Enrique, Iván, Israel and Karim are tired. Tired of the flow of tourists into their building – number 13 on Calle de las Infantas, in the Chueca neighborhood. Of the continuous clatter of their suitcases on the wooden stairs. Of the constant ups and downs in the elevator. Of phone calls at indecent hours, of agitation, of unexpected celebrations, of shouting at dawn. And of the trash cans on the landing. All this is due to the 22 properties that make up the block, eight are houses for tourist use (VUT, for its acronym). And they go further.
This is why the four young people, they say, will end up leaving the building in the not too distant future. When their contract expires, surely. In fact, Enrique and Iván will leave Calle de las Infantas next December. This also poses another problem. “Systematically, when a tenant leaves his home, he turns it into an Airbnb for rooms. I left a property on the third floor. They demolished the living room and two other rooms. He paid 1,300 euros rent for it. I made a lump sum calculation and now they will take about 6,000 for himself. In other words, there are actually more than eight VUTs. And if there is no accountability and no sanctions, people will not stop doing this type of activity,” Ismael explains.
Counting the exact number of these properties in the capital is complicated. According to the latest data, proposed by the government Department of Urban Planning, Environment and Mobility, there are 13,502 apartments offered in the city. And only 1,008 have the necessary building permits to operate. In other words, the 92.52 percent are illegal. Of these 1,008, 158 are located in the Center. The rest do not have a proper business license, like all those found in block 13 of Calle de las Infantas. Young residents say that their case is also a bit special.
The entire building belongs to a single owner: it belongs to the San Pedro and Santa Rosa de Lima Foundationwhose board of directors is the Pinto City Council. “What does this entity do? We don’t know. There is no founding object. It is assumed that it belongs to the Protectorate of Foundations of the Ministry of Family, Youth and Social Affairs. But the statutes are not published. And in the Registry of Foundations of the Community of Madrid nor where there are annual accounts for 2020. So we don’t know how much they generate or what they do,” Israel says.
Padlocks for access to tourist accommodation
“When I started living here, the building had a doorman. A gentleman from Pinto very linked to the foundation that told me that in the city there was a day center called Santa Rosa de Lima, so I always interpreted that what we got from that was to maintain that,” Enrique continues.
They report that previously the foundation owned more properties in Madrid. All this from the same person who once donated his buildings to the Pinto City Hall for people in situations of social exclusion. But over the years, they all sold out. Except this block. “Before, the apartments were rented through a small real estate company, a family business, located in the neighborhood,” Enrique explains.
The situation will get worse from 2022
Everything changed in 2022, when the foundation decided to transfer the rental management of the entire block to a private entity, with the exception of two floors. One of them was Israel’s, which, however, ensured that the landowners They don’t have much room to maneuver.since they are subject to what management dictates: “The bargaining power is as if they were de facto managing the entire building themselves.”
They believe that the strategy of many of these agencies is to make life difficult for their residents in order to evict them. Almost two years ago, they carried out work in the building to install a boiler in all the houses. “They never worked”Enrique points to the white appliance in his kitchen. He and Ivan didn’t deliver the electricity, but Israel and Karim did: “Today we still don’t have heating. We’ve been like this for almost two years.”
Enrique shows the gas boiler, which does not work, installed in the kitchen
The young people emphasize that every time they were forced to fix a defect, they had to “put a lot of pressure” on the administrator. At the end of 2021, Karim the washing machine is broken and it was only two months later that the same Wallapop salesman rang his doorbell: “I had to advance the payment myself until the technician came to install it.” And in Israel a tile fell of one of their bathrooms. And he had the hole in the ceiling for six months.
Regarding the managers’ responses to this type of complaint, they assure that in most cases there was a tense relationship: “They told us, for example, that they were going to increase the CPI retroactively, that they were going to work and that we would have to move to the suburbs. “The upstairs neighbor, now older, who has always lived here, went a week without sleeping.”
Up to 800 euros for two nights
We did a quick search of the most popular companies dedicated to offering accommodation. Currently, there are about ten rooms available in the building, just on the Airbnb app. In Booking, one. We choose a date, from October 14 to 16 – they ask for a minimum of two nights – for two adults: 834 euros. Young people say that there is a housing problem in Madrid in general and in tourist apartments in particular. In Madrid, VUTs have been increased by 41 percent since 2017.
Last May, José Luis Martínez-Almeida announced that he would freeze the granting of licenses for at least a year, until the modification of the Accommodation Plan, which will be presented this month, in force since 2019, is approved. In addition, he has tightened inspections and now the sanctions can reach up to 190,000 euros.
What is clear is that the original Airbnb model has been distorted completely: “They intend to turn entire buildings, like this one, into boarding houses.” After that, they clarify that they do not object to the owner doing what he sees fit, as long as it is done legally. “Here, the property is managed dishonestly, with practices that we consider dishonest.”
The degradation of a city
VUTs are even changing the way people live in the capital. “A model with illegal Airbnbs is changing the way people live in downtown buildings. There is an undeniable causal link between these illegal and unlicensed properties and the closure of small businesses, rising prices, declining security… Leisure activities are changing. It completely transforms the city“, they say.
Enrique believes that Chueca is perhaps the neighbourhood that is doing the worst. He has lived there for 13 years, since 2011, and has noticed its deterioration more and more: “Now, Pedro Zerolo Square is very bad. Especially since they continue to open grocery stores 24 hours a day and the young people from ‘later’ come because they know they can get caught here at odd hours. There are thefts all the time. And filth.” It’s all a pity“.
