The newly created Housing Base alliance, formed in the south of Tenerife, attended last week the public consultation in the Parliament of the Canary Islands on the future holiday housing law that the Government of the Canary Islands wants to promote to change the current 2015 decree that regulates vacation rental and not without controversy.
“In Base Housing – says Juan Luis Hernández, from the People’s Movement (MDP) – we are very clear that we must set limits on vacation homes. Having one or two homes for rent is not the same as having several platforms with enormous rental potential, disturbing the well-being of residents and deteriorating the quality of life of our people, with the aggravating factor of not supervising and tax evading a large part of those rentals. ”.
In that same meeting, which was attended by different groups, including ASCAV (Canarian Association of Holiday Homes), Hernández explained the need for “an ecotax”, which serves to “regularize and control the excessive tourism tax that the islands are subjected to.” and especially in some municipalities”, in addition to promoting “the reclassification of land to promote a public housing stock, with prices that adjust to the needs and capabilities of workers. The sustainability of our territory must also be subjected to ruthlessly limiting mass tourism, tourism of quality not quantity like all-inclusive. The Canary Islands, with a population of 2.2 million inhabitants, can never be sustainable if we continue to receive 17,000,000 tourists, as long as the environmental and economic interest of our territory does not prevail,” said Hernández in the Government consultation, chaired by Miguel Ángel Rodríguez, general director of Tourism Planning, Training and Promotion.
The Base Housing alliance insists that “due to overcrowding and non-regulation of the territory and tourism, we are immersed in a chaos of the tourism model in which residential and tourist use has been coerced. Not everything goes. As we are seeing in the south of Tenerife, with the rise in residential rents.” Juan Luis Hernández thanked Miguel Ángel Rodríguez for “the clear and real presentation” of the situation of vacation tourism in the Canary Islands, “despite the attitude of some people from vacation housing platforms who, due to their own interests, are not interested in the consultation or listening to the presentations to create a new law that regulates it.”
