Anger is growing in Spain after an elderly woman was evicted from her home of 70 years

An 87-year-old Spanish woman was forced out of the Madrid apartment she has lived in for more than 70 years on Wednesday, in a case that highlights a growing housing crisis in the country.

The video showed Maricarmen Abascal, who is a wheelchair user, being taken out of the building in the Spanish capital’s Retiro district on a stretcher and taken away in an ambulance.

Hundreds of supporters had gathered outside the building overnight to protest their eviction, with dozens of police officers holding them back as some tried to stop the eviction. In a social media video posted on Friday by the Madrid tenants’ union, Abascal thanked them for the support they have received.

Abascal’s lawyer, Beatriz Duro, described the force used in the eviction as “completely disproportionate and unnecessary” and condemned the intransigence of the building’s owners.

The case has brought renewed attention to an ongoing housing crisis in major cities across Spain, as gentrification skyrockets rents and shrinks the stock of affordable housing, leading to growing public anger.

Tenants’ unions and other housing groups held protests and rallies in 16 cities on Thursday, including Granada, Logroño and Zaragoza. The Madrid tenant union plans to hold a large demonstration in the capital on Saturday evening.

An investment fund bought Abascal’s building in 2018 and sought a steep increase in her rent, and she had been fighting eviction for more than five years, according to the Madrid tenants’ union.

Duro said that court officials and representatives of the fund, Urbagestión, refused to suspend the eviction despite a pending court case, humanitarian appeal and evidence that public authorities are working to secure alternative accommodation.

“They are all inhumane,” Abascal said in a Spanish TV interview the day before her eviction. “It’s like I live with a machete at my neck, ready to be cut down at any moment.”

Duro also said an anonymous individual offered to cover the rent payments, but the landlord refused to sign a new lease.

“We tried to negotiate with the owners until the last moment, and they flatly refused everything,” she said, denying “a lack of humanity” in their treatment and “all these public resources” channeled to allow the eviction.

Urbagestión did not respond to a request for comment.

The fresh wave of anger comes after protests in recent years against over-tourism in Barcelona, ​​where activists say a surge in apartments used for short-term holiday rentals has contributed to a shortage of affordable housing.

The European Union announced new rules earlier this month to tackle the housing crunch caused by short-term rentals in tourism hotspots.

Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez described the eviction as “a social tragedy that we cannot accept either as a country or of course from the perspective of public institutions.”

Speaking at the United Nations General Assembly in New York on Wednesday, Sánchez accused Madrid’s conservative regional government of pursuing luxury penthouses while ignoring demand for social housing.

Irene Hernández López, a 31-year-old test engineer who lives and rents in Chamberí, about 2 miles from Retiro, said what happened to Abascal is “terrible,” and she’s worried that similar evictions are already happening to other tenants around town.

“Housing has become a product that people do business with,” she told NBC News. “It is no longer important that it is your personal world, where you live and where you make your life.”

Hernández López, who pays 500 euros ($570) for a room in an apartment she shares with two others, said she is currently looking to move because the property is old and in need of repair, but that the rental market in Madrid has been “terrible,” with prices “rising extremely fast” and very little available.

“Some rooms are 500 euros or 600 euros and you think: ‘How am I supposed to live here? How can I pay 500 euros for this?'” she said. “I think prices should be regulated because wages are not going up, while housing prices keep going up. I don’t know how we should continue.”

Dan Nicander, general secretary of the International Union of Tenants, said that the situation in Spain is something that his organization has seen in many countries in Europe.

“It’s part of the funding problem when you see housing as an asset more than a home for people,” he told NBC News.

It is “really difficult” for the people who live in the houses to do something about it, he said, the responsibility lies with the politicians “to regulate the market in such a way that it should not be so easy to buy and invest and then not [be] use the houses as houses.”

“Housing is a right,” he said. “It is above all a basic right, it should not be a commodity.”