César Nebrera pours out a cup of coffee he has brewed on a stove in the boot of his car. The old green Kia saloon sits in the shade of a carob tree just off the main road near Ibiza Town.
“I miss the basic things that make life comfortable, like being able to stand up in your own home, being able to cook properly, or even open a drawer and pull out some socks,” he says.
“Those are the kinds of things that you miss out on when you live in a car.”
César’s Kia has been his home for the past three years. He works as a chef, but with rental costs on the Spanish island of Ibiza having spiralled, he cannot afford to live in a flat.
“In Ibiza, accommodation is very expensive, and it’s getting more and more expensive,” he says. “And the cost of renting is completely out of kilter with what you earn. So living like this is an alternative. It’s less comfortable, but it allows me to keep living on the island.”
Ibiza is one of the four main Mediterranean islands that make up Spain’s Balearic Islands. The others are Majorca, Menorca, and Formentera.
Many local professionals in Ibiza are living in similarly precarious conditions because of high rental costs. Last year, the IGC, a representative body of the civil guard police force, said that “three or four” of its officers were living in vehicles on the island.
Other locals have resorted to living in tents, or in extremely basic shared accommodation.
I’ll repeat it forever, but minimum wage should be a liveable wage. It should be attached to some median cost of living for the area where the workers work.
The problem here is that you’re competing with tourists sleeping four to a room and you just can’t outbid them for apartments, even with high wages. The solution here is to set aside properties for resident locals so that they aren’t forced to.
The conservative regional government of the Balearic Islands, which came into power last year, has chosen not to implement a housing law approved by the Spanish government in Madrid which seeks to cap rentals in areas of the country where they have soared.
Conservative regional government is just, choosing not to do anything, despite a law passed that would explicitly help this situation.
Instead, the local authorities mainly attribute the housing problem to homeowners in residential areas of Ibiza who are flouting the law by offering their properties for short-term rental, when local laws state they must rent for at least six months at a time.
So the local government has resorted to fining the people that don’t bribe them.
It’s a great system
I think going after short-term rentals is exactly what they should be doing. If they take bribes not to then that’s a huge problem though.
Here is my issue with short term rentals. In theory they are needed and a good part of the economy. In practice, they are people who are jacking up the housing market and need to go away. They are a business and should be treated as such. I move often and short term rentals have been great till I can get established. That said I stayed at hotel designer for that purpose. I’m not opposed to some sfh being used for that purpose but we have way too many.
You’re right. The problem is not so much the concept as what happens when residential property can be turned into Hotels by installing an app.
Exactly. I don’t mind a few unique properties as rentals. There are some really unique properties I’d love to stay in that otherwise I wouldn’t. But otherwise they are taking sfh from buyers or renters. That I’m not cool with. We need some for people who are moving. I’m fine with that.
I’m fine with vacation homes outside of metro areas. I’m fine with someone renting a room.
It’s the people who are turning it into a business I’m not fine with.
This is well beyond what minimum wage is about. The authorities should heavily regulate tourism there and make sure it’s not damaging the local communities. This is not only within their power, it is also the very reason they exist
They need to regulate Airbnb and other rental companies turning housing into hotels.
I really don’t understand how we got in this situation. Almost everywhere in the world, tourism used to be heavily regulated. The number of hotels beds, hotel locations, the seats in restaurants, everything monitored restricted and taxed. And then in the space of 10 years, here we are…
Businesses are too fast for policy to keep up. Loopholes and gray area.
Silicon Valley companies realized that laws are optional.
All the vacation rentals need to have been restrictions.
I will say in some parts of the country, you can see them starting to fail. Orlando there are tons of previous air bnb on the market.
You can get a fully furnished McMansion for 500k
Why are they failing?
That I don’t know. Go look at realtor or Redfin for Orlando by Disneyland and you can see what I’m talking about. You’ll know it was an air bnb because it’s fully furnished or they’ll say turn key.
Honestly, locals should just leave. Places there will quickly realize if they want to continue operating there they will have to pay what is a livible wage for the area.
Until someone stops doing their laundry, cooking their food, or doing the gardening, they might never realize how untenable their situation is.
- Where will the locals go? They have networks of support, professional networks, etc. those are hard to replicate elsewhere?
- How will they afford to leave and establish themselves? This is very hard to do when you already live close to poverty.
- What’s to stop the rich folk from bringing in cheap “temporary foreign labour” that is housed in the same conditions? Dishes still get washed, it’s just the poor locals and the exploited TFWs that lose out.
- Anywhere else. If they’re living in a tent, they don’t have any networks of support.
- …as opposed to how will they afford to stay there? Which they can’t. Take your car or tent and leave. They don’t just let people be homeless in Europe, right?
- Nothing. That’s what they want. That’s what will happen. They’ve succeeded in creating enough of a global wealth gap that for a minimum of the next few generations, there will always be enough people that are poor enough that they would happily take functional indentured servitude on a rich persons island mansion. They’ve sucked almost everything from the middle class that its no longer a necessary class. At this point anyone between extreme wealth and extreme poverty is only getting in the way of what the rich want by demanding things like being able to live above extreme poverty.
Anywhere else… It never ceases to amaze me how someone can feel like they know better than the people going through the situation.
It’s not going to get better without violence. I am not advocating for that. Just a conjecture.
Since even the cops are homeless, that’s likely.
The sad thing is that violence will most likely disproportionately affect those who are already most affected by this situation. An investment fund which owns some apartments there will just liquidate and buy somewhere else or even invest in somewhere else entirely. Ironically, they might make more money out of investing into the reconstruction of the area which saw violence.
