For real: Barcelona’s housing crisis caused by anti-hospitality policy, not tourism
Saverio Francesco Bertolucci
The most visited Spanish city, Barcelona, is rarely off the radar of the anti-tourism academic and media establishment. The numbers call into question their pessimistic moralism.
Despite the alleged political turmoil around tourism, Barcelona continues to attract global appreciation: The Catalan capital is the world’s eighth most attractive city for visitors and entrepreneurs. The latter, attracted to hospitality-based places and lifestyles, inject energy, creativity, and inclusive employment into their newly adopted home.
Saverio's post proved a little controversial in some quarters. Here's a few thoughts from the editor, below:
On the 'overtourism' issue in Barcelona. A number of things can be true at the same time.
Tourism has been beneficial for the city in lots of ways. Judging by the opinion polls cited, the large majority think it still is. The development of tourism – part of the ‘Barcelona Model’ – was deemed to be a successful example of what many European cities were doing – managing deindustrialization, overseeing a shift towards a different kind of economy. It made the city relatively prosperous & an attractive place for migrants and investment, as well as tourists.
The rapid growth of tourism has put pressure on housing. Housing crises exist all over Europe. They stem from growing populations, a lack of house building, & demand from tourism plays a role too – a significant one in some places. Property owners have seen asset appreciation, whilst non-property owners , reliant on stagnant wages, have lost out over decades. Property owners can be large companies, and they can also be working class people looking for a second income steam to offset stagnant wage growth. Property has become an investment rather than a place to live as demand has outstripped supply, pushing up its price.
Housing is a basic need and whilst its cost runs ahead of wage growth this creates an important issue. Housing is profoundly cultural – a house or flat is a home, and homes comprise communities. Communities earn their living and thrive through commerce, but a sense of community itself is not a commodity to be bought and sold.
Saverio is probably right to challenge degrowth as a way forward. It may not be ‘nonsensical’, but it has little appeal to people who earn their living through mass tourism, and is not favoured by the people who Barcelona’s citizens vote for (and the polls cited suggest local support for more tourism in the region, if not the city itself). Degrowth takes growth itself as a category to be the problem rather than the lack of popular, democratic control over the direction of the society / communities. One can favour the latter and see growth as a means to that end (which was the ‘leftist’ tradition in the past).
Currently the Barcelona administration is trying to maintain the benefits from tourism whilst mitigating the problems, via rent controls, controls on letting, expansive new development projects in former industrial sites etc. Saverio argues they’ve got the policies on rents and letting wrong, and have exacerbated the problem. We’d be interested to read a clear response to that or other points raised.