A hundred caravan owners gathered a few days ago in front of Palma City Hall. They were protesting the decision of the municipal government team, of the Popular Party, to approve a new civic ordinance that sets fines of up to 1,500 euros for caravans that remain parked for more than ten days in the same place. And that is a serious problem, because caravan neighborhoods have begun to emerge within the traditional neighborhoods in the city. It’s the new Nomadland.
In one of these neighborhoods that is in full urban development, Son Güells, vehicles have been lining up along streets and streets for several years now. One of his neighbors, Javier González, summarizes at the foot of a caravan part of the serious housing problem that exists in the Balearic Islands. “Before all these people lived in homes; “We are the demonstration of a problem.” The caravan has become the last refuge for around 400 people in Palma who cannot afford a home or even a room.
The average price of renting a room in the Balearic capital is 560 euros, the equivalent of what it costs to rent an apartment in a medium-sized provincial capital. Groups linked to the Platform for People Affected by Mortgages (PAH) in Mallorca assure that there are already advertisements for renting beds in the same shared room.
A few years ago the case of hospitality workers who were forced to rent balconies in Ibiza was widely reported. The price of a room there is 1,060 euros. And this is where another economic derivative is added to the social drift that has caused the increase in housing prices in the Balearic Islands: the lack of workers to cover the needs of a tourism sector with extensive growth.
The community’s tourist success is not distributed equitably, and there are increasingly more poor workers who cannot afford housing costs. In Arenal, one of the traditional tourist areas of Mallorca, the cheapest apartment to rent costs 795 euros per month, according to various real estate portals. They are 40 m2 apartments. On the entire island of Eivissa there are only two apartments that are below 1,000 euros per month.
The price of housing has caused a lack of personnel, and this has unleashed a real war between businessmen to find employees and provide service during the summer season. Alfonso Robledo, from CAEB Restauración, points out that the hiring of personnel has advanced, but even so, employers are having problems finding workers. There are fights to complete the templates.
Some hoteliers already block rooms for their employees, while others have returned to the tourism model of the 1960s and offer housing to their employees. The salary they receive, despite the fact that the Balearic hospitality industry has one of the safest agreements for its employees, is not enough to afford the high standard of living on the islands, which means that many workers have chosen not to come.
Robledo explained a few days ago that last summer there were restaurants that could not even provide morning and night service due to lack of staff.
The Government of Marga Prohens is concerned with this economic derivative of the social housing problem and has just approved specific regulations in search of a solution. The Urgent Measures in Housing Law came into force last week and includes a provision that allows the change of use of plots intended for tourism so that they become residential housing with a series of conditions. The most striking is that they can only be used for housing for workers in the sector, not for the general population.
The buildings, in addition to being intended for tourist personnel, must be for community residential use or with complementary common spaces, so-called coliving or cohousing. The articles of the law specify that these homes will be used to provide accommodation to the employees and management staff of the tourism company in general, without being able to be used for other uses.
The law also includes the possibility that obsolete hotels can be converted into homes. Prohens has said that he will not set the limitation on rental prices that the state Housing Law allows and that the Generalitat of Catalonia has already approved in some stressed areas. The Minister of Housing, Marta Vidal, rejects this possibility. In Parliament she defended that these price limiting measures cause the opposite effect: that there is less housing on the market. According to Vidal, since the law came into force there has been a 30% decrease in rental supply and a quarter of traditional rentals have been diverted to seasonal or room rentals.
The counselor also announced that the Balearic Government is preparing a secure rental program so that part of the 100,000 empty homes in the Balearic Islands come onto the market, according to the latest data from the Housing Census prepared by the National Institute of Statistics. While waiting for the results of the new regulations, caravan residents are asking for solutions to their current problem and assure that they are either allowed to live in their mobile homes or they will have to live on the streets. No one can even pay for a room.
