The licenses for tourist apartments have revealed new discrepancies between socialists and commoners. While Jaume Collboni's contacts continue to expand the municipal government now in a minority, this issue has opened a new waterway between both parties. The socialists have paralyzed the formula promoted by the Colau government at the end of the last term to prevent the opening of tourist apartments, including those in the Tarragona block.
“When legal certainty is guaranteed, we will initiate the files,” say municipal government sources, who point out that of the 106 files initiated in this way – 89 corresponding to apartments on Tarragona Street – in “many cases” the owners have challenged the resolution. For this reason, the municipal government wants to wait to guarantee the legal security of the instrument to revoke licenses before opening more files following the same model as that of the Tarragona street block.
Colau's party resorted to the Generalitat's economic activity facilitation law, which states that a permit can be withdrawn if the business has not started three months after obtaining the license. The previous government, chaired by Colau and with the PSC as a minority partner, found in these regulations an instrument to withdraw the license from apartments that had had it for three months but that, after this period, did not function as housing for tourist use because there were still tenants residing in them.
BComú estimated that the legal route used would allow the closure of up to 900 apartments that, despite the restrictive regulations promoted by the party itself, obtained licenses. The spokesperson for the municipal group, Janet Sanz, considers it “a scandal” that Collboni has stopped the withdrawal of licenses through this formula and has asked the executive to use the legal means at its disposal “against housing speculation.”
The reaction of the government team has not been long in coming. Laia Bonet insisted yesterday that “we have not stopped anything; We will reduce housing for tourist use, but we will do so with legal certainty; We want to avoid legal loopholes that force us to accept new tourist apartments at the stroke of a sentence,” and she recalled that, despite Colau's regulations, new tourist apartments could be legalized. The socialists clarify that the figure of 900 apartments referred to by Janet Sanz is not true, since the law can only be applied if housing activity for tourist use has not started in three months and “this does not happen in all the cases". They also remember that since 2019 the City Council has had to register 671 homes for tourist use in the municipal census of tourist accommodation and that the majority as a result of court rulings.
The debate on the closure of tourist apartments occurs after the publication of the latest municipal survey on the perception of tourism, in which although the number of Barcelona residents who believe that tourism does not benefit the city is growing (23%), a large majority (70%) still consider it beneficial. Among the aspects that most concern residents, overcrowding stands out (23.6%). 16.2% attribute the rise in housing prices, both for rent and purchase, to tourism, a percentage that has doubled compared to last year.
