The debate on the proliferation of tourist apartments (which cannot be separated from the increase in housing prices) will be one of the workhorses of the legislature. València has already surpassed the figure of more than 10,000 tourist apartments, according to data from Visit València, with an increase of 38.6% in the city as a whole.
A problem that is not exclusive to the city of Valencia. Yesterday, the mayor of Madrid, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, at the press conference after the Government Meeting, announced that the City Council that he presides over has decided to suspend the granting of new licenses for housing for tourist use in the city, while is working on approving the modification to the General Plan, which is expected to be completed in early 2025.
A decision that the mayor of Valencia, María José Catalá, does not rule out that it can be copied, although she anticipates that the suspension of licenses is a complicated process. "I'm not ruling anything out, because I don't want illegal tourist apartments to proliferate, we want controlled growth and quality tourism," Catalá explained. Compromís encouraged him to do it and to look to Madrid not only to make mascletàs.
Yesterday the socialists in the City Council reviewed the data by neighborhood and warned that the increase has not only occurred in the most tourist areas (which could already be at the limit of their growth), but in the peripheral neighborhoods, which have grown by 67 %. The most striking cases are those of Benicalap and Ciutat Fallera (which has grown by 107% from 76 to 157 apartments); Saïda and Marxalenes (98%); Rascanya and Torrefiel (69%); o Olivereta and Patraix (65%).
PSPV councilor Borja Sanjuán regretted the "carelessness and open bar" of the current government team and warned of the problems that could be caused in terms of housing if the emergence of tourist apartments spread to all the neighborhoods of the city. “There is not a single neighborhood that is not being stressed in its housing prices due to the effect of tourist apartments and the government of María José Catalá cannot continue to be a denialist of the problem of tourist apartments,” said the mayor.
Along these lines, Sanjuán recalled that the previous Rialto government "prepared a moratorium" to immediately prohibit the opening of more tourist apartments "and Catalá has done nothing."
Curiously, the first to come out against the PSPV's words were its former government partners in the City Council. The current spokesperson for Compromís, Papi Robles, "welcomed" the PSPV for requesting a moratorium on licenses in tourist apartments and recalled that her coalition had been fighting for this moratorium since the previous mandate. However, Robles now considers that this is no longer enough and she asked Catalá to support the Tourist Apartment Restriction Plan that the coalition presents today.
For her part, the mayor of València disgraced the previous government for "in the last eight years neither an ordinance nor an inspection was made to stop illegal activity." Regarding the possibility of copying the proposal of her party colleague in Madrid, the first mayor explained that "in order to be able to suspend licenses, the 1989 PGOU must be modified." However, she reiterated: "I'm not ruling anything out."
