The tension is still mounting a notch in the Basque Country on the thorny subject of the price of real estate. Between 6,500 and 8,000 people demonstrated in Bayonne on Saturday at the call of the collective “Living and housing in the country!” »To demand accessible housing in the Basque Country, where rising property prices and the scarcity of year-round rental properties are causing tensions.
The participants (6,500 according to the Pyrénées-Atlantiques prefecture, 8,000 according to the organizers) marched behind a banner saying “No to speculation! In the Basque language and traditional bell ringers. “#Balance your empty home” and “Who am I without a roof? », We could read on the signs in the procession.
“The right to have one home must come before the right to have two”
The organizers, around thirty organizations from the associative, trade union, cultural and political world, asked the participants to brandish their bunch of keys to make “a noise sounding like an alert (…) intended for the public authorities” which “must intervene a lot. more strongly on the market ”.
“Because the right to have one home must come before the right to have two, we must fight against second homes which are so many roofs confiscated from the population who wish to live here”, they explained in particular, also asking “Measures such as compensation to fight against furnished tourist rentals of the Airbnb type”. This “compensation rule” would oblige landlords to offer long-term accommodation for every short-term accommodation.
12,000 vacant homes
According to the Basque association Alda, the Basque Country has 6 to 7,000 permanent tourist accommodation. The Basque Country Urban Community (158 municipalities) estimates the number of vacant housing units at 12,000 and second homes at 42,000, for a territory of just over 300,000 inhabitants in demographic growth.
Inscriptions “The Basque Country is not for sale” in the Basque language have sprung up this year on the fronts of real estate agencies and houses for sale, reviving the memory of the years 2007/2008 when sabotage and plastication took place. ‘real estate or second home signs. A dozen agencies had also been tagged again during the night from Friday to Saturday, report South West.