The Totana City Council has urged the Autonomous Community of the Region of Murcia, through its General Directorate of Territory and Housing, to develop a strategy for the persecution of slums in the Region of Murcia.In addition, it has been requested that the municipalities be transferred, in any case, all information and means in this regard that make it possible to carry out actions from the local level aimed at eradicating the phenomenon of substandard housing.In fact, the municipal plenary session approved last June, unanimously and at the initiative of the Ganar Totana-IU Group, this petition in light of the proliferation of the phenomenon of slums, which is increasingly present in this municipality, in the Region of Murcia and in all the national territory.The concept of substandard housing refers to all that space dedicated to housing that does not meet the minimum conditions of habitability.
Currently, there are legislative examples in the autonomous communities that try to regulate the appearance of the phenomenon of substandard housing, but its legal framework usually generates problems in the consideration of it, since all those spaces that do not meet the required conditions are defined as such.
of habitability.According to the municipal agreement, this phenomenon has to be pursued from the social point of view, and later embedded in a legislative framework on substandard housing.
When we speak of 'substandard housing', we cognitively associate this term with spaces that under no circumstances can be considered as dwellings, which, of course, do not meet the minimum conditions of habitability, but which are offered as such, as commercial premises that are rented and sold outside the law, destined for housing. The users of these slums belong to the most vulnerable sectors of our population, and with less access to income and opportunities than the rest of the population and, especially, is the case of immigrant workers, who are the main victims of these practices motivated by the difficulty of access to decent housing.It is, therefore, a matter of pursuing the practices that motivate the appearance of these slums, mostly unhealthy and that in any case do not meet the conditions of decent housing through a strategy of persecuting them, ranging from the field action on them and on the adaptation of a legal framework that deepens in preventing their appearance.
