BarcelonaAlba Sala spends hours checking the application on which days a tourist flat on Carrer Bruc in Barcelona, in Dreta de l’Eixample, will be free. Not that I have any particular interest in booking it. It’s that he lives under it. The nights he’s not booked, he explains, are the nights he knows for sure he’ll be able to sleep. They are not many. “All I want is to rest. Two years ago he had to come and get me an ambulance after three nights without being able to sleep”, he remembers. Insomnia, however, is just one of the headaches that comes with living wall-to-wall with a tourist flat.
In conversation with the ARA, Sala reveals some of the episodes that have taken place over the last year in his block on Carrer Bruc, where, in addition to the one above his house, there is a second tourist floor. Both are legal. “We find everything”, he points out, and begins a peppered account of scenes ranging from remains of urine and excrement on the landings to broken glass bottles in the elevator, empty fire extinguishers on the stairs and wreckage on the porter automatic and on the motorcycle of one of the neighbors. The worst, he says, is the noise. “Many times the tourists who come are groups of young people who organize parties in the flat”, he says. This is corroborated by Esther Roset, who shares her displeasure with Sala: “At times they have even brought prostitutes”, she laments.
Cases similar to those described by Sala and Roset are repeated in other blocks of flats in Barcelona. For example, in Ferran Peris in the Vila Olímpica neighborhood, next to the beach and in a community of neighbors with a swimming pool. A candy for tourists. In his case, he lives downstairs and has a tourist apartment above and another next door. Also both are legal. “They arrive drunk in the morning screaming and continue the party here”, he complains. On his mobile phone there is an audio recorded one morning from his dining room in which you can perfectly hear the music reverberating neighbors’ techno. “One night I even found one pair who was trying to access his flat from my terrace”, he explains.
The recommended protocol in the face of these conflicts involves calling the 24-hour telephone numbers that tourist apartments must have available. These neighbors, however, say that it is not always effective and that many times, in addition to calling the police, they have no other option but to go upstairs and ask for silence. “You draw their attention and you make a commitment”, laments Peris. Sala agrees, who admits that he often climbs in fear of whether the tourists will confront him. In his case, he also claims that, since he reported the case to the media and got the neighborhood community to put the case in the hands of a lawyer, he has received pressure from the agency that manages the apartments tourists from her blog, who has threatened to report her for harassing tourists.
A network of affected
To combat this feeling of helplessness, Sala and Roset are trying to articulate a group of those affected. They hand out leaflets in the mailboxes of Dreta de l’Eixample – a neighborhood where 66% of the beds are already for tourism and where there are 1,700 tourist flats, according to data from the City Council – in which they encourage people who live in flats tourist organizations to organize to put pressure on the institutions and find a solution. In a few weeks they have already obtained dozens of adhesions from other neighbors. One of them is Àlex Soria, who lives closely the situation of an entire block of flats owned by a single person who, just before the City Council restricted licences, registered all the homes as tourist flats despite the fact that still had tenants there. Some of them are old people with an old income who now live with tourist flats next door.
A neighbor of Enric Granados who shares problems, but who prefers to remain anonymous, is not yet part of the network. She lives with a legal tourist flat and a temporary rental flat which, she complains, often “functions as an illegal tourist flat”. He has been taking anxiolytics for a year. Among the tricks used by the apartment owners to avoid being caught by the inspection services, he says, are “letting tourists in and out outside the regular inspection hours” or having a person live in the apartment who is he is in charge of receiving tourists so that it looks like he is renting out rooms. Sources from the Directorate of Services and Inspection of the City Council admit that these cases are particularly difficult to detect.
The complaints of these residents have already reached the Council’s table. The councilor of the Eixample and responsible for tourism Jordi Valls met there recently and admitted the difficulties of acting when it comes to licensed tourist flats, since right now they could only be revoked if they did not have a certificate of habitability in force or if they accumulated more than three firm penalties for not having a 24-hour helpline. Valls emphasizes that the City Council’s intention is to “substantially” reduce tourist flats in the future and to prioritize the most crowded places and those that cause inconvenience to neighboring communities.
Until the decree of the Generalitat that will make the current licenses temporary (five years) and allow them to be revoked, the City Council is trying to work with the platforms so that they “collaborate with the coexistence of the city” and establish some sort of protocols to restrict listings of legal tourist flats that accumulate multiple community nuisance complaints.
Apartur requests right of admission
The president of the Association of Tourist Apartments of Barcelona (Apartur), Enrique Alcántara, points out that it is key that tourist apartments have sound meters “to avoid any inconvenience to the neighbors”, but he asks for more tools to be able to deal with tourists who do not they behave In this sense, it demands that platforms such as Aibrnb or Booking allow apartment managers to exercise the right of admission and cancel reservations without penalties when they believe “that someone may be annoying”. It also asks that the administrations authorize them to “vacate a tourist flat that is annoying”.
However, Alcántara claims the mediation system promoted by the City Council between residents, owners of tourist flats and operators and which, he says, allows “the vast majority of possible inconveniences to be completely resolved” with measures such as the installation of scales in the lifts to avoid their excessive use, clearly signaling the intercoms or prioritizing that the check-ins don’t do it at night.
However, the mediation system is not always successful. Sometimes the understanding between the parties is impossible, because some are considered “second-class owners” due to the fact that in the same property there are those who earn money and get rich with their flat while the rest of the neighbors have to suffer the consequences. For this reason, they ask that it be prohibited that tourist flats can coexist in blocks of flats with neighbours. “They should all be in the same building,” concludes Sala.
2024-05-03 11:06:07
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