The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, during the meeting of the National Executive Committee of the PP. Borja Sánchez Trillo (EFE)

"The occupation of real estate is a phenomenon that generates great social concern and an undeniable feeling of insecurity among citizens."

This is how the Community of Madrid presents the telephone number 112 occupation (900 205 112), inaugurated last June.

However, the service has barely managed to answer six queries a day in its first six months of life, according to information obtained by EL PAÍS using the Transparency Law.

Of those 1,163 calls received between the last week of June and December 31, 2022, 42 were made from outside the Community of Madrid: that is, only 0.02% of the region's adult population used the service .

With an important nuance: the data provided is not broken down according to the interlocutor, so the same person may have made several calls.

Of the total, only 6% of the cases were reported to the police.

A balance that contrasts with the alarm generated by the main spokespersons for the PP since 2019, when Isabel Díaz Ayuso and José Luis Martínez Almeida came to power in the Community and the City Council and placed the fight against squatting at the heart of their political agenda.

This is how Ayuso answered Podemos in a parliamentary debate in February 2022: “I can tell you in advance that starting in March we are going to launch the anti-squatter office, the anti-squatter office and we are going to help the local police , to the judges, to the prosecutors, but especially to the owners of those houses that their friends occupy and to those who are defending whenever they govern, so that they quickly abandon their properties”.

And this is how Martínez-Almeida expressed himself in October: “What was happening in the previous term [in reference to the Ahora Madrid government with Manuela Carmena] is not happening].

They are not social movements, but facial movements, because they want to live by their faces at the expense of all the people of Madrid, and our commitment [against them] is firm”.

The two statements make it clear that for the PP, as for Vox, squatting is a problem that opens up an opportunity: it allows confrontation with the left to mobilize the conservative vote.

However, those claims do not take into account some data.

In Madrid there are some 4,300 squatted homes within a park of 3.5 million.

And of those 4,000, 2,108, 50%, are from the Community of Madrid through the Social Housing Agency (AVS), according to figures provided by the Executive.

These figures allow us to suggest that the supposed citizen problem is actually a government problem.

As the regional Executive is the main victim of squatting in the region, it has made decisions to limit the phenomenon: for example, in 2021 it decided to spend 200.

000 euros in anti-vandal doors and alarms "in order to avoid squatting" of 257 empty homes owned by him.

And the capital's government, also from the PP, is in the same line of argument, and shares the same problem, it spent 1.4 million until 2022 on a contract to protect municipal lots.

These decisions reflect that public properties, and the empty ones that are in the hands of banks, investment funds, and companies, are the most affected.

In fact, the squats of private apartments are the minority, as recognized by the Administration.

An X-ray that perhaps explains the number of calls that the 112 occupation receives.

calls in summer

According to the data obtained by this newspaper, in 6% of the calls (70 cases) the 112 occupation gave a transfer to the police, although it is not possible to know what happened in each of them.

The Government defends the implementation of this service, which provides service seven days a week, with two operators for each of the three established shifts (morning, afternoon and night).

"What this tool does is provide information, advice and prevention in matters of occupation and it has given good results, since up to 70 situations that could have led to occupation have been avoided or dissuaded since July," explains a spokesperson. municipal.

"The profile of the calls that occur to this number is advice for ongoing occupation, lawyers from neighboring communities,

The municipalities with the largest population are those that generate the most calls to 112: Madrid (830), Getafe (25), Parla (21) or Alcalá de Henares (19).

In addition, there is a group of inquiries (41) that come from places about which the police officers coordinated by the device cannot do anything, since they lack competence: they are from outside the region.

The balance obtained by this newspaper is that the peak of inquiries coincides with the summer months, when more houses are left empty due to the vacations of their residents and it is easier to squat them: 192 calls in July, 309 in August, and 271 in September, which represents 66% of the total.

The service, moreover, was launched right at the beginning of the summer of 2021.

The proximity of the municipal and regional elections will surely revive the debate.

Few issues mobilize the electorate more than the defense of private property.

And Ayuso knows it: that is why he has ordered Canal de Isabel II to stop charging owners of squatted homes for water.

A bet that affects a few citizens, but attracts many voters.

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