedbed or a greenhouse. It’s amazing! So, there are differences between places.

João: I always feel it is important to stress the diversity of contexts and strategies inside the PAH as you mentioned. And since Pedro is mentioning what is going on in Barcelona and Cat-alonia, where we now have plenty of neighborhood or village housing unions, I wanted to ask Juanjo about what has been going on here, because I know he was involved in organizing the first Catalan Housing Congress in 2019, and we went together to the second Congress in February 2025, where the Catalan Confederation of Housing Unions (COSHAC) was created.

Juanjo: It has been a long and arduous process, and still is. There are people who really believe in this confed-eration process, and while there have also been res-ervations from some PAHs and other organizations, thankfully it looks like everyone is choosing their path. We are working towards a common future of alliances and building together. In Catalonia we now have four big actors fighting for the right to housing: the PAH, the Tenants Union, the Socialist Housing Union,3 and the Confederation, which groups many different organizations, including some PAHs. While the Con-federation is working on its own construction, we are all making sure those four actors can work together to have more strength, each from its perspective and without losing its identity, but with a common fight for housing. There’s a lot to do, but it’s a really interesting process.

Excerpted with permission from Yes It's Possible!: A Handbook for Building Power from Below by João França and The Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH); Preface by Rob Robinson;
Afterword by Silvia Federici. Published by Common Notions Press.

The Internationalist Archive