Alex Trelinski
ALICANTE City Council will not grant new licences for tourist flats for up to two years.
Councillors voted overwhelmingly for the moratorium with just two abstentions and one against.
Alicante’s Urban Planning councillor, RocIo Gomez, said the period would be used to review all the laws over tourist lets and ‘purify all those homes that do not comply with the regulations’.
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She stated that each district of the city will be studied to establish an appropriate number of holiday homes in the neighbourhood.
Gomez also detailed that she planned to carry out a public registration census ‘of all those that do comply with the regulations, to have a competitive and quality market’.
The councillor also quoted a report on tourist housing commissioned by the council from the company Estrategia y Organisation SA (EOSA).
It estimated the number of tourist flats at 4,108 – 2.31% of the total housing stock – of which 3,292 are not licenced.
“Our main aim is to take care of our neighbourhoods and citizens, always taking into account the tourist character of our city,” added Gomez.
During the debate, the Vox spokesperson Carmen Robledillo, advocated ‘eradicating tourist apartments with more inspections’ and ‘closing and sanctioning illegal ones’.
She also stated that ‘disastrous policies’ have led to ‘a decrease in residential housing for long-term rental or sale’.
One of the two left-wing Compromis councillors that abstained- Rafa Mas- said: “Our neighbourhoods are being occupied and speculators are making housing more expensive.”
The one person to vote against the measure, Manolo Cope, from the EU-Podem party branded the moratorium as ‘fictitious’ and that in reality it will ‘regularise the situation of many homes that are currently illegal’.
