The city that parked in the bus lane when the clock struck ten at night has been changing its physiognomy for years. Between bicycles everywhere and new squares bounded by bollards, Valencia is redrawing itself more designed for people than for cars, as the local government insists on explaining.
But in this transition to a new model, not always easy, there are streets that have been losing surface parking spaces and not all of them have an affordable, nearby garage available to residents. It happened on Avenida Pérez Galdós, one of the arteries of the city, where a small parking area became a small square with wooden tables for use and enjoyment and its disappearance -together with the attractiveness of the area on weekend nights week- stresses parking in the neighborhood now.
One solution is to look for private parking. A quick filter on the Idealista portal adds up to 1,394 offers of garages for sale and another 649 for rent in the city, and the latter with a price ranging from 20-25 euros for motorcycles, going through about 40 euros in spaces for small cars up to 200 euros that can be paid in central streets, such as Lauria or Colón. It is only a first approximation of the private offer available, since the platform does not have global data and its is not an official registry.
From Fotocasa, however, based on their announcements, they do appreciate how the demand has been “quite stable” for a few years. From the platform they point out that searches for garage spaces for sale are stable, “and perhaps where we see an increase is in garages for rent, but it is not a very notable increase either. What perhaps we do see is that the supply is declining.â€
In their latest balance sheets, they show that the price of garages for rent in Spain has risen by 2.09% in one year and in the city of Valencia, by 4.4%. The average price of garages for sale has also grown, in this case up to 14.5% in Spain, while in Valencia the price has increased by 35.5%, being the second city, behind Logroño, where the most has become more expensive According to his calculations, a year ago Spaniards paid an average of 10,152 euros for a garage, compared to the 11,619 euros paid on average in the last year.
After the consultation was transferred to the real estate agents, the president of the Association of Real Estate Agents of the Valencian Community (Asicval), Nora GarcÃa, explains that there is no “excessive movement” in the parking spaces because, she argues, “people are not willing to pay exorbitant prices in this regardâ€. She agrees with Fotocasa’s perceptions that there is no increase in demand, although she does acknowledge that “if offers come out at a reasonable price, they are sold quickly, but those at a higher price are not being sold.” Other sources in the sector speak of an increase in demand, but the representative sample is smaller.
So stable supply, stable demand, and rising prices? With the fever of pedestrianization, in Valencia many surface parking spaces have disappeared. The city has nine public car parks, one of which, on Avenida del Oeste, is the best valued in the Parclick application, which brings together the parking offer to make online reservations. It ensures that the cheapest car park in Valencia is that of Severo Ochoa, next to the Mestalla stadium and a few meters from the Clinical Hospital.
The socialist Sandra Gómez has led these years, from the Department of Urban Planning, the pedestrianization of numerous squares and streets in the city and not without some controversy, but with examples that are now successful, such as the Plaza de Brujas or the Plaza del Segrelles painter.
In this regard, Gómez assures this newspaper that “it is true that the consequence of gaining public space has a direct consequence, which is that you are removing outdoor parking. However, there is an issue that I also want to vindicate and that is that this government, although surely more will have to be done, has generated new underground parking lots that did not exist beforeâ€.
Gómez focuses on the redirection work that he is doing so that instead of parking on the surface it is parked underground and an example is the administrative procedure that the Valencia City Council began two weeks ago to put 72 parking spaces up for public auction Municipally owned, in Campanar and Benimaclet, car parks, some of them with storage rooms, to which all citizens can attend.
Meanwhile, in CompromÃs, the candidate Joan Ribó proposes, if he reissues his mandate, to provide 2,009 parking spaces in five neighborhoods: Ciutat Fallera, Malilla, la Fonteta, Nou Moles and Tormos. Ribó assures that his intention to transform the city by giving “quality space for people” implies distributing the space “and removing a part of the space dedicated to the car in the streets”, but he believes that this has to be done by giving solutions to the public “His proposal seeks spaces that are not currently being used to generate parking spaces for residents, such as taking advantage of a 722-square-meter municipal plot in the Aguja neighborhood, in Nou Moles.
For their part, the Popular Party is critical of this management of public space and maintains that the municipal government began from day one “a battle against private vehicles, which has meant the elimination of more than 10,000 parking spaces.”
In this sense, the popular candidate, MarÃa José Catalá, proposes a plan to recover parking spaces in the city, as she assures that “this crusade against the residents who every day have more difficulties to park in their neighborhood and that the government of Ribó and PSOE forces them to have to rent and pay for a place. You cannot eliminate places that are most affected by residents with fewer resources to be able to pay for a place whose cost in many neighborhoods exceeds 1,200 euros a year, about 100 euros a month, â€says the candidate.
