The plenary session of the Valencia City Council will approve this Tuesday a precautionary suspension of tourist apartment licenses for one year, extendable for another year. The announcement was made this Friday by the mayor of the city, the popular María José Catalá, during a meeting organized by the newspaper Las Provincias.
The mayor has indicated that the moratorium will affect the entire city (there is already one in Ciutat Vella and El Cabanyal has its own regulations) and will be in force while work is being done “with the aim of making good regulation and preventing the proliferation of this phenomenon that affects all large cities.” Catalá has once again called on the central government to coordinate a common framework to address this problem.
As municipal sources have explained to this newspaper, the suspension of the license will be approved through an extraordinary point in the plenary session next Tuesday and will be applied both in communities of owners and in commercial premises. Complete buildings intended to exclusively house tourist apartments will be exempt from this moratorium because “they are an economic activity comparable to a hotel and, therefore, the suspension does not affect them,” the City Council explains.
Already this Thursday, the mayor announced that “it makes sense” to apply a moratorium on tourist apartments until there is legislation that guarantees sustained and sustainable tourism growth. She said this after it became known that the rise of tourist apartments continues unstoppable. In just two months, from February to April, the Visit Valencia portal has recorded an increase in the supply of more than 600 new properties, going from 10,286 to 10,854, an increase of almost 6% in an already very stressed city. Thus, the current available places are now 37,794, 2,500 more than in the previous calculation.
A complaint made yesterday by the PSPV that criticized that the tourist apartments “continue to grow due to the ineffectiveness of María José Catalá who continues without taking measures because she is on the side of the speculators.” The socialist spokesperson, Sandra Gómez, placed emphasis on the growth of tourist apartments “in the neighborhoods of working families.”
In her speech this Friday, Mayor Catalá regretted the ineffectiveness of the previous municipal government of PPSV and Compromís, whom she accused of having done nothing but making counterproductive decisions such as allowing the installation of tourist apartments in commercial basements. The PP leader has pointed out that, on the contrary, there are now up to four teams of inspectors that have allowed 160 closure orders to be issued.
