The Santa Coloma de Gramenet City Council has taken the decision to suspend the procedures for granting new licenses for flats for tourist use for one year. In the meantime, an interdepartmental study commission will be created from which a proposal will emerge so that the municipal council can modify the city’s commercial uses plan.
Santa Coloma has 82 homes for tourist use, 65 of which are for flats and houses and 17 with an aparthotel license. In addition, it has two hotels and two guesthouses. However, in recent years they have started to receive new requests which, they believe, could cause a strong distortion of the housing market, increase access to rental prices and promote gentrification processes. In the same way, there may be effects on the rest and coexistence of the neighbors.
In this sense, Barcelona has been a clear example of the distortion that is expanding on the municipalities of the metropolitan environment, through the oil slick effect, thanks to an optimal public transport network. Santa Coloma, just thirty minutes from the center of Barcelona, ??has received numerous inquiries related to tourist activities in recent years, especially regarding establishments for this use and shared housing, but also many more related to accommodation.
The city already has a regulation of the rules for obtaining this kind of license, but in view of the possibility that this phenomenon will become a real problem, and in accordance with the decree approved by the Generalitat that mentions this same problem, they consider it necessary to study and analyze a new local regulation in order to respond to the risks and threats to the housing situation in the city.
The government chaired by the socialist mayor Núria Parlon has paralyzed new licences, once the Generalitat has promoted a new regulation in Catalonia which, among other measures, requires the renewal of each license every five years, through a permit issued by the municipalities themselves. The regulations will come into operation in 262 municipalities that have 95,000 tourist flats, 90% of the total. The new regulations make it a condition for councils to be able to grant more licenses that the municipal urban planning justifies that there is enough land for housing. Licenses will be limited to 10 tourist flats for every 100 inhabitants, a limit exceeded by almost half a hundred municipalities. In these 47 saturated towns, there is an excess of 28,000 tourist apartments that the rule will force to eliminate.
