The Generalitat has approved by decree the regulation with which it hopes to reduce the number of homes for tourist use in Catalonia. The new regulation, which will have to be ratified by Parliament, obliges owners to obtain a planning license within a maximum period of five years to continue operating and to renew it every five years. The regulation sets a maximum limit of ten flats for tourist use for every 100 inhabitants, which entails, at least, the cancellation of 28,000 tourist rentals in the 47 municipalities that already exceed this ratio.
The decree, which La Vanguardia advanced on Saturday, November 4, particularly affects the municipalities of the coast, the Pyrenees and Barcelona and its metropolitan area. Once it is ratified in Parliament, the town councils will have to modify their urban planning to set the amount of this type of flats they want to absorb depending on the available land and the difficulty of access to residential housing that they consider to be suffering your municipality.
In practice, the decree provides a tool for councils to liquidate, if they consider it so, the activity of tourist rentals if they do not include this use in their respective urban planning. The regulation will have to be applied in 262 municipalities, which are those that have a tight rental market (140) or that have more than five homes for tourist use for every hundred inhabitants (134) or both circumstances at the same time.
If a municipality establishes in its planning more than five homes for tourist use for every hundred inhabitants, it will have to justify that it has a surplus of land, that the residential use is sufficiently equipped and that there is availability to use it for tourist rental. In any case, the Catalan Urban Planning Commission, which is in charge of ratifying municipal urban planning, will have the last word.
"We will use all the tools at our disposal to contribute to solving the problems of accessing residential rental; we work to enforce a fundamental right such as access to housing", reiterated Councilor Ester Capella yesterday after the approval of the decree. "Many municipalities have had to regulate, each as they could and not in a homogeneous way; now what the Generalitat has done is get to work. Many asked for a regulation like this", he added.
The minister hopes that the entry into force of the decree will be as soon as possible. From this moment, the owners of the apartments will have five years to legalize them. The regulation also establishes a five-year period for renewing permits and the list of affected municipalities, which can grow or decrease depending on the needs that are established. "The councils will have to establish, guaranteeing free competition, which formula they apply to authorize or not tourist flats. We grant the license but we cannot interfere in the municipal autonomy", specified Capella.
The Generalitat calculates that the obligation to obtain the new license affects a total of 95,094 existing flats in these 262 affected municipalities. In 47 – the Ministry did not specify which ones – the proportion of tourist flats exceeds 10 per 100 inhabitants, which implies the reduction of at least 28,000 tourist rentals, to which will be added those that each City Council decides in its new urban planning.
In the case of Barcelona, the first deputy mayor, Laia Bonet, was yesterday satisfied with the regulation, "because it goes in the right direction". "We were consulted and we were able to work on the document", he said. "The City Council makes the option of being able to guarantee that the main use of the homes must be this and not an economic use", added Bonet, who assured that "we will start working on the implementation of this tool", without specifying how or how much they will reduce the number of tourist rentals in the city.
