The FAVB values ​​the new PEUAT, but insists that it is insufficient

The last plenary session of the year will approve this Thursday the second Tourist Accommodation Plan (PEUAT); “a necessary tool, but insufficient to embark on the path of tourism decrease that Barcelona needs “, they underline from the Neighborhood Assembly for Tourism Decrease (ABDT), group of entities and groups of the city that was born in 2015 as Assemblea de Barris per un Turisme Sostenible, but which soon realized that its endeavor went beyond seeking a ‘sustainable’ tourism (or rather that the only sustainable tourism model was forced to go through degrowth). “As we said in 2016 with the first PEUAT, it should have been more ambitious, but the city is better off with it than without it,” sums up Daniel Pardo, a member of the ABDT.

Along the same lines as the name change, from the ABDT have always ensured that the only suitable tourist accommodation plan is “the one that prevents any new license throughout the city, to prevent the gentrifying phenomenon spreads to other neighborhoods, and not increase the total accommodation capacity. “In that sense and for that reason and although it sounds utopian, from the ABDT -assembly of which it is part of the Federation of Neighborhood Associations of Barcelona (FAVB) territorial platforms such as SOS Enric Granados to Fem Sant Antoni- claim that the ideal would be a Metropolitan PEUAT.

The main novelty of the new plan is the regulation of the ABDT’s eyes “misnamed shared homes “. “From the social movements we have fought for a ban on tourist room rental because it represents a new step in the process of precarious access to housing that punishes the already most precarious layers, the people and families who have a rented room at home, who would find themselves competing with the rent to tourists“, judge from the ABDT insisting on the” shameful regulation of the Generalitat “, which has forced the city council of the Catalan capital to make a move.

After the hard negotiation between ‘commons’ and socialists, the option finally adopted is a regulation that allows this practice only in case of Holders of a tourist apartment license who renounce it to enter to live there by renting a room. A situation that is difficult to imagine and that, according to Pardo, will be positive “only if in practice it prevents the tourist room rental“.” There is a danger that this figure will be used as a cover for tourist speculation in housing, making use of the bureaucratic and administrative difficulties to inspect and sanction, “they warn.

46 fewer tourist apartments

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In a statement made public this Wednesday, the ABDT also considers positive that the 46 licenses that had been canceled are removed from the tourist-use housing stock, so that they cannot be reactivated, and the consideration of zone 2 as a natural decrease in places in terms of tourist flats, but, they add, “these are measures that lack great impact.” “This so-called natural decrease is a rhetorical figure that in practice does not produce any effective decrease,” they reiterate.

The new PEUAT also restricts -although to understand the platform not enough- the concession of new student residence licenses – “often covers for new hotels “, they recall from the ABDT-, and no more tourist places are allowed in 22 @ Nord, vindication of the territory.