You shall not speculate (nor will you expand airports)

The mayor of Barcelona, Jaume Collboni, met a few days ago with his counterpart from New York, Zohran Mamdani, on the occasion of the U20 or Urban 20, a summit of mayors from 34 G-20 cities. From the very moment of the resounding electoral victory that brought him to the mayoralty of New York, Mamdani became a global progressive icon and a kind of anti-Trump counterpower (although that is more for show than anything else), and therefore photos with him are highly prized by European left-wing leaders. Collboni got his photo with Mamdani and something more: the endorsement of the New York mayor for Mayors for Housing, an international alliance of mayors committed to promoting policies against the housing crisis, which Barcelona has already led at a European level and which now seeks to expand internationally.It cannot be said that the U20 was not productive for Collboni nor that he arrived there empty-handed. Barcelona was the only city from the Spanish state to participate and was able to contribute the regulation of rental prices, the total ban on tourist rentals, or the expropriation of vacant homes, measures that have certainly been approved (but are not being applied, or not enough, in one of the preferred cities for vulture funds and large speculators, both banking and non-banking). The Mamdani administration has, for its part, approved the freezing of rent prices for rent-controlled apartments or the creation of public supermarkets to guarantee access for poor families to basic products; Collboni committed to opening the first of these supermarkets by the year 2027 in the Barcelona neighborhood of La Marina.All of this comes to be a kind of alliance of mayors against speculation and it is very good. But it is difficult to maintain the spirit that animates the assumption of these commitments while disregarding the protests this past Sunday against the airport expansion, a great mobilization that also took place in Palma and Ibiza, where it had the dimensions of a historic demonstration. The protests are based on a clear finding: the expansions of El Prat, as well as Son Sant Joan, as well as Es Codolar are being done to increase the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza. And the increase in the touristification of Barcelona, Mallorca, and Ibiza is directly linked to the lack of control over prices and housing speculation, which is, in fact, one of the direct consequences. The fabulous extractive machine that is Aena may hide behind the need to have infrastructure that is competitive with other large international airports, but this does not take away even a bit of the seriousness of a system failure—the housing crisis—that has also acquired an international dimension and that is especially suffocating in intensely touristified zones like Catalonia (especially Barcelona) or the Balearic Islands (especially Mallorca and Ibiza). Double standards do nothing at all to alleviate this failure.