Someone’s houses

“There are places that make us who we are…,” said in the award-winning movie Mystic River (2004), directed by Clint Eastwood and starring Sean Penn and Tim Robbins.

And it’s true that we grow roots in our places of origin, becoming part of them as much as they shape us. Just as language, with its grammar and etymology, structures thought differently for each tongue, the places where we grow up and live throughout our lives build our way of seeing the world and processing it day by day.

In a rather unoriginal Proustian experience, one of the places that most intensely shaped me during childhood —I imagine like many others— was my grandmother’s house.

She lived in a delightful house in Barcelona’s Eixample district, on Passeig de Sant Joan. It’s a wide, peculiar street, full of character. It connects the Monument to Mossèn Cinto Verdaguer with Plaça de Tetuan, the Arc de Triomf, and Parc de la Ciutadella, giving it a stately air, distinct from other streets in the city.

I remember the house as long, deep, and cool. With a dark and mysterious entrance, life emerged on both sides deep within. To the left, it faced the Church of Sant Francesc de Sales, next to the Marist school. To the right, it opened to the interior courtyard of the block, more intimate and peaceful, where my grandmother often sat sewing in the gallery. I could reproduce from memory the patterns on the floor tiles, the ones near the kitchen that shifted with a characteristic sound, warning her that someone was approaching down the hallway.

I remember her canaries. Nowadays, few people keep canaries at home. My grandmother always had six or seven, filling the air with their endless songs. Mediterranean sunlight poured through the stained-glass windows of the gallery, nurturing an exuberant nature among the flowerpots. My grandmother would sit in her rocking chair, immersed in that harmonious world she had built over time.

Surely, many of the places we associate with beauty, peace, or balance are tied to our personal experiences. A place feels pleasant because we compare it, consciously or not, with our prior experiences and learnings. We build our value systems and emotional connections through the homes we inhabit.

The forced disappearance of the place we live in causes emotional trauma that goes beyond mere material loss.

Jorge Luis Borges once explained that everything he had ever written came from no more than about twenty books in his family library. He admitted that those were his only references, and he would inevitably return to them every time he began a new story.

In this sense, the forced disappearance of the place we live in causes emotional trauma that goes beyond mere material loss. This is evident in natural disasters, even in those without human casualties. We establish deep bonds of dependence with those walls and the life we’ve experienced within them. There isn’t much difference from people forced to leave their homes because they can no longer afford rent or mortgage payments. Organizations like the Platform for Mortgage-Affected People (PAH) or the Tenants’ Union face extreme emotional situations daily, undoubtedly driven by the violation of the basic right to have a home, but also worsened by the uprooting caused by leaving behind so many memories of their current homes.

My grandmother always rented that house until she passed away at nearly a hundred years old. She raised nine children almost entirely on her own, as my grandfather died young.

A letter from the landlord stated that the contract would end with my grandmother’s passing and that one of my aunts, who had always lived there, would have to leave the only home she had ever known at eighty years old. Beyond the logistical challenges this foretold, what truly caused a sense of sadness and irreparable loss was the disappearance of the family home from the landscape of our lives. All those experiences would remain only in memory, with no place to recall them, no spaces to relive them.

An event that, while common and widely accepted, remains violent. A legal landlord claiming their property and the right to exploit it at a higher price, and a “proprietary” family inhabiting it, who also claim it as their home and a repository of memories, “if there are,” as Jaume Sisa sang, “homes belonging to someone.”

In a world increasingly populated and with growing social inequalities, a housing pact becomes ever more urgent —one that not only ensures access to housing but does so with a commitment to stability and permanence. A pact that values and acknowledges the fundamental role our homes play in our education and emotional well-being.

This stability must be guaranteed by our governments, by maintaining and expanding public housing stock. Land is a finite resource, and it cannot be sold off if we wish to meet the housing needs of future generations. Public housing should not belong to anyone. It belongs to everyone.