With the slogan “housing is a right, not a business”, thousands of people demonstrated yesterday in Madrid against unaffordable rents and short-term leasing.
Twelve thousand people demonstrated on Sunday in Madrid in favor of lower rents and against short-term renting.
At a time when the number of tourists in Spain is again breaking a record this year with more than 64 million visitors until August, many Spaniards are complaining that they can no longer live in their cities because of the problem of short-term renting and, as a result, skyrocketing rents .
“The government must regulate prices and housing,” nurse Blanca Prieto told the demonstration. In July, the Spanish government announced that it was suspending the licensing of short-term rentals and pledged to check listings on platforms such as Airbnb and Booking.com to ensure that the necessary licenses are in place.
At the demonstration, the representative of the Union of Tenants, Victor Palomo, spoke on French news agency television about a real estate “bubble” in Spain: “We got to this situation because in the 2012-2013 season a red carpet was rolled out for investment funds. Since then the market has been overheated by speculators, so rents have skyrocketed. Therefore the current situation is not due to some natural, inevitable phenomenon, but to the fact that the market was left in the hands of speculators.
Madrid and Barcelona are affected by overtourism
The challenges for the Spanish government are great. He is asked to balance between the promotion of tourism, a pillar of the domestic economy, and the dissatisfaction of citizens, who see every day more and more property owners turning to the lucrative short-term rental market.
Demonstrator Laura Barrio, activist of the Madrid Housing Movement emphasizes: “The evictions must urgently stop and the rents must fall. We should then draw up a plan of long-term, structural measures to initiate radical but necessary changes. The same applies to the housing problem as it does to climate change: we all have to do our part to stop it.”
In another protest in Barcelona yesterday, on the occasion of the America’s Cup sailing race, protesters blamed the event for driving up rents and attracting more tourists to a city already suffering from overtourism.
AFPTN, Reuters, dpa
Source :Skai
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