Closing tourist flats, the latest ‘genius’ idea to curb the ravages of earlier wrong decisions

Closing down tourist flats will not be as easy as recent political announcements suggest. While Barcelona City Council has pledged to eliminate all these flats in five years, Sánchez’s government is considering amending the law so that Airbnb cannot operate in communities where neighbours live. However, these measures could have legal and economic effects not foreseen by their promoters.

At the legal level, legal experts warn that it is not possible to close all the flats in five years, as the mayor of Barcelona, the socialist Jaume Collboni, intends to do. They foresee delays of at least four years with respect to the announced timetable and anticipate a shower of lawsuits from the affected owners, who will demand compensation for what they consider to be an expropriation of their licences, which provide an economic return on their properties.

In economic terms, the consequences would be a loss of jobs and commercial activity derived from the tourists who opt for this type of accommodation. This sector would disappear from the destinations concerned, handing over the tourism monopoly to hotels. Beyond this reduced competition, one of the objectives of these measures, to improve access to housing, is also unrealistic, as the proportion of tourist flats in the total residential stock is minimal.

According to the Catalan employers’ association of tourist flats, Barcelona will lose 1,555 million euros if this measure is implemented, which will only free up 3% of Barcelona’s housing stock. The sources consulted suspect that the decision does not seek to correct the housing emergency, but rather to please the young and left-wing electorate, who support this type of initiative, as well as to align with the hotel businessmen, to whom Collboni has handed over municipal tourism management, in a turnaround from the policies of his predecessor, Ada Colau.

And there is still a third group that the socialist could be seeking to satisfy with the announcement of the closure of flats, motivated by a gesture from the Socialist Party to Esquerra Republicana, who are the ones who really want to eliminate tourist housing in order to get their votes and for the socialist candidate to be the new president of the Generalitat.

It is a very reckless decision with serious consequences that will lead to the impoverishment of families who supplement their income with an Airbnb. Illegal flats and B money are also going to surface, and it may further paralyse investment in housing construction in Barcelona, and there may be a battery of lawsuits by the owners of the flats against this resolution.

Legally, the solution should be to promote more social housing from the city council with effective measures to improve the supply of housing, but prohibiting is a schoolyard measure: you won’t let me play, so I’ll take the ball away from you.

Barcelona City Council plans to eliminate all tourist flats by November 2028. Collboni has to wait nine years and it seems unfeasible to pass an ordinance that would eliminate an entire economic sector. Moreover, what the new Catalan law against tourist flats allows municipalities to do is to limit the number of flats, but in no case to eliminate them. Nor does the five-year deadline seem realistic to him, as this is the time given by law to owners to request the renewal of their licence, but after this date they could apply for a new four-year extension, which means that Collboni would not be able to close a single legal tourist flat for another nine years if he still held the mayor’s office.

Beyond the Barcelona case, in view of the possible government regulation for the whole of Spain, rather than prohibiting, what should be done is to legislate correctly, as this type of measure only has an electoral effect. When the economic profitability of a property is expressly reduced, the owner can claim compensation and, although the law currently allows neighbourhood associations to veto the opening of new tourist flats, it cannot be applied retroactively to close those already in operation.

No tourist flats is in line with satisfying a very specific part of the local population, who remember that in overcrowded destinations such as Catalonia tensions between residents and visitors are on the increase. However, he believes that other more sustainable and community-friendly types of travel, such as home exchange or renting rooms in flats where the owners live, have not been encouraged either.

The few measures that have been taken have remained anecdotal, such as protecting the old trade from disappearing, while those who were truly collaborative, sharing a room and living there were persecuted in a big way, despite the fact that “those owners supervised by the local authorities”.