By Sophie Davies
BARCELONA, July 2 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) – The residents of Eixample, an elegant, tree-lined district in central Barcelona, are getting used to a new sound: the rattle of suitcases being dragged along paving stones.
Until a few years ago, this neighbourhood – named after the Catalan word for ‘extension’ because it was built in the 19th century as the Spanish city outgrew its medieval borders – was not a popular part of the city for tourists to stay in.
Today, about one third of the properties surrounding University Square, on the border of the district, are rented out on the home-sharing platform Airbnb Inc, according to DataHippo, a Spanish aggregator of rental data.
Each year, about 30 million tourists visit Barcelona, a city with a population of 1.6 million, according to official statistics.
Eixample’s residents, like those in many other parts of Barcelona, are not happy. They say tourism is leading to overcrowding, destroying the city’s character and pushing rents so high that many locals can no longer afford to live there.
Carmen Rios, who works in healthcare technology, has lived in Barcelona for nearly 20 years and moved out of the city centre a few years ago to get away from the crowds of tourists.
“I don’t enjoy the city centre anymore and wouldn’t live there ever again … (the authorities) have not made it pleasant for Barcelona’s residents,” she lamented.
Now a new sustainable home-sharing platform wants to make tourism an asset to neighbourhoods where residents feel they are being squeezed out to make space for visitors.
Fairbnb, which is due to launch this summer in five European cities, promises to give 50% of its revenues to support local community projects and help “counter the negative effects of tourism”, according to its website.
When guests reserve accommodation through the home-sharing platform, they can choose which of the projects registered with the site they want to support, said Jonathan Reyes, Fairbnb’s co-founder for Barcelona and Valencia.
Those projects could be anything from social housing for residents to community gardens, he told the Thomson Reuters Foundation by phone.
The company will also apply a “One Host, One Home” rule, limiting each host to one listing in an effort to restrict the number of holiday rentals in each city, so that locals have more chance to find affordable homes to live in.
“We really want to give the sovereignty of tourism back to local communities,” Reyes said.
He explained his company’s philosophy is that tourism in itself is not bad, but it needs to be better managed.
“We cannot just try to stop or to destroy this tourism model,” he stressed. “To change things, we need to build a real alternative.”
