• Urbanismo.Almeida studies to eliminate the requirement that the tourist apartments in Madrid have a differentiated access to that of the neighbors

Luis García had to wait for more than three years to have a favorable response to his complaint against a company that implanted 39 dwellings for tourist use (VUT) in his building -of a total of 49-, without having the respective municipal licenses and the which the Madrid City Council did not sanction . Last Friday, the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid (TSJM) issued its judgment in which it obliged the Consistory to act, initiate a file on urban discipline and sanction tourist apartments that have been denounced by the neighbors.

"We managed to get a judge to tell the City Council that he is not right in the obstacles that he has put in place to apply the law against tourist floors in private homes," explained Alfredo Carda, urban advisor for the Neighborhood Association of Letters and Letters. The court ruling dismisses the City Council's appeals to the appeal filed by the residents for the lack of municipal action against these 39 VUT at number 15 Calle Príncipe, in the center of Madrid. In addition, it establishes that the Consistory had to initiate an urban discipline file when it was claimed by the neighbors.

For García, this is a "small moral reward" after so many years of struggle. "Three years in the life of a human being is a very long time." He acquired his apartment in 1994, but since 2015 he has been forced to put up with "hooligans , drunks, people with syringes drugging in the hallways" and even naked men on his doorstep. "I was fed up, exhausted. This kills anyone's life ."

He assures that after the state of alarm and due to the measures imposed by the regional authorities this situation worsened. As he explained, now the downtown flats are rented for parties during the weekends. "Since there are no bars, the apartments are rented with the consequent problems that this entails: security, hygiene and public health," she says.

The ruling of the TSJM establishes jurisprudence and could benefit 2,144 other cases that are pending and that are handled by the Neighborhood Association of Sol y Letras and more than 10,000 that are in the entire Central district. For this, the review must be requested on a case-by-case basis. "It is a process that will take us a long time," says Carda, adding that this also represents a "serious urban infraction" that in the general regime is punished with between 30,000 and 600,000 euros and in the specific regime with between 10 and 15 % of building value . And, in addition, "with a minimum that always works: that the sanction cannot be less than the benefit that has been obtained during the time that the floor has been in this activity."

Now the City Council has 30 days to file the appeal. "Co-defendants are a very powerful economic sector that will surely put a lot of pressure on the City Council to appeal the sentence," concludes Carda.

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