The mayor of Barcelona is drawing up a plan to ban all short-term rentals for tourists from 2029, in an effort to contain soaring rental costs of housing for locals living in the popular travel destination.

According to Bloomberg, the Mediterranean city will stop issuing new licenses and will not renew existing ones. Therefore in 2029 the residences they will not have a short-term rental permit to tourists, the city’s mayor, Jaume Collboni, said at a press conference on Friday. Currently around 10,000 houses are listed as being rented out to tourists.

“We need more housing supply, and the measures we’re introducing today have exactly that goal, of more supply so that the working middle class doesn’t have to leave the city because they can’t afford the housing burden,” Collboni said. “The measures will not bring changes overnight. Such problems take time to resolve. But these measures are a turning point.”

Cities such as Barcelona have already taken other measures to curb the proliferation of short-term rental apartments. And this in an attempt to balance the increase in tourism on the one hand, with the concerns, on the other, about a lack of affordable housing for the city’s residents.

Barcelona, ​​which has previously cracked down on unlicensed rental apartments, has seen property prices rise.

Collboni stated that at this stage rental prices in Barcelona have skyrocketed and they keep getting more expensive by the day.

Rental prices per square meter in Barcelona have risen by 14% in the past 12 months and are among the highest among Spanish cities, according to Idealista, the country’s largest property website.

Finally, it is noted that the city was visited 16 million tourists in 2023according to the Barcelona Tourism Observatory.