South China Morning Post · https://www.scmp.com/news/world/europe/article/3368920/thousands-march-spain-over-eviction-87-year-old-woman-maricarmen-abascal
An 87-year-old was evicted from her home of seventy years, and every step of it was legal. A whole country recoiled anyway, as if it had watched a theft.
A father of the fatherless, and a defender of the widows, is God in his holy habitation. God sets the lonely in families.
Psalm 68:5-6
On Saturday, September 26, tens of thousands marched through Madrid, and an encampment held the Puerta del Sol. Three days earlier, on September 23, Maricarmen Abascal, 87, was carried out of her home on a stretcher and lifted into an ambulance. Her father first rented the central-Madrid flat in the 1950s, and she had lived there more than 70 years. The crowd chanted a single word, her name.
Nobody broke the law. An investment fund bought the building, offered to sell her the flat at a price her pension could not reach, and raised her rent toward €2,650 a month, a reported 275% increase. Even the lower figure it later offered ran past her pension. When the stays ran out, a court ordered the eviction.
Every step was legal, and the sum of the legal steps was an old woman on a stretcher.
Spain recoiled as if it had watched a desecration. The prime minister called it "a social tragedy that we cannot accept," and on Tuesday his cabinet is due to vote on a decree already named for her.
Psalm 68 is a victory song attributed to David, all thunder and procession. In the middle of the triumph it stops to name this God as the defender of widows, the one who houses the solitary. The prophets carried the same conviction into the housing market of their own day.
Isaiah 5:8Woe to those who join house to house, who lay field to field, until there is no room, and you are made to dwell alone in the midst of the land!
That woe falls on people who broke no law. When a king offered Naboth a fair price for his family's vineyard, Naboth would not sell at any price, because a home was an inheritance and could not be reduced to an asset (1 Kings 21). That seizure ended in a killing. Madrid's needed none.
A transaction can pass every legal test and still take from a person what was never only property. The God of that psalm keeps watch over the one the market was free to move.