Fu** Airbnb: Postcard from Lavapies Madrid

by Robert McGarvey

By Robert McGarvey

Ever since it debuted I have been an Airbnb skeptic. Indeed the very idea of paying money to sleep on a stranger’s couch – when I wouldn’t sleep on a friend’s couch for free – seemed, well, absurd.

I wasn’t more enthusiastic about paying money to use a spare bedroom of a stranger.

And then a funny thing happened on my way to Madrid this summer. We’d decided to flee Phoenix’s heat this year and spend the month of July in a cooler clime and of course I know Madrid is hot but the fact is yesterday it was 90 in Madrid but it was 117 in Phoenix. The Phoenix low was 93. The low.

So Madrid – a city we like for its great museums, good foods, lively street scenes – is where we chose to flee in escaping Phoenix heat.

At what cost? At $200 per night – a modest hotel room in a European capital – the tab for July would be $6000 plus taxes.

I glanced at Airbnb, mainly out of frustration with the hotel prices I found, and pretty much instantly came upon a listing for a whole apartment in Lavapies, an edgy multi ethnic centro neighborhood about a mile from the Prado. This particular listing was for a place a couple blocks from a 24/7 Carrefour supermarket and a metro stop.

How much? Under $1900. For the month.

Sold.

The unit is in a very old building but is totally renovated and looks to be an IKEA model apartment. Around 400 square feet, including a sleeping loft with a king size bed and a real staircase, not a ladder. There’s a tiny but fully equipped kitchen, a similar bathroom, an ac, and surprisingly fast WiFi (about 270 mbps just now).

Of course I knew that Barcelona had banned short term rentals, to take effect in 2028, but to me Barcelona is an utterly different and glitzier place than Madrid, which has all that a European capital should have but with little self importance.

But I now know that the Spanish government is making noises that it plans to do something about Airbnb and its brethren but that may be sheer noise. What is true however is that rents are jumping skyward in Barcelona, Madrid, and other tourist destinations. The locals are complaining.

And then I saw the large graffiti across the street from the Airbnb I’m housed in: Fu** Airbnb – resiste Lavapies.

Know that Lavapies sometimes has been called “the coolest neighborhood in the world.” I don’t know about that but walk through it and you will walk along blocks thick with North African retail and culture, other blocks that are straight out of India, some that are old Madrid, others that are sub Saharan Africa, and then there are the blocks of upscale hipsters.

If I had to name a neighborhood in the United States that reminds me of Lavapies I’d say Venice beach a quarter century ago – I moved from it in 1999 just as its gentrification took off — or maybe Adams Morgan in Washington DC where I lived in 1974-75. But neither was anywhere near as multi racial and multi cultural as Lavapies.

Lavapies definitely has a cool vibe. And now I wonder if I am undermining it by spending a month in an Airbnb.

And then I remember Venice Beach which was definitely hip when I moved in in 1986 but it had lost much of its cool when I loaded up a U-Haul in 1999 and relocated to Sonoma county where I stayed a couple years. I liked the Venice I lived in but then it was gone.

There was no airbnb to blame then. But more wealthy homeowners were renovating beach shacks into palaces and late model BMWS and MERCEDES were replacing the battered VWs and Datsuns and even a few orphan vehicles such as Morris Minors on the local roads. Money was changing the place and the attraction was a great location on the Pacific. What had once seemed improbable suddenly had become inevitable.

So it now is happening in Lavapies. A great cheap location has been primed for gentrification and it will happen with or without Airbnb. Money talks louder than graffiti.