The recent judicial permit for a real estate agency to transform an entire building of 120 Barcelona homes into tourist apartments was an involuntary torpedo to the housing policy of Ada Colau’s municipal government. The mayoress raised the tone demanding the Government, which is the one that has the powers in this matter, to open the door so that the licenses for tourist apartments can be revoked. The demand fell on deaf ears, which is why En Comú Podem has decided to take a bill to Parliament with measures to limit this type of housing.
The bill, presented this Wednesday by the president of the parliamentary group of the commons, Jéssica Albiach, and the deputy mayor for Urban Planning of the Barcelona City Council, Janet Sanz, aims to reform the current norm to toughen the permit to allocate a home to private use tourism throughout Catalonia. Thus, the commons want to return to a license regime valid for three years to allocate a home for tourism purposes and that these properties “can never be located in buildings where they are shared with habitual residence homes.”
The proposal intends to modify the Urban Planning Law of 2010, which was amended the following year by means of the Omnibus Law agreed at that time by CiU and the PP to allow tourist apartments to obtain “for life” -criticize the commoners-, the mandatory permit . The commons want the municipalities to have the ability to revoke these licenses because to date they only have the ability to freeze the number of licenses.
The bill presented provides that the municipalities establish the conditions for granting these licenses and expressly prohibits the granting of licenses in areas declared to be a stressed housing market.
With the modification proposed by the commons, the new licenses would have a duration of three years and the existing ones would also have a moratorium of three years to adapt to the conditions set by each municipality. This “allows us to avoid the million-dollar compensation that extinguishing the current licenses would mean,” Sanz argued at a press conference from Parliament, adding that this would imply that in three years the licenses for the block of 120 homes in Barcelona would be extinguished.
The commons trust that the standard can have the support of ERC and the PSC. Albiach trusted this in his appearance with Sanz demanding that the Republicans agree to “bring order to the disorder” of Junts and to “take advantage” of the fact that the post-convergents are not in the Government. “ERC has no excuses left, it cannot say no,” urged Albiach, who also hopes that “the PSC joins common sense.”
