Bye-bye locals: Europe's cities sound
alarm
Hordes of tourists fill the city centres, while residents
have deserted buildings full of history to make way for quaint hotels and
tourist rentals - an issue that affects popular spots Europe-wide.
Venice considers capping
tourist numbers to reduce crowds
Memories of the past come flooding back as Manuel Mourelo
strolls through Barcelona's picturesque Gothic Quarter: children playing, fun
with the neighbours, traditional bars... But now, "all of that has
disappeared." Hordes of tourists fill the narrow, winding alleys on guided
tours, bike and Segway rides, while residents have deserted buildings full of
history to make way for quaint hotels and tourist rentals - an issue that
affects popular spots Europe-wide.
Last year, Mourelo himself joined the exodus out of a
district he had lived in since 1962 when he came to the Spanish seaside city
from Galicia in the northwest. The flat he had been renting for 25 years was
sold to an investor and he was evicted. Having paid 500 euros ($560) a month in
rent, he was unable to find anything else affordable in the area. "They
were asking for 1,000, 1,200, 1,500 euros," says the 76-year-old, his face
framed by thick glasses and a bushy moustache. "This was my village. I had
it all here, my friends, my shops, I got married here, my children were born
here, and I thought I would die here. "I feel displaced," he adds,
his eyes welling up.
According to the city hall, the fixed population in the
Gothic district so loved by tourists has dropped from 27,470 residents in 2006
to just 15,624 at the end of 2015. Now, 63 percent are "floating"
residents - tourists or people in short-term lets. At the same time, according
to real-estate website Idealista, rental prices in Ciutat Vella, where the
Gothic Quarter is located, have gone from 14.4 to 19 euros per square metre in
just two years.
Rising rental prices, noise and crowds jostling for space in
the streets and the disappearance of traditional, everyday stores have all
contributed to forcing people out for economic reasons... or due to sheer
frustration.
The arrival of Airbnb and other such home-renting platforms
has only aggravated the problem, locals say. "We're not talking about
gentrification, about substituting the original population by another more
wealthy one," says Gala Pin, a councillor in Ciutat Vella. "We're
talking about the historic centre emptying out."
For sociologist Daniel Sorando, co-author of "First We
Take Manhattan," an essay that analyses the phenomenon in various cities,
the trend is towards "urban centres conceived as machines to make money
while the working classes are displaced outside." The problem also affects
cities further afield.
In Paris, concerned residents of the 4th district, where
Notre-Dame Cathedral is located, organised a symposium on the "invisible
desertification" of city centres in March. The city hall in the French
capital said earlier this year that it had lost 20,000 housing units in five
years, partly to tourist rentals. This contributes to a "rise in
prices" and a "drop in the population," Ian Brossat, in charge
of housing for Paris' city hall, told.
In Amsterdam, meanwhile, the ING bank found that owners
could earn 350 euros more per month with seasonal rentals, pushing the prices
up, Senne Janssen, author of the study, told.
To try and remedy the situation, Paris, London and Amsterdam
want to regulate the duration of rentals and register all flats and houses
being used for short-term lets in order to better control them.
In Berlin, people are only allowed to rent out one room in
their home since last year, and the whole flat or house if it is a secondary or
occasional use pied-a-terre.
Barcelona, whose mayor Ada Colau is a former anti-eviction
housing activist, has chosen to be even more strict. The city hall last year
imposed a 600,000-euro fine on home rental platforms Airbnb and HomeAway for
marketing lodgings that lacked permits to host tourists.
But Airbnb Spain says housing problems existed before. In
Ciutat Vella, for instance, "there is three times more empty accommodation
(that is not being rented out) than accommodation ads on Airbnb," says
Spain spokesman Andreu Castellano. And research in cities like Berlin, Los
Angeles, London and Barcelona into occupancy shows that "the amount of
accommodation put online for purely professional use (rented out more than 120
days a year) is too low to have an impact," Airbnb adds.
Hard data on the impact of seasonal rentals on accommodation
prices are few and far between, but all experts questioned said these could
worsen the situation in already saturated areas.
Barcelona has been particularly hard hit by a rise in prices
as investors are attracted by the profitability of a city that sees some 30
million visitors annually. Sergi Leiva, of real-estate firm MK Premium, says
half of his clients are foreigners, who are looking for a second home or a good
investment. And for those who hold on tight despite the prices, life is far
from peaceful with the crowds, noise and lack of convenience stores. "If
the prices don't throw you out, daily pressure does," says Marti Cuso, a
27-year-old local activist in Barcelona. Raised in the district, he is the only
one among his friends to still live there. For Socorro Perez, an expert in
human geography, the outcome is "cities without residents, dead districts."
"Cities transform into 'clusters' of entertainment and consumption, into
tourism fast food."
is/ks (afp)
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