Barcelona, a top Spanish holiday destination, has announced it will bar apartment rentals to tourists by 2028, an unexpectedly drastic move as it seeks to rein in soaring housing costs and make the city livable for residents.

The city’s leftist mayor, Jaume Collboni, said on Friday that by November 2028, Barcelona would scrap the licences of the 10,101 apartments currently approved as short-term rentals.

“We are confronting what we believe is Barcelona’s largest problem,” Collboni told a city government event. This meant that “from 2029”, if there were no setbacks, “tourist flats as we conceive of them today will disappear from the city of Barcelona”.

The boom in short-term rentals in Barcelona, Spain’s most visited city by foreign tourists, meant some residents could not afford an apartment after rents rose 68% in the past 10 years and the cost of buying a house rose by 38%, Collboni said. Access to housing had become a driver of inequality, particularly for young people, he added.

National governments relish the economic benefits of tourism – Spain ranks among the top-three most visited countries in the world – but with local residents priced out in some places, gentrification and owner preference for lucrative tourist rentals are increasingly a hot topic across Europe.

Local governments have announced restrictions on short-term rentals in places such as Spain’s Canary Islands, Lisbon and Berlin in the past decade.

This article originally appeared on The Guardian.

by The Guardian | HNR Hotel News