The annulment of the special urban planning plan for tourist accommodation (Peuat) of Ada Colau's mandate has turned the granting of tourist apartment licenses into a strainer. If the intention of the previous executive was to limit and restrict the opening of new hotel establishments and stop the proliferation of tourist apartments in the center of the city, the errors that have been detected in the drafting of the plan - which did not have a economic report on the impact of the measures – and the subsequent judicial action have caused the opposite effect.
Since in 2019 the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) decreed the nullity of the Peuat until today, justice has forced the City Council to authorize the granting of the tourist license for all the apartments that have tendered In total, 615 tourist flats have been authorised, according to data provided by the City Council to La Vanguardia. And there are still 271 cases pending in court, which could raise the number of new tourist apartments to 886. Because of all this, the housing stock of this kind in the city will go from 9,189 in 2021 to 10,075 next months. This represents a growth of almost 10% during Colau's tenure. The City Council regrets that there has been this rift and considers that, "in a housing emergency, Barcelona cannot afford to have 10,000 tourist flats".
The Consistory, after receiving the verdict of the TSJC, is in charge of notifying the Tourism Registry of Catalonia, which depends on the Ministry of Business. Here, the numbers differ, albeit slightly. According to the department, the City Council has announced the registration of 675 new tourist licenses from 2021 to 2023, 60 more than what the City Council says. According to Government data, six were registered in 2021; in 2022, 144, and in 2023, 525.
In any case, the trickle of judgments that give the right to the owners does not stop. The City Council's legal services admit that the annulment of the Peuat has meant "the massive dictation of judgments and judicial resolutions that declare null the inadmissions" of the City Council with respect to the owners who applied for the license. They express this in a written response to the Junts municipal group.
The ban opened with several judgments handed down in 2019 by the TSJC declaring the urban plan null and void. The City Council presented an appeal to the Supreme Court which was dismissed two years later. The ruling was final in 2021 and the City Council approved a new plan that came into effect in January 2022. These two years were the window that thousands of owners took advantage of to apply for new licenses, although most they presented the documentation in the first fifteen days before the City Council presented the appeal. They argued that, if the urban plan was void, it meant that it was not valid and that the restrictions on applying for new tourist licenses did not exist. In the Eixample alone, for example, 1,136 communications were submitted by owners informing them that they would start carrying out the activity. Following this avalanche of communications, the City Council dismissed them with the argument that the plan was still valid.
Some owners resorted to justice, which finally gives them the right. The most striking case was that of the block of flats on Carrer Tarragona, owned by Inmobiliaria Gallardo, where the City Council had to authorize the opening of 120 homes in the same block. The issue is that the same real estate company has obtained a total of 237 new tourist licenses thanks to this gap, according to Government data.
The City Council undertakes to deploy more tools "to regulate and restrict this activity" and positively values the decree-law approved by the Government to "order and limit the activity of housing for tourist use". From Junts, the spokesman, Jordi Martí Galbis, reprimands that "the Peuat was a big mess and that the negligence and ineptitude of the Colau-Collboni government has caused the opposite effect of what was intended".
The more than 800 tourist flats that will end up being included in Barcelona's offer are even more than what was projected by the ERC municipal group, which calculated that 774 homes had been "sneaked in". Esquerra demands the approval of an ordinance that regulates the conditions of tourist apartments.
