[imagesource:wikipedia]

Barcelona announced on Friday that it will be stopping apartment rentals to tourists by 2028.

The top Spanish holiday destination is making the drastic move as it seeks to rein in soaring housing costs and make the city liveable for residents.

Barcelona’s left-leaning mayor, Jaume Collboni, announced that by November 2028, the city will revoke the licenses of the 10,101 apartments currently approved for short-term rentals, saying “We are confronting what we believe is Barcelona’s largest problem,” at a city government event, per CNN.

“Those 10,000 apartments will be used by the city’s residents or will go on the market for rent or sale,” Collboni said of the measure.

As Spain’s most visited city by foreign tourists, Barcelona saw a boom in short-term rentals, which basically priced the local residents out. Now, residents cannot afford an apartment after rents rose 68% in the past 10 years and the cost of buying a house rose by 38%, Collboni said. Access to housing has become a driver of inequality, particularly for young people, he added.

While the national governments eagerly embrace the economic windfall of tourism – Spain, for instance, is one of the top three most visited countries globally – the growing trend of local residents being priced out of their neighbourhoods, coupled with gentrification and landlords opting for profitable tourist rentals, is sparking heated debates across Europe.

It’s even beginning here in Cape Town.

To curb this issue, local governments have announced restrictions in the past decade on short-term rentals in places such as Spain’s Canary Islands, Lisbon and Berlin.

Spain’s Socialist housing minister, Isabel Rodriguez, said she supported Barcelona’s decision, but Barcelona’s tourist apartments association APARTUR said in a statement that “Collboni is making a mistake that will lead to (higher) poverty and unemployment,” adding the ban would trigger a rise in illegal tourist apartments.

Perhaps, then, hotels can benefit from the move.

Although the opening of new hotels in the city’s most popular areas was banned by a far-left party governing Barcelona between 2015 and 2023, Collboni has signalled he could relax the restriction.

Barcelona’s local government assured it would maintain its “strong” inspection regime to detect potential illegal tourist apartments once the ban comes into force. The local government has already ordered the shutting of 9,700 illegal tourist apartments since 2016 and close to 3,500 apartments have been recovered to be used as primary housing for local residents, it said.

At least Cape Town has a working model for sorting out a potential housing crisis if push comes to shove with the region’s increased semigration and digital nomad influx.

[source:cnn]