Park Güell’s shift from a shared public space into a cultural zone occupied almost exclusively by tourists is understood by some worried residents of Barcelona as a story about the prospective fate of the city itself. Albert Arias, a geographer with the local government, told me that he had publicly criticized the selling of tickets as “a very bad solution,” adding, “It is acknowledging a problem by fencing off public space.” [...]
Nearly half the Airbnb properties in Barcelona are entire houses or apartments. The conceit of friendly locals renting out spare rooms has been supplanted by a more mercenary model, in which centuries-old apartment buildings are hollowed out with ersatz hotel rooms. Many properties have been bought specifically as short-term-rental investments, managed by agencies that have dozens of such properties. Especially in coveted areas, Airbnb can drive up rents, as longtime residents sell their apartments to people eager to use them as profit engines. In some places, the transformation has been extreme: in the Gothic Quarter, the resident population has declined by forty-five per cent in the past dozen years. [...]
Properties used almost exclusively for Airbnb rentals are offered on the company’s Web site with photographs that might have come from a shelter magazine: carefully staged table settings, closeups of fruit bowls. The same neutral, vaguely Scandinavian design can be seen in listings from Bangor to Bangkok. (The critic Kyle Chayka has aptly characterized this aesthetic as “AirSpace.”) The Barcelona Airbnb I stayed in, in the Eixample, an elegant fin-de-siècle district, was typical: stylishly but minimally equipped, with ikea furnishings and a Nespresso machine in the kitchen. There were no signs of regular habitation, which wasn’t a surprise. According to Inside Airbnb, a watchdog site founded by Murray Cox, a Brooklyn-based housing activist, the Eixample apartment, which goes for about two hundred dollars a night, is available to rent three hundred and forty-three days a year. Its owner has five other properties in the city listed on Airbnb. [...]
By 2017, tourism had risen to the top of a list of Barcelona’s most pressing concerns. According to an annual survey taken by the city, sixty per cent of residents felt that Barcelona had reached or exceeded its capacity to host tourists. Three years earlier, only thirty-five per cent had felt this way. That summer, anti-tourism protesters lined the waterfront, standing knee-deep in the Mediterranean bearing banners reading “this is not a beach resort,” in English, in the face of bikini-clad visitors who were somnolently tanning themselves. Thousands of protesters marched along La Rambla and loudly informed tourists that they were not welcome. Pardo and other activists staged protests against illegal Airbnb apartments by renting them on the site, checking in while using a hidden camera, and then refusing to leave, with the media there as witnesses. They staged an action to expose a landlord who was illegally renting out thirteen apartments in the Ribera neighborhood. After obtaining access to one of the apartments, the activists were about to film themselves reading a manifesto when the manager suddenly came back—and they had to flee. “We forgot to lock the door!” Pardo said, with chagrin. It was the kind of rookie mistake a tourist would make.
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