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The 22@ District has recently been the subject of critical comments related to the amount of office space available there. In the article Crisis of the 22@ district? Barcelona decides, the journalist Susana Cuadrado wonders if the District is in crisis due to its unemployment.
An unemployment that may persist due to the work modality of coworking and the social trend towards teleworking, both trends that have an impact on the reduction of the surface area dedicated to offices.
Also, practically all the articles agree that more housing would need to be built in the neighborhood. It should be remembered that in each block of the area delimited by the @ rating, of the total surface area to be built, 10% must necessarily be allocated to protected housing.
Thus, either it is a small number of homes, if we consider a city neighborhood with mixed uses and activities, typical of the Mediterranean city, or we have an excessive number of homes, if we consider that it is a sector of exclusive tertiary use to resemble the Anglo-Saxon downtown model.
It is true that if we look at the Poblenou neighborhood as a whole, the lack of housing in the sectors classified as @ is somehow compensated, thanks to the group of homes that have to be preserved in the old industrial neighborhood of Poblenou.
However, large built areas have been created, occupied mainly by tertiary activities (or what amounts to the same thing with very little housing) in which it is horrible to be able to walk on weekends or at certain times at night.
At the same time, we find a district of Eixample where a significant number of homes are used as offices. This circumstance makes the rental price of housing more expensive, largely due to the greater solvency offered by companies and professionals compared to families, who have an average income that in the District was, in 2020, 23,488 euros. (a family income of 23,488 euros means, allocating 35% of the income to this need, being able to pay a rent of 685 euros for a home, which is what is currently being paid for a room in a shared apartment in Eixample) .
Likewise, this transformation of homes into offices also generates a disproportionate mobility due to work reasons - workers and visitors - with the known counterproductive environmental effects. While Royal Decree 486/1997 of April 14 establishes a surface area per office worker of between 4 and 6 m2, the minimum surface area for a home in Catalonia is established at 40 m2.
That is to say, in some way we are segregating parts of the city of Barcelona with certain uses that not only expel the resident population for economic reasons, but we are also specializing it functionally, thus approaching the American city model.
If we continue this trend marked by an ultra-liberal real estate market, in a few years we will witness the segmentation and compartmentalization of the urban fabric of the central city by preferential uses and high added value.
However, it should be remembered that the Poblenou neighborhood, as well as the Eixample District, are both part of the urban complex designed from a unitary conception, by Ildefons Cerdà.
Going deeper into this notion of a unitary, equitable city thought of as a whole, it would be logical to deduce that if we could move a part of the offices that currently occupy the upper floors of the Eixample District to Poblenou, we would not only facilitate the occupation of the empty spaces in this neighborhood, but at the same time, by emptying the Eixample homes of offices, the residential supply in this District would increase, lowering its price.
It goes without saying that, indirectly, the environmental conditions of the center of Eixample would also be improved, by reducing the traffic load in this sector, in addition to eliminating part of the motorcycle parking and thus recovering public space for pedestrians. Taking a walk through the center of Eixample on a holiday, with practically no motorcycles on the sidewalks, allows us to imagine the enjoyment of five-meter sidewalks. expedited for pedestrian use (if the bar terraces do not prevent it).
Finally, many of the currently unused ground floors would be favored by a demand from companies or professionals who, for some reason, did not want to go to 22@, and this despite the support measures that the City Council could provide to encourage them to move.
In this sense, it is worth insisting on the impossibility, or in the best case the irrelevance of the fact of being able to transform the ground floor into housing, within the whole of the city of Barcelona projected by Cerdà. Its configuration, with a block of 113 x 113 meters. between axes of parallel streets, implies having a distance between facades of two opposite streets of 93 meters. and a built depth on the ground floor of each of the buildings of approximately between 30 and 36 meters.
If we take into account that each property has its corresponding staircase, which reduces the ventilation surface for a hypothetical home, and that the light wells never reach street level, the impossibility of complying with the minimum habitability conditions can be confirmed. and consequently, the unviability of this measure, which some have dared to propose to increase the housing stock in the area.
Housing is therefore a problem that affects Poblenou and also Eixample without distinction. In the first case, it is an office neighborhood that lacks a sufficient number of homes. In the second, because it was a residential neighborhood that is being converted into an office neighborhood.
The first, with an average family income of 38,742 euros, according to the personal income tax declaration and published by the Tax Agency made from the declarations made in 2017, is far from the income declared by families residing in the best-rated Eixample and more tertiary (Passeig de Gràcia - Rambla Catalunya, 61,880; or Diagonal - Provença, 60,477 euros).
However, while in Poblenou family income will continue to fall, distancing itself even further from the richest neighborhoods of the city (all homes in the 22@ District are planned for low-income families), in some sectors of Eixample family income will continue to grow, due to the reduction of the residential stock to the benefit of the office sector and the increase in the price of the few homes that will be maintained.
At this point it is worth asking ourselves if it would not be necessary to take measures to accommodate offices from Eixample and increase the residential park for families with average incomes in the 22@ sector and, in parallel, recover the floors above the main one to repurpose them for housing and facilitate the transfer of offices from Eixample to El Poblenou. Both neighborhoods would benefit and with them the city as a whole.
