“It made me so angry that I almost broke my mobile phone.” VÃctor Rodrigo was browsing TikTok when the all-knowing algorithm served him a video of a student from the United States who had just arrived in Barcelona. “POV you’re going to live in Barcelona and this is the view from your window”, said the TikTok, with background music by Quevedo and Bizarrap. The balcony in question, which 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 cannot afford it and because almost the entire building is dedicated to tourist or seasonal rentals.
The 27-year-old journalist wrote a tweet: “I had to see how me and my friends, born in Poblenou, left the neighborhood because we couldn’t pay the poor rents imposed thanks to the expansion of the 22@” , which multiplied on the web and was filled with comments from other young people like him who can only see the apartments they would like to live in, close to where their parents and grandparents live, in the streets they have known since childhood , if they open TikTok.
VÃctor, Natán, Josep, Anna and Laia have known each other all their 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 landscape that has disappeared. To begin with, his school, Montseny, is no longer where it was. The concerted center moved to a new building twenty years ago. Now it is in front of an Aparto, a luxury residence for students where the price of the room is close to 1,400 euros a month. The centre, which belongs to a British chain, and has a gym and rooftop pool, is one of many such centers that have opened in the neighborhood in recent years, dodging City Council regulations that limit expansion of hotels, but which in practice also works as a pension for short stays. Aparto is not even the most luxurious of these residences. In Vita, located in Sancho de Ãvila, the room with kitchenette costs more than 2,200 euros per month, and does not have 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 will become an office building, following the planning of the 22@ (a term to designate the area that everyone detests and which for them is synonymous with denaturalization of Poblenou). They also mourn the loss of La Terrassa, a bar in Bogatell where they used to hang out and which will become offices. They no longer tend to sit in bars or even on a bench in the Rambla del Poblenou, among other things because this does not guarantee them, as before, meeting friends and acquaintances. “Before it was impossible to cross the promenade without bumping into someone, now there are only guiris. And in the bars there we are no longer the target audience. They’ve opened a branch of a place that’s in Enric Granados and they charge you six euros for beer”, laments Natán. They joke about the fact that, in the absence of an Ametller Origen, the local supermarket famous for its high prices and gourmet products, they have opened three along the Rambla.
They estimate that none of their friends, from higher or later years, former students of their school or other centers in the neighborhood 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 around 13 months to get access to an official shelter, 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 for sale for 807,000 euros and a 3-room, 93 square meter flat for 631,000. “You need three lives to pay for it,” comments VÃctor. These are not isolated cases. Eduardo Fortes, a real estate advisor who has been working in the area since 2015, confirms that in this interval, less than a decade, prices have doubled, especially in terms of rent. “The flats for which you paid 900 euros in 2016 are now 1,800”. Landlords, he says, prefer to rent for temporary stays of up to eleven months to maximize their earnings and a quick look at Idealista makes it clear: there are plenty of flats on offer for temporary rentals, many around 2,500 euros for homes of less than 90 square meters.
“The people here can’t pay the rents. What we have are many English, French, Nordics, people who telework or who have very well-paid jobs in the 22@ and they all ask for flats on the Rambla, Pujades, Marià Aguiló or already on the promenade. We have experienced situations where a flat goes for 1,500 euros and you are offered 1,800 to keep it at first, because there is little supply”, summarizes Fortes.
It’s nothing that hasn’t happened in other areas of Barcelona, ​​but the neighborhood has its particularities. The former factory district is going through its third wave of gentrification in just 30 years. The area was already transformed with the creation of the neighboring Vila OlÃmpica and changed again when, in 2000, the 22@ was conceptualized as a way of converting these former factory premises into headquarters for technological companies. All of this 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. We were driven out by the crisis of 2008. We had a flat in Pere IV for which I think they paid about a thousand euros. Now those flats, with the Melià hotel next door and the Sala Beckett, have prices that no one in my family could afford”, 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 went get a “very small and uncomfortable” studio for which he paid almost 900 euros. It didn’t last long.
Laia works as a waitress “in a pretty cool vermuteria”, which means that out of all of them she is the one who gets along the most with the new neighbors of the neighborhood, to whom she serves croquettes at 2.50 each and tables of cold cuts of more than 20 euros There isn’t too much friction with the new temporary neighbors, who sometimes walk barefoot with their neoprene on and their surfboard under their arm, on Bogatell Road. This and that of eating portions of pizza in 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 one from Barcelona, ​​out of about ten or twelve students, among whom were Australians and Japanese. “The teacher asked if we could do the class in English, and he didn’t do anything to me, but, of course, I’m in my neighborhood and I’d like to be able to express myself in Catalan.”
