Barcelona’s
war on tourists
Locals
feel they are being priced out by the visiting hordes, and the mayor
agrees.
By DIEGO
TORRES 11/22/16, 8:45 PM CET Updated 11/23/16, 6:09 AM CET
BARCELONA — The
battle lines in Barcelona have been drawn. On one side, the masses of
tourists who flock to the city every year. On the other, locals fed
up with rising rents, crowded streets, drunken antics and expensive
bars. The city’s mayor feels their pain.
“We don’t want
the city to become a cheap souvenir shop,” said Ada Colau, who came
to power in 2015 and has been described as “the world’s most
radical mayor.”
Colau made her name
campaigning against the increasing number of evictions and
foreclosures in Spain after the financial crisis, before turning her
sights on the tourism industry. Her local election campaign examined
the “tourist bubble” and promised to bring the situation under
control, propelling her leftist coalition — Barcelona en Comú
(Barcelona in Common) — to victory.
It’s a difficult
game to play. Barcelona gets around 30 million visitors a year,
according to local government figures, bringing in a huge amount of
money to the city of 1.6 million. The impact those tourists are
having on rental prices, however, is a major concern for locals, with
opinion polls putting it as the second biggest problem for residents,
after unemployment.
“We don’t want a
city only for tourists,” said Colau from her office in city hall,
using crowded Venice as an example of what she doesn’t want
Barcelona to become.
The mayor said her
city will always be welcoming to visitors, but the tourism industry
is driving up rents and forcing out locals. She wants a new model
that encourages sustainable tourism and benefits all local people,
not just the wealthy, while preserving the traditional features of
Barcelona’s old neighborhoods.
The question is:
Does such a model exist?
For decades, cities
have sought new ways to promote tourism. Little research has been
carried out into how to manage tourism that is disrupting the local
population.
If Colau can make it
work, authorities in the likes of Hong Kong, Venice and Amsterdam
will be very interested. Citizens in all three have been putting
politicians under increasing pressure to strike a balance between the
economic advantages of tourism and its less welcome side-effects,
against a backdrop of massive global travel growth and the
development of disruptive technologies.
The not-sharing
economy
Colau approved a
series of controversial measures after taking power: She froze
handing out licenses for all new hospitality establishments,
including hotels and private apartments — despite 15,000 pending
requests — and launched an assault on short-term rentals through
sites such as Airbnb, which she blames for the lack of affordable
housing in the city.
The town hall
slapped Airbnb with a €30,000 fine for advertising unlicensed
vacation homes — a spokesman for the U.S.-based company said
Barcelona was the first city in the world to fine Airbnb — and has
threatened to increase the penalty to €600,000 if the firm refuses
to play ball.
Colau also created a
20-strong team dedicated to scouring the internet in search of
illegal tourist apartments, who then go door to door hunting down
lawbreakers. She also encouraged citizens to report neighbors who
rent out their apartments without the correct paperwork.
In July and August,
the town hall reported that 615 illegal tourist apartments in the
city had been located and their owners fined €30,000 each and
ordered to cease and desist.
The effect of these
measures is yet to be seen. The number of hotel guests in Barcelona
grew by 5.4 percent in 2015 and long-term rental prices have
increased by 30 percent since Colau became mayor. The growth in
Madrid, where no such measures have been introduced, was 19 percent
over the same period, according to the real-estate website Idealista.
Colau’s crackdown
has generated fierce opposition from the hospitality business and
Colau’s political opponents, who fear she will kill the goose that
lays the golden egg. Tourism generates between 10 and 12 percent of
Barcelona’s economic output and 14 percent of jobs in the city.
“She’s put many
new investments at risk in a city whose main industry is tourism,”
said Carina Mejías, who leads centrist opposition Ciudadanos’
group in the town hall and labels Colau a “radical-left populist.”
“It is
disappointing to see the city hall intimidate locals with archaic
rules that threaten an economic lifeline for thousands,” said
Andreu Castellano, a spokesman for Airbnb in Barcelona, referring to
letters sent to citizens encouraging them to snitch on their
neighbors.
Representatives of
the sharing economy argue that the city hall makes no distinction
between people who rent out a room in their own house on a short-term
basis and those who rent out a whole empty house.
They also complain
that the number of holiday homes is too small to be blamed for rising
rents. Airbnb has 22,000 advertisements listed in Barcelona, a city
with around 1 million houses.
Even international
organizations are concerned about the path the city is taking. “The
world is looking at Barcelona,” said Taleb Rifai, the head of the
United Nations’ organization for tourism (UNWTO), adding that the
city has become a “global icon” and a case study on how to
successfully promote tourism.
“Please don’t
let us down,” Rifai said.
Priced out, driven
out
Colau’s message
has, however, found fertile ground among neighbors who complain about
the negative impact of tourism.
María Montero, a
38-year-old physiotherapist who pays €575 a month for a
30-square-meter studio in Sant Antoni (at the edge of the city
center), has been living in Barcelona for 20 years.
Montero said she has
been forced to change her usual bike ride to work in order to avoid
the huge crowds of sightseers on the iconic La Rambla, and she avoids
the Gothic Quarter altogether because of the tourists, the high
prices and the awful service. She said she once sat at a bar in the
Rabal Quarter and was unable to order a beer in Spanish or Catalan,
because the waiter could only speak English.
Local data shows
that over the past eight years the Ciutat Vella district, which
covers the entire city center, has seen its population drop by 11
percent. In some areas, the numbers are even more dramatic: the
Gothic Quarter lost 45 percent of its inhabitants in the same period.
Even the tourists
complain. According to a poll carried out by city hall, 58 percent of
visitors said that Barcelona is too crowded.
Rifai of the UN
warned against policies designed to appease the anti-tourist
sentiment of locals, such as opposing limits on the number of
tourists that can enter the city and the freezing of licenses for new
hotels.
Instead, Rifai said,
problems can be solved through higher taxes on hospitality businesses
in the city center, in order to encourage tourists to go to the
periphery. “It’s called crowd-management […] and that’s the
way Barcelona should go,” he said.
Colau favors a more
direct approach. In March, she pushed a plan which forbids any new
tourist license in the whole of Ciutat Vella and some other areas
close to the city center.
The plan — which
is still being negotiated and has come under fire from opposition
politicians — would force any new business to the outskirts of the
city. While the plan is being debated, the ban on all new licenses
continues to apply.
Manel Casals, head
of traditional hospitality business association Gremi d’Hotels de
Barcelona, said the plan is too restrictive. However, he supports
the crackdown on Airbnb and the like.
Barcelona “needs
to chose between becoming the next Detroit or the next Venice,”
said Fernando Encinar, co-founder of Idealista. He said Barcelona had
invested a lot over decades to promote itself as a tourist
destination and has no viable alternative.
Colau is adamant she
is doing the right thing, saying that tourism reminds her of the
real-estate bubble she fought hard against as an activist. “The
only battle that is lost is that that we don’t fight,” she said.
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