The beginnings of an issue
Forty years in the past, Barcelona wasn’t excessive on most vacationers’ lists of must-see cities in Europe. However that modified after town hosted the Summer time Olympics in 1992: An infinite public funding in beautifying town coincided with a primary spot on the worldwide stage. A brand new “vacation spot” was born.
Attracted by town’s museums, eating places, structure and Mediterranean shoreline, vacationers arrived from throughout Europe and world wide. By 2019, Barcelona — a metropolis of about 1.6 million — registered over 21.3 million in a single day stays, greater than double the determine from 2005. And that’s not even counting the greater than three million cruise ship passengers who handed by means of town’s port that yr.
When Airbnb arrived in 2009, Barcelona had no particular laws governing personal leases to vacationers, however curiosity within the service was evident: By the center of 2016, there have been some 20,000 listings of each personal rooms and full flats in Airbnb’s Barcelona part, in keeping with knowledge from Inside Airbnb, which tracks listings in cities world wide. The hosts in Barcelona had been working in a type of “grey market” in these early years of progress: It wasn’t explicitly authorized, nor was it clearly forbidden.
However as vacationer numbers grew, so, too, did the sense amongst many in Barcelona that town was nearing its capability for guests. In the summertime of 2014, anti-tourism protests erupted within the Barceloneta neighborhood, the place locals had grown pissed off with the noise and raucous conduct of tourists who had come to social gathering. Anti-tourism graffiti sprouted up, typically in standard vacationer spots, and in 2017, a gaggle of left-wing activists vandalized an open-top bus stuffed with vacationers. Many residents — in addition to some at Metropolis Corridor — pointed the finger at Airbnb.
“For a very long time, tourism was seen as nothing however a constructive factor for town, however now we’re beginning to really feel all the impacts,” stated Mar Santamaría Varas, a Barcelona-based architect and co-founder of 300.000 Km/s, an city planning company. With regard to vacationer lodging, she added that her evaluation has revealed three important issues: gentrification, crowding in public areas, and the disappearance of nook shops and different retailers which are important for residents.
Airbnb maintains that non-public room leases have little to no affect on the provision of native housing, as individuals who hire out personal rooms reside in the identical property. However a research printed final yr within the Journal of City Economics discovered that Airbnb exercise in Barcelona has elevated rents by 7 % and housing costs by 17 % within the neighborhoods which have the very best ranges of exercise on the platform. Within the common neighborhood, the results had been a 1.9 % enhance in hire and a 4.6 % enhance in housing worth.
A brand new period
The 2015 election of Ada Colau as Barcelona’s mayor marked a turning level within the metropolis’s relationship with tourism, ushering within the first actual efforts to control short-term leases. Already well-known in Spain for her work preventing housing evictions, the left-wing Ms. Colau took a a lot more durable line on tourism than her predecessor. Below her management, Metropolis Corridor enacted a moratorium on new vacationer licenses for entire-apartment leases; launched a serious crackdown on unlawful house listings; banned the development of recent accommodations within the metropolis heart; and launched neighborhood-specific guidelines to control the institution of memento retailers and different companies that cater to vacationers.