A curious phenomenon has been quietly repeated in recent years in the wealthy neighborhoods of the northwest of Madrid, where large mansions located on plots valued at millions of euros are a regular part of the landscape.
It involves the replacement of these large single-family mansions with private complexes made up of smaller single-family houses, built in the space previously occupied by large mansions. At the urban level there does not seem to be a big change. However, as the councilor of the Socialist Municipal Group of Madrid Antonio Giraldo in your X profileit is an unprecedented gentrification process that is silently being implemented in the richest neighborhoods of the capital.
Same space, more population. As Giraldo explains in your threadeach of these operations occurs within a perfectly legal framework since it does not require any action to reorganize the territory or reclassify the land use since it continues to be a single plot and contains single-family homes. The type does not change, just change the number.
To make the miracle of loaves and fishes possible in a real estate version, it is enough to enable a private street that provides access to the new single-family houses within the plot. The only difference is that, instead of having a single construction in the form of a huge mansion occupied by a single family, the space is redistributed into several smaller single-family homes, occupied by separate families.
No complex legal requirements. Since there is only a rearrangement of space within the plot. the only requirement that marks the General Urban Planning Plan of Madrid is to present a detailed study to the city council. As in reality no regulations are being breached because the nature of the homes to be built is not being changed, in reality the procedure remains almost an informative formalism.
However, what is actually being achieved is to increase the density of the resident population because, instead of having a single-family home of 1,000 m2 in which one family lives, there are now five single-family houses of 200 m2 with five families occupying the same space.
Rich, but not so rich. The gentrification of wealthy central neighborhoods in the capital is already a reality. The traditional inhabitants of neighborhoods like Salamanca already they are being forced to move to other more remote areas due to the increase in the price of luxury housing in those neighborhoods driven by the arrival of US millionaires and Latin America.
This has made the luxury residential neighborhoods on the outskirts, traditionally inhabited by the ultra-rich who had built their mansions in a quiet neighborhood with few inhabitants, become the new destination for these new neighbors who are not rich enough to buy a mansion, but are equally well-off.
The density problem. The big problem of increase density of a residential area is that the infrastructures were not designed for this change. Precisely for this reason it is not allowed to build floor blocks on them.
The residential neighborhoods of Madrid and the majority of large cities in Spain have narrower streets, less parking capacity and public transport networks sized for use by a small volume of people.
If suddenly the population multiplies by five, services become strained and life in those neighborhoods is no longer as calm and relaxed as it used to be. Streets with more traffic and traffic jams, insufficient public transport frequencies, insufficient health infrastructure and school places, etc.
“Inverted” gentrification. While usually the arrival of new neighbors of high purchasing power raised the price of housing to the point of making it inaccessible to its inhabitants, in the residential neighborhoods with high purchasing power of Madrid the reverse process is taking place.
Real estate developers are putting pressure on the owners of large mansions to demolish them and build smaller, more profitable luxury homes for millionaires who cannot afford to buy a 1,000 m2 home in that area, but can afford to buy a 200 m2 home and share space with four other neighbors.
It doesn’t work in Barcelona. In the upper area of Barcelona, with a layout of huge plots on which enormous mansions were built, an attempt has been made to apply the same model of replacing large mansions with luxury houses, but smaller. However, the urban policy of the city of Barcelona does not interpret in the same way that practice.
For the Catalan council, the change does not simply represent a rearrangement of the built volumes as happens in Madrid, but rather they take into account the impact of the modification on the neighborhood and recognize “the need to maintain the character of a consolidated neighborhood.”
Image | Unsplash (Fabian Wiktor, Alim)
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