Reportage
Barcelona takes aim at tourist housing, but tenants say the policy is misguided
As expected, the property owners' association, Apartur, is ready for all-out war. However, the tenants' union wasn’t all that happy with the move either.
On Saturday, for a moment, Ada Colau’s successor, Barcelona’s Socialist mayor Jaume Collboni, finally looked like he wanted to give a political direction to his previously nondescript administration. He announced that from 2028, the 10,000 tourist apartments that currently operate in the city (representing about 1.25 percent of the total number of apartments) will disappear. The intention was to signal that the city wants to get serious about fighting the invasion of mass tourism that is suffocating it.
His plan is that the municipality will not renew the licenses that expire that year, under a law passed in 2023 by the Generalitat de Catalunya, the regional government. The move is very clever from a legal point of view: instead of drafting new legislation for tourist accommodations, the municipal executive, which has weak support (only 10 out of 41 councilors), will let the licenses expire without taking any action. The licenses granted for this type of apartments previously had a permanent duration, but the regional law stipulates they will expire five years after the entry into force of the regulation. Thus, if Collboni doesn’t take any step at all, one will not be able to resort to the courts to block his initiative.
During Colau’s eight years in office, during which no new licenses were granted (the process was blocked since 2014), the municipality had approved a rule allowing new hotels to open only in the suburb, which ended up subject to dozens of legal challenges (and much controversy). In this case, the only possibility to prevent the closure of these apartments rented legally to tourists – the number of apartments being rented out illegally remains unknown – would be for the Constitutional Court to uphold an appeal filed by the Popular Party against the regional law approved by the Catalan Parliament, or for whoever succeeds Collboni as mayor in 2027 to decide otherwise.
As expected, the property owners’ association, Apartur, is ready for all-out war. However, the tenants’ union wasn’t all that happy with the move either, claiming it was merely fodder for the media: “The current housing crisis in Barcelona,” they stressed, is “caused by the lack of regulation of temporary rentals,” not by apartments for touristic use. “Temporary rentals are being used to get around the limitation on rentals” approved by the central government last year, the tenants’ union wrote, recalling that it was the Socialist party and Junts, the two parties currently vying for the presidency of the Generalitat, that nixed the decree that the outgoing regional government led by Esquerra Repubblicana had approved to regulate this type of rentals. At this point, the Catalan Parliament hasn’t yet managed to appoint a new government after the elections held last month.
The tenants are also accusing the current junta of failing to implement controls to curb the illegal renting of apartments to tourists. The previous administration had implemented a shock therapy plan against illegal rentals, analyzing 70,000 listings and ordering the closure of nearly 10,000 apartments. Municipal sources quoted by El País claimed that in January this year, a total of “3,473 apartments were recovered for long-term residential use.”
According to the tenants’ union, Collboni’s move is ultimately a smokescreen to cover up his plan to change the most controversial measure approved by the Colau junta in 2018: a requirement that builders of new apartment buildings must dedicate 30 percent of them to social housing – in a region where social housing accounts for only 2 percent (in Spain the percentage is 2.5%, while the European average is 9.3 percent; Italy is at 3.7 percent).
Collboni was Colau’s number two during most of the eight years of her administration, and he became mayor last year thanks to the votes of the Comuns party, which the Socialists beat by only 200 votes; however, he never wanted to bring them into his alliance.
The owners’ association, Apartur, also criticized Collboni for his passivity on the housing plan: “He needs to engage in grand political gestures because he hasn’t done anything substantial on housing, and apartment prices keep going up,” they said.
All this took place in the same week in which the Socialist junta allowed Formula 1 cars to roar through the city center for the first time: a slap in the face to pro-environment policies which the mayor did his best to defend as “selling the Barcelona brand” – i.e. attracting even more tourists.
Originally published at https://ilmanifesto.it/assalto-dei-turisti-la-mossa-di-barcellona on 2024-06-23