In Urban gothican anthology of 10 young authors recently published by Editorial Horror Vacui, there are stories about, knife, real estate, bonds, invoices, and desperate tenants. Although only some of the stories incorporate supernatural turns, it could be said that all the stories of the book are horror. For everyone who did not access a property before the 2008 crisis – for being too young or for any other circumstance – the house has become a nightmare. It is something that demonstrate the surveys of the Spaniards, as they point out) and that can be checked daily. For example, any conversation between children under 40 ends up, sooner or later, dealing with the price of rentals.
On March 9, the journalist Luis Paz Villa published in, those who, although they have work and share a floor, continue to need their parents to reach the end of the month. Essays like Housing, the new class divisionby Lisa Adkins, Melinda Cooper and Martijn Konings, they also explore this phenomenon that extends throughout the West. “Young adults depend more and more on the capacity and will of their parents to give them or give them money for the entry of a home. In the asset economy, they have acquired a new meaning,” explain these academics that describe a world in which “the income from employment is increasingly less and less access to the way of life of the middle class.”
As a collateral effect of the housing crisis, the family has gained weight in the lives of those young people who never manage to emancipate completely. But as some of the most popular fictions of all time, of the Rey Lear by Hamlet a The Karamázov brothers of Dostoevski, of the Barbarian comedies by Ramón María del Valle-Inclán to the series , When family and money are mixed, things usually go. “If the family has always had a social control function, there are currently economic bases that reinforce that position. More than ever, you have to fit in the life expectations your parents have,” says the anthropologist, journalist and researcher Nuria Alabao.
The natural thing is that the expectations of the parents (or grandparents) are not always the same as those of the children, so that, now that many of the seconds depend on the former to have a home, the disagreements can be enquist and perpetuate even painful, arbitrary or subordination situations.
Families (and societies) structured by housing
Rodrigo is a 33 -year -old architect who could settle on an empty floor owned by his parents. Although his is a privileged experience, he illustrates some of the tensions that these arrangements cause: “I lived in another province and, as they put a 50% errte and I started collecting a misery, I proposed teleworking from my city. I came to save and, as I knew that my parents had an empty floor, I asked them to stay in it. At first, they said that the floor had been closed for a long time. Finally, I told them that I furnished it and convinced them, but they didn’t have very good about teleworking. “Suddenly one day my father came, I saw a bulb and, at any time, I returned with a lamp and installed it. Or my mother appeared with old pots and left them out there, while I tried to work. I went on to not have any intimacy, because every two for three they passed by with anyone. In the end, I had to tell them to stop,” he recalls.
The architect admits that his experience was positive, despite so many annoying details. However, Alaba recalls that “depending on your family is a lottery.” The anthropologist develops it: “Not only in the sense of whether you have a family with economic capacity to give you options. You also depend on the fate with respect to whether it is a more open family, more generous or more intolerant. In that sense, but a social discipline with the function of preparing for salaried work that, in addition, is still supported on.”
In your essay He explains that, in recent years, family heritage has served to cushion the effects of successive economic crises, “acquiring an increasing importance against the devaluation of educational credentials and the degradation of employment conditions.” “The inheritance, has become the main means of transmission of class positions, and in a unquestionable social principle,” he concludes. This scenario is the result of an ideological transformation. The recent reactionary turn of world policy is closely linked to the resurgence (by economic necessity or by moral conviction) of the family institution. “The claim of the family is a purely conservative field, and the defense of families is one of the main rhetoric of the current extreme rights, which use it to oppose rights such as homosexuals or abortion. It also promotes neoliberalism because social expenses are cut to the extent that it is families that are going to take care of social reproduction,” Alabao confirms.
Conflicts, generosity and generational blindness
Andrea, a 36 -year -old artist, considers that, when talking about family and housing, it is necessary They will accept their magnitude, they would not understand our resilience, this immobility: that nothing burns, ”he says. She herself was expelled from a home that her grandfather preferred to maintain without use: “For a long time in my family there were a couple of empty houses, and I stubbornly in kupar them, but instead of finding majority family support, I always perceived, in one way or another, that, until my grandfather literally threw us. I suppose that two things are mixed: the question of why leave you the house to you and not any other cousin, Casas, which are mausoleos of their past, can be modified, ”he says.
The case of Sebastián, a 30 -year -old professor, is something different: he could never take advantage of the floor that his parents had free to a few meters from which he currently rents. “They told me that they did not trust that I took care of him in the right way, so I looked for my life and found another to rent in the same neighborhood. When I told them, they were surprised and asked me why I had not gone to their floor, which filled me with anger because I felt almost like a manipulation,” he recalls. “Later, when I wanted to go with my partner, I asked them again and they told me again that they did Come the world in a way that I will never see it, ”says the young man.
Situations such as those lived by Andrea and Sebastián demonstrate that intergenerational solidarity does not always occur in Spain, a country in which less than 52% of greater than 55 has “other real estate properties” in addition to their place of residence. Even so, the most common is that these favors do occur although, according to Alabao, it is not the most recommended. “We should get new generations not to depend on favors. They must have the capacity to define their life schemes and decide whether they want to live with friends, several couples or how they want to imagine. No one has to depend on their relatives, but on more solid public services, taking out the market more and more areas of the social reproduction of life. And, on the other hand, we must have access to better paid jobs that allow independence,” summarizes the researcher.
Meanwhile, the consequences of this return to family support networks can be noticed in all areas, from the cultural life of cities to electoral balances. And, above all, they are perceived inside the families themselves, because, today, you look where you look, there are children disappointed with their parents (and vice versa), brothers fought with each other, cousins that are not spoken or elderly whose entry into a residence rushes after one in their neighborhood.
