Barcelona City Council has bought three properties from the public company Regesa to expand the social rental offer in the city, at a cost of 10.7 million euros. Together, the Council has acquired 170 flats located in different neighborhoods of the city. Specifically, they are located in Mare de Déu del Port street (La Marina neighborhood, in the Sants-Montjuïc district), in Teodor Llorente street (Guinardó, Horta-Guinardó) and in de la Selva (Porta, Nou Barris ).
The developments that the City Council has now bought were built on municipal land ceded in 2006 to Regesa – a company belonging to the former Barcelona Regional Council and now in the process of divestment in the hands of the Metropolitan Area – for a period of 75 years. However, their protection was only for 30 years, so these homes currently had between 15 and 17 years of public protection left. After this time they could be freely marketed, which is what the municipal government wanted to avoid with this acquisition.
All the homes included in this operation are occupied by 170 tenant families and now become stable and permanent tenants of the municipal public park. The price that the City Council has paid for its acquisition is 17% below the value that the sale of the surface rights would have according to the price of officially protected housing established by the regulations.
This is the second operation of these characteristics carried out by the Barcelona City Council during the current mandate that began in 2019. The previous one occurred in 2021, when it bought 198 homes from Regesa with the same objectives of avoiding privatization and increasing supply social rental in the catalan capital.
The three recently acquired farms are the last in the city that were owned by this company. Now there are only about thirty officially protected homes spread over different developments that could be acquired in the future by the City Council or other public administrations.
