Residents of the building located at 14, Calle Letonia, in Tres Cantos (Madrid), belonging to the VIVE Plan of the Community of Madrid, have been reporting a heating malfunction in their home for a little over a week. “It’s hard not to have heating in the middle of a cold spell.” “We live in an area close to the mountains, and that’s where it’s coldest,” laments Gonzalo Ruiz, president of the Latvian Neighborhood Association and an affected person, who denounces that the companies responsible are “passing the buck.” Arantza López, another resident of the neighborhood, sums up the situation wryly: “We call it Plan Survive.”
In the three properties, which group together five gates, there are around 180 occupied homes – around fifteen are empty – according to Gonzalo Ruiz, president of the neighborhood association. He himself reports that the temperature inside houses drops to 16 degrees, a particularly worrying situation for families with minors and vulnerable people. “The houses are freezing. There are people with young children and families who are very cold,” he emphasizes.
Like other neighbors, Ruiz, who lives with his son and his pregnant wife, is forced to use electric heaters which, he emphasizes, “will have an impact on the electricity bill” in housing which, precisely, aims to offer affordable prices. Leticia Sobrinho, who lives in the building with her partner and their five-month-old baby, arrived at the apartment in August 2024 and, according to her account, since then they have had many problems. “We are at home with coats. It’s very sad to be cold at home,” he laments. He assures that they cannot afford to turn on the heating due to the high cost of bills, which have exceeded 200 euros in some months. “I have to pay rent and I also have a baby,” she explains.
According to development company Sogeviso and Acenz, which manages the building’s heating and cold air, service was fully restored last Tuesday. For its part, the Ministry of Housing also claims that a solution to the problem has been found. Acenz CEO Álvaro Martínez acknowledges that the service has been “interrupted several times” and explains: “This equipment (two of the four machines that provide heat) is not prepared to operate at temperatures below 10 degrees. What happens is at that temperature they collapse. He also recognizes that these heat pumps “are not suitable for this geographical area”.
However, the company emphasizes that this is a “temporary” solution and does not rule out that outages could recur as temperatures continue to drop in Tres Cantos. Likewise, he assures that long-term solutions will be evaluated after the holidays.
This is not the first case of incidents and complaints concerning the state of housing belonging to Plan VIVE. On December 30, residents of Calle Bella Dorotea number 3, in Getafe, reported having spent seven days without hot water in their homes or with a small trickle of lukewarm water. The same companies, Sogeviso and Acenz, were also involved in this affair.
Testimonies collected after the announcement contradict the official version according to which the problem is resolved. Arantza López, a neighbor of the building, assures that the heating still does not work properly. “It makes the air cold,” he explains. He says that at home, they are “with blankets and they are cold, especially at night.” “If you turn on the electric heating, your electricity bill will skyrocket, but it will be our turn.” “We are testing, yesterday it worked for a while then it failed again,” he adds.
López also says that the aerothermal company sent an email to the neighbors assuring that the situation “was resolved and that if they had problems again they should record the incidents in the application”, but in his case he was unable to do so because “the last incident he recorded before the company said it had been resolved is still in progress and he cannot record a new one.”
The complaints add up: “It’s one after the other”
Other incidents add to the heating problems. “In houses like mine, we constantly hear the hum of the aerothermal machine,” he explains. “There are people who have had to leave because of the discomfort caused by the constant noise” and, in their case, they say they have to sleep with the television on to hide. He also lists other faults in the promotion: “When this summer’s fire (the fire which ravaged more than 2,000 hectares last August) the garage was full of smoke and the alarm did not go off, the garden floors rise, the cupboards do not close, it’s one after the other.”
She further criticizes the costs that tenants bear for services that they do not receive, according to her: “The whole community is supposed to do gardening, but we don’t have a gardener.” And he adds: “This summer, they had to come and clear the bushes for a few days because the snakes and rats were invading us…”
Arantza López assures that she pays around 1,360 euros per month including charges for a 76 square meter apartment in which three people live. He says that at home, they are “with blankets and they are cold, especially at night.” “If you turn on the electric heating, your electricity bill will skyrocket, but that will depend on us,” he adds. He also points out that “they don’t always have hot water” and recalls that “this summer, the cold air stopped working in the middle of a heatwave.” “I think they installed the cheapest machines they could find,” he concludes. Three days after announcing the supposed solution, Borja Rodelgo, a neighbor, still sees no change and also points out that they do not have hot water in their apartment and that it only comes out “temperate”: “I had to heat the water to wash my daughter.”
The situation is repeated in other houses in the neighborhood. Kamil Pozezynski lives in a north-facing house, one of the coldest areas of the building. “We’re cold, we face north and we don’t get a ray of sunlight all day. It’s the coldest part of the neighborhood.” “It’s 15 degrees in the morning in the house,” he emphasizes, acknowledging that he is not in the habit of “turning on the heating too much” because “bills of 200 euros are arriving.” Adrián Alarcón, who has lived in the building since July 2024, speaks along the same lines. “We have lived here since July 2024 and since the beginning we have had heating problems,” he explains. At home, he assures us, “in winter, the temperature never exceeds 18 degrees”.
Faced with this situation, the neighbors launched a vote to change the aeronautical company. “We shouldn’t have to pay these gouging prices for something that also doesn’t provide us with good service,” Pozezynski says. Currently, although not all households have voted yet, 136 of them support a change in the company that provides air conditioning and hot water, Acenz.
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