On the last day of November 2024, construction workers in a building at Calle Tribulete 7 drove screwdrivers through a partition wall into the common stairway. Fragments of masonry fell into the shared space. Residents were home. The building had been sold eight months earlier to a real estate investment fund — Elix Rental Housing II — whose ownership trace leads to AltamarCAM Partners, one of Spain's larger private equity groups. Police and firefighters came. Then they came again. And again. More than four times in the weeks that followed.
No eviction notice had been served. Every tenant in the building was current on rent.
The Eviction That Isn't
This is the thing the screwdrivers reveal: the eviction that is not legally an eviction. The strategy that requires no lawsuit because the building does the work instead.
In Spain's legal framework, acoso inmobiliario — real estate harassment — has existed as a civil offense for years. It describes systematic pressure designed to push residents out of their homes without triggering formal judicial eviction. Landlords who stop making repairs. Who cut water. Who authorize unnecessary works. Who let conditions deteriorate past the point of habitability.
The civil version of this complaint rarely goes anywhere. Burden of proof is high. Tenants leave before the process concludes. The fund books the cleared floor as an asset.
The criminal version — a querella, a formal criminal complaint — is a different instrument entirely. It requires a judge to assess whether conduct constitutes deliberate coercion. It names individuals. It charges legal entities. It takes time. And it had never, before May 22, 2025, been successfully filed in Spain against an investment fund for these specific offenses.
That changed in a courthouse in Madrid's Embajadores district, where the remaining residents of Tribulete 7 — some of whom had lived in the building for thirty years — filed the first collective criminal complaint for real estate harassment against a real estate investment fund in Spanish legal history.
The Strategy Called #NosQuedamos
The Sindicato de Inquilinas e Inquilinos de Madrid had been working with the Tribulete tenants since before the screwdrivers. Their strategy — called #NosQuedamos, "We Stay" — is documented and deliberate: tenants whose leases expire do not leave. They remain. They pay if they can. They document everything. They force the fund into the legal procedure it is trying to avoid. The goal is to make the no-eviction strategy expensive, slow, and visible.
December 2024: a symbolic funeral march outside the building. The punk band Biznaga played from the balconies. The neighbors wore black. It was not protest theater — it was a community event at an address that still had people in it, which was itself the point.
By the time the querella was admitted by Juzgado de Instrucción nº 17 in December 2025, approximately half the original residents had left the building. The other half had not. On February 19, 2026 — this morning, as of this writing — senior Elix executives and the supervising architect testified as investigados at the Juzgados de Plaza Castilla. The fund's defense: tenants who left did so voluntarily, after "generous economic agreements." The tenants' response, through their lawyer from CAES: the decision to leave was not free, because the conditions were not livable.
So we designed a business model around making homes unlivable, and we're calling it voluntary departure. Translation: the building did what the court wouldn't.
What Tribulete Surfaces
What Tribulete 7 surfaces is not a story about one building. It is a story about what happens when the legal arbitrage that has sustained a particular housing business model gets tested in a new venue: not the housing market, but the criminal court.
Tribulete sits in a city where the governing party has opened a legal pathway for 2,831 buildings in the historic center — roughly 17% of the building stock — to convert from residential to tourist use. La Canica, a community social space a short walk from Tribulete, was evicted in June 2024 and converted to four tourist apartments. Buildings in San Ildefonso, General Lacy, Mesón de Paredes, and Valverde (Malasaña) are documented as operating under the same #NosQuedamos framework — organized, holding, watching this case.
On February 18, 2026, the day before the Elix executives testified, residents of more than thirty blocks across Madrid delivered letters to the Ministry of Housing demanding the new proposed state housing company, Casa 47, purchase back more than 15,000 apartments.
The behavioral shift happening in Madrid is not primarily about noise. It is about the venue. Protest still happens. But the organizing energy is moving into documentation, legal strategy, and collective staying. The court is now part of the territory.
Before It Has a Name
What the Tribulete case is doing to the housing-harassment business model is not yet legible in policy language. There is no legal reform in motion that directly responds to this case. The querella has not concluded. The fund has not been convicted. Everything is still instruction-phase, open, unresolved.
But: a judge in Madrid reviewed the evidence and decided there was enough to proceed. That is not a verdict. It is a threshold. And crossing it — formally, judicially, for the first time — changes the risk calculation for other funds operating similar models in similar cities. Not because of what the sentence will be. Because of what it costs to be named and to have to show up.
When information becomes immersion, the building stops being background and starts being evidence — and the people inside it know how to use the walls.
