Barcelona is the epicenter of renting in Spain

One of Barcelona's barrio del Raval neighborhoods, which according to the rental apartment register, is among the areas with the highest rents in Spain. It is a neighborhood with thousands of rental apartments owned by the same company. A mini-district of cheap houses where slum dwellers were relocated in the 1920s when the 1929 World's Fair was held here, now owned by the municipality. Or it's the old, small and neglected housing in the poor Raval neighborhood. But there are also luxury buildings in a prestigious neighborhood with high rents in the upper part of the city. These are just a few of the neighborhoods in Barcelona with the highest number of rental apartments in all of Spain. Catalonia's capital city has the largest clusters''four times faster than residents' incomes.

The situation is particularly dire in Rawal. It is a very dense area: over 47,000 residents in an area of just over a square kilometer, the streets are always crowded. More than 51.9% of the population are migrants, mostly from Pakistan, Bangladesh and the Philippines. There are a total of 1,832 residential buildings, of which 906 were built before 1900. The average size of apartments is 64 square meters. Summer nights are hard to bear because of the heat. And there are very neglected neighborhoods where low incomes are less than half the city average (€16,750 net income per person per year) and less than €8,000 per person per year.

One of the leading associations that try to address the neighborhood's shortcomings, Red Vecinal del Raval, reports that "in''the neighborhood mixes two opposing realities: poverty and gentrification'." "There are neglected neighborhoods with old buildings and cases of overcrowding by necessity; and those closest to the Rambla with tourist apartments. There are elderly people with long-standing incomes, disadvantaged migrants and rich foreigners ... in addition to apartments belonging to investment funds that are empty after eviction, and some of them are turned into drug apartments." In the same institution, Miguel Angel Lozano adds that in Rawal, a quarter of the housing units belong to large owners and of these, 1,200 are social apartments of public or charitable organizations. "The situation is very difficult, especially in buildings with inadequate maintenance, the most neglected in''neighborhood. Add to that unfavorable conditions and low incomes...'. The fact that the rental percentage is high and comparable to European countries is not always good news', he emphasizes.

Among the neighborhoods with a large number of rental apartments in Barcelona, there are also features: a polygon of cheap houses belonging to the municipality in Can Peguera; one of the census in the wealthy Sant Gervasi neighborhood of La Bonanova (income 47% above the city average), where 55% of the apartments are rented. Located between rue Mandri and Ciutat de Balaguer, it is centered on an array of vertically owned buildings and rental apartments.

The most important thing is what's happening closer. To''The association of tenants in the complex. The difference in the case of these sections, as explained by INE to this newspaper, is due to the fact that only 10% of the dwellings have been classified through administrative registries (the average in the rest of Spain is 75%). The rest of the data were derived from the external frequencies of the "Basic Survey on the Characteristics of Population and Dwellings".

There is no single reason why Barcelona is the epicenter of renting in Spain, but expert and president of the Metro Housing Observatory Carme Trilla points to the main one: 'Renting is an urban phenomenon, in the countryside people have their own homes; but in Barcelona whole neighborhoods like the Eixample were rented. And Citat Velha also came from the rentals. In Barcelona there are''rental history: the developer kept the main apartment and rented out the rest of the building'. In the 1960s, more than 70 percent of the apartments were rentals, Trilla continues, describing the city's heritage. "But the city's rental property law, the ACA, froze rentals, and a lot was lost, besides, what was built in the '60s, '70s, and '80s was no longer built for rent. But rent still mattered. It dropped below 30% in the early 2000s, and now it's up to 38%. "

The 38% that Trilla talks about is different from the INE census percentage because it is based on the "reliable, accurate and up-to-date" database of the Catalan Land Institute, which holds mortgages of leases. There are 200,000 of them there, and if you add the 50,000 remaining from''old rentals and those who don't put down a deposit, then the estimate is nearly 290,000 rental apartments out of the city's total of 754,000 prime residential units.

Besides Raval, there are other neighborhoods in Cite Velier with very high rental rates. Like Gothic or Born, closer to Rambla or Via Laietana, where socio-economic indicators are improving, houses are in better condition, apartments are bigger and traditional residents are mixed with new arrivals with higher incomes who pay impossible rents for locals. The top 30 also include four sections in Barceloneta, a former fishing district, with apartments of 28 square meters and astronomical prices because of their historical importance and proximity to the beach. In any case, Citat''Vella appears in a recent study as the Barcelona neighborhood where residents spend the highest percentage of their salary on rent: 63,4%. Given the maximum historical rental prices (in Barcelona they exceed the minimum wage, and reached 1,123 euros in the second half of this year, according to Incasol), experts insist that the gap between the rise in housing costs and wage growth "reinforces the structural crisis of housing affordability". In 2022, rents in Barcelona will rise four times faster than household incomes, warned this week the Observatory of Metropolitan Housing. The Metropoli Institute also recalls that in Barcelona and its neighborhoods, 28.1% of renters have low incomes; 59.5% have middle incomes and only 12.4% have high incomes.'''Sociologist and researcher at the institute Sergio Porcel notes that "the increasing difficulty of access to own housing is diversifying the traditional profile of the renter", but that it is still dominated by a young population or migrants with low incomes, particularly vulnerable to soaring prices.

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