Since 2011, Barcelona has required entire apartments offered for short stays to have a license from the city, but it froze granting new licenses in central Barcelona in 2014. In 2018, the city introduced a host ID system that allowed it to verify whether apartments offered online were done so legally, making it easier to identify and pursue rule-breakers. And in August 2020, the city imposed a temporary rule to ban room rentals for less than 30 days; the new proposal would make that rule permanent. [...]
The plan, which will now undergo three months of public consultation before being submitted to a vote in the city’s council chamber, would extend the city’s campaign against short stays to a new front line. In extending permanent controls of vacation lettings into shared apartments, the city’s goal is, according to its press release, is to “guarantee the social function of housing and avoid a saturation of tourist rooms that would cause problems of coexistence, impact the housing market and harm neighborhood trade.” [...]
The arguments for the ban made in the city’s proposal make for dramatic reading. If no regulations whatsoever were placed on tourist rooms, it says, a potential 670,000 homes might be able to rent out rooms. This figure far exceeds the actual numbers of tourist rooms offered before the pandemic — 14,000 beds, overwhelmingly clustered in the Old City and Eixample district, But the city also expressed fears that its own efforts to regulate platforms like Airbnb could drive more landlords towards the tourist room sector.
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