This is the three-story house auctioned for one euro in the center of Valls

BarcelonaWhile current events are marked by the housing crisis, an auction platform has brought a historic three-story building in the old town of Valls to the market with a starting price of 1 euro. For less than what a loaf of bread or a latte costs, Escrapalia is offering a 368-square-meter property with a garage and attic in the capital of the Alt Camp region. However, to live in it, a comprehensive renovation is required.

Valls is one of the mid-sized cities in Catalonia with a degraded historic center, just like Manresa, Tortosa, Olot, and El Vendrell, among others. The house auctioned for one euro has an appraisal value of 76,300 euros, but for 1 euro, you can get a ground floor of 89 m² and three more residential floors of 85 m² each, with wrought-iron balconies. It comes from the bankruptcy proceedings of a local company.

The City Council asserts that the marketing of this property at this price is "an anecdotal case," in a context where "new developments are being promoted in the historic center, which fill up quickly, often with young people," amidst an "effort" underway to relaunch the neighborhood. effort underway to relaunch the neighborhood.

A "quite similar" case

At the end of the last century, citizens began to gradually abandon historic neighborhoods to settle in newly built areas or other municipalities. The loss of interest from inhabitants led to the decay of many old town centers, to the point that there are now properties that, in practice, as lamented by the Valls City Council, "almost belong to no one": they have been passed from hand to hand through successive inheritances, without anyone taking charge of them.

"We do not just need housing policies, but rather we work on many actions, from incentivizing local commerce to improving street lighting, including aid to owners and tenants so they can repair the properties," say members of the municipal government.

Faced with this reality, the government of Salvador Illa presented the Neighborhood Plan as one of the star measures of the legislative term: resources for municipalities to act in "areas that have been left out of major transformations" and that require an "update and fine-tuning," in the words of the executive spokesperson, Sílvia Paneque. Although the Neighborhood Plan goes beyond the recovery of historic centers, several municipalities have taken advantage of the measure with old town centers in their sights.