In two weeks, the Madrid City Council will present its promised and pompously named Special Plan for the Protection of the Residential Area, with which, according to municipal sources, the aim is to “generate more housing in the center of the capital and definitively regulate housing for tourist use”, the so-called VUT, whose exponential increase has skyrocketed the rental and sale prices to unaffordable limits. This was announced this Tuesday at the municipal plenary session by the mayor, José Luis Martínez Almeida, who assured that the PP, “instead of worrying about ourselves and protecting sexual offenders”, in a direct shot at Más Madrid for the Íñigo Errejón caseis concerned “about protecting the people of Madrid and generating housing policies” in a city in which one in every four rental apartments in the center is now destined for tourists.
During his speech, the Madrid councilor outlined the most important points of the plan, whose star measure is that “tourist apartments dispersed in communities of owners” will be prohibited in the AP001 area – the historic center –, that is, that nothing 4ºC will be a VUT and the rest will be neighbors’ homes: the tourist apartments will be in entire blocks dedicated to this activity. Likewise, for the first time the change of use of buildings from private facilities (for example, a private cultural center) to residential will be allowed to generate affordable housing and/or living togetherwhich the City Council estimates may apply to up to 210 properties in the center.
In addition, it will be allowed to increase the buildability in buildings whose use is other than residential to transform them into residential properties. The transformation of commercial premises into housing for tourist use will also be prohibited in the main commercial axes – which the mayor has not specified – “to preserve the identity of the neighborhoods and small and medium-sized businesses.”
In a first step to try to stop its increase, the City Council made public in May the list and location of the VUTs that have an urban planning license to “offer more guarantees and security to users.” On this map there were then 1,008 legal rentals – which represented only 7.47% of the total of 13,502 vacation apartments that the City Council estimated were operating in the city, although the platform Inside Airbnb It increased them to more than 24,000, the majority in the Centro, Tetuán and Arganzuela districts. In addition, he launched a toughening of sanctions and the reinforcement of inspectors after a month before, in April, he promoted a moratorium on licensing.
Today, in This map shows 1,131 legal VUTs ―the increase despite the moratorium is due to those that were already in process― and Almeida has said that there are already 14,000 tourist apartments that operate without papers. “Not 25,000 as the left says, which confuses the data because that figure refers to beds in illegal tourist housing,” he added. When asked by this newspaper, Urban Planning has not provided an assessment of these five months of operation of the new fine system, which contemplates a first firm sanction of 30,001 euros; a second cumulative amount of 60,001 euros if the irregular activity continues, and a third of 100,001 euros if it persists.
Although The regulatory powers of the VUT fall on communities and city councilsthe government announced at the end of May that it would advance to 2025 the obligation imposed by European regulations to implement a single registry of apartments that are advertised on digital platforms for rentals of less than one year.
