Preserving ancestral trades

Municipal elections should be held every week because, if you'll allow me to write hyperbolically, the proximity of the next elections to the city councils next spring is causing a pharaonic proliferation of works in the city and an authentically wild eagerness to activate the legislative agenda of the City Council. This is how this Friday we learned that our highest authority, Jaume Collboni, has finally announced a plan of measures to help save what the more pretentious fellow citizens call "emblematic shops". Apparently, the City Council will activate a fund to buy the premises of ancestral or strategic shops in a certain neighborhood, with the very healthy objective of preventing our city from ending up looking like a salad of Starbucks and absurd brunch places. The administration of the Capicasal has given us few pleasant news, so we have to celebrate this (late) success.

But palace affairs move at a slow pace... and Collboni himself has already warned us that the preservation of heritage establishments (in Barcelona, according to the City Council's website, we have 209 cataloged ones; we are talking about centenary shops that have never changed premises or activity) will require promoting legislation that affects the entire country with the aim that city councils can exercise the right of first refusal and redemption of the premises to be saved from gentrification or neglect.

This preservation effort is late, but it finally arrives: for decades we have known the difficulties of many shopkeepers to adapt to the impossible rents of their neighborhoods (which has caused the closure of places like Ferreteria Camps and Forn Santa Clara de Gràcia, Pastisseria Rovira d'Horta and, especially, the row of shops in the Gothic Quarter) but the administration, I insist, seems to enjoy trudging at a turtle's pace.

Yours truly is an old-fashioned liberal, and seeing how public affairs (which already weigh us down enough with their unbearable heaviness) transform into a real estate agent is not my preferred cup of tea. But Barcelonians, in this aspect, are a perversely stingy people who strive for a museum-city full of antediluvian shops — and who, in turn, cry like a baby and send letters to La Vanguardia when one of these definitively closes its shutters — but who don't have the decency to move their ass and loosen their purse strings to go buy a croissant or a girdle there. Since citizens have failed spectacularly in the only existing way to save commercial heritage —I insist, by doing the favor of dusting off the wallet— now the administration has to save our bacon by doing that very chavista thing of acting as a landlord, now for shops and tomorrow who knows if for bars...

Despite the good news, it must be remembered for the umpteenth time that, no matter how much the City Council exercises the purchase of properties, the survival of ancestral commerce is indiscernibly linked to the active life of the neighborhoods. This happens clearly in Ciutat Vella, the place where more examples of this endangered species are hidden; no matter how much the administration acts as a lifesaver to avoid disaster... the commercial fabric, and forgive me for reminding you of something so basic, needs neighborhoods that do not expel the indigenous Barcelonians and, in turn, that the few of us who still remain have enough purchasing power to be able to afford the sweets from La Colmena or the candles from Can Subirà. In the end, as always happens, everything will end up being reduced to the ability we Barcelonians have to stop being much poorer than our tourists and expats and, alas, to be able to return to the olympus of the middle class. 

But well, let it not be said that we don't know how to appreciate good news...