“It made me so angry that I almost broke my cell phone.” VÃctor Rodrigo was diving into TikTok when the algorithm that knows everything served him a video of an American student recently arrived in Barcelona. “POV you are going to live in Barcelona and this is the view from your windowâ€, said the TikTok, with background music by Quevedo and Bizarrap. The balcony in question, Rodrigo quickly identified, belonged to a flat on the Rambla del Poblenou with Pujades, right in front of the house where he grew up and where he can no longer afford to live, because he can’t afford it and because almost the entire building It is dedicated to tourist or seasonal rentals.
The 27-year-old journalist wrote a tweet – “I have had to see how me and my friends, born in Poblenou, have left the neighborhood because we could not pay the tax-busting rent thanks to the expansion of 22@” – that It multiplied on the network and was filled with mentions from other young people like him who can only see the apartments in which they would like to live, close to where their parents and grandparents live, in the streets they have known since they were children, if they open TikTok.
VÃctor, Natán, Josep, Anna and Laia have known each other their whole lives, from the neighborhood. They all went to the Montseny school and, although they are young (they are 26 or 27 years old), they already know what nostalgia is for a disappeared landscape. To begin with, his school, Montseny, is no longer where it was. The subsidized center moved to a new building twenty years ago. Now he is in front of an Aparto, a luxury residence for students in which the price of the room is around 1,400 euros per month. The center, which belongs to a British chain, and has a gym and swimming pool on the roof, is one of many of this type that have been opened in the neighborhood in recent years, dodging the regulations of the City Council that limit the expansion of hotels , but in practice it also works as a pension for short stays. Aparto is not even the most luxurious of these residences. At Vita, located in Sancho de Ãvila, a room with a kitchenette costs more than 2,200 euros per month, without services such as laundry.
The group of friends is also losing its points of reference. They have just closed the MerlÃn, the nightclub they used to go to as teenagers and which is going to be converted into an office building, following the planning of 22@ (a term to designate the area that everyone hates and which for them is synonymous with the denaturation of Poblenou). They also mourn the loss of La Terrassa, a bar in Bogatell where they used to meet and which will become offices. They no longer usually sit in bars or even on a bench on the Rambla del Poblenou, among other things because that does not guarantee them, as before, meeting up with friends and acquaintances. “Before it was impossible to cross the boulevard without bumping into someone, now there are only foreigners. And in the bars that exist, we are no longer the target. They have opened a branch of a local that is in Enric Granados and they charge you six euros per beer â€, laments Natán. They joke that, in the absence of an Ametller Origen, the local supermarket famous for its high prices and its gourmet products, they have opened three along the Rambla.
They calculate that not a single one of their friends, in higher or later courses, former students of their school or other neighborhood centers such as Voramar or Grèvol, have been able to become independent in the neighborhood, unless it is in flats inherited from grandparents. “There are people who have waited 13 months to get access to subsidized housing, but they are very few,” they say.
On the way from their old school to the Can Saladrigas library, where they used to spend their afternoons, the group stops at the window of a real estate agency. A ground floor with a terrace is sold for 807,000 euros and a 93-square-meter three-bedroom apartment for 631,000. “You need three lives to repay it,” says Victor. They are not isolated cases. Eduardo Fortes, a real estate consultant who has been working in the area since 2015, confirms that in that interval, less than a decade, prices have doubled, especially for rent. “The flats for which in 2016 you paid 900 are now at 1,800.” Landlords, he says, prefer to rent for temporary stays of a maximum of eleven months to maximize their profits, and a quick look at Idealista makes it clear: there are plenty of flats on offer for temporary rentals, many for around 2,500 euros for low-cost homes. less than 90 square meters.
“The people here can’t pay the rent. What we have are many English, French, Nordic people, people who telework or who have highly paid jobs at 22@ and they all ask for flats along the boulevard, Pujades, Marià Aguiló or already on the seafront. We have experienced situations in which a flat is listed at 1,500 and they offer you 1,800 to keep it the first time, because there are few offersâ€, sums up Fortes.
It is nothing that has not happened in other areas of Barcelona, ​​but the neighborhood has its peculiarities. The old factory district is undergoing its third wave of gentrification in just 30 years. The area was already transformed with the creation of the neighboring Vila OlÃmpica and it changed again when, in the year 2000, 22@ was conceptualized as a way of converting those old factory premises into headquarters of technology companies. All of that happened before this latest gentrification, led by digital nomads from the United States and Northern Europe in love with a charming beachside neighborhood.
“My family lived in Besòs, but my parents wanted to try to live closer to Poblenou. The crisis of 2008 expelled us. We had a flat in Pere IV for which I think they paid about a thousand euros. Now those apartments, with the Melià hotel next door and the Beckett room, have prices that no one in my family could assumeâ€, explains Natán. VÃctor Rodrigo’s parents also had to leave Poblenou for Sant Martà about eight years ago, when their landlady decided to raise the prices, and Laia’s mother, when she separated, only got a “very small and uncomfortable” studio for the who paid almost 900 euros. It didn’t last long.
Laia works as a waitress “in a pretty cool vermouth bar”, so she is the one who lives the most with the new residents of the neighborhood, to whom she serves croquettes for 2.50 each and sausage tables for more than 20 euros. There is not much friction with the new temporary residents, who sometimes walk barefoot with their wetsuits on and a surfboard under their arms, on their way to Bogatell. That and eating slices of pizza on the street are two of the new visions of the neighborhood that shock them the most.
Anna recently signed up for a ceramics course and found that she was the only Barcelonan, out of about ten or twelve students, including Australians and Japanese. “The teacher asked if we could do the class in English, and I didn’t mind, but, of course, I’m in my neighborhood and I would like to be able to express myself in Catalanâ€.
