04/27/2024
In the Santa María de Los Ángeles neighborhood, in El Poblado, there is a house that dominates a corner. It is one of the last exponents in the city of modern Californian architecture that arrived in the 1950s to help Medellín transition from its colonial and republican facet to contemporary development. It is one of the most beautiful houses still standing in all of Medellín, but it will soon fall. And although residents regret that with its demolition one of the last signs of architectural identity and uniqueness will be gone of El Poblado and the city, what worries them most is the construction that will replace it.
At the beginning of last February, a fence appeared that many residents felt like a blow. The yellow sign warned them that the Río SAS Project Promoter had requested the First Urban Curator’s Office for a planning license to build a building called Unik with 162 hotel suits, 27 apartments and 10 commercial premises. From that moment on, almost all daily conversations between neighbors are permeated by this project, which many consider a threat to the future of the neighborhood. one of the last forts of residential and neighborhood life in El Poblado Given the undeniable advance of the gentrification and tourism throughout Commune 14.
To understand part of the fears that neighbors have, we must talk about the Partial Plan of Santa María de Los Ángeles. The Partial Plan was approved in July 2007 and covered in its polygon an area delimited by streets 44 and 48 (Avenida Las Vegas), and streets 15 South and 17 South (block 010, block 011, block 019). Broadly speaking, its objective was to achieve an urban development model in which a high densification of an area rich in infrastructure and services like few others in El Poblado would be achieved; that the new buildings would have a neighborhood-scale park as their connecting axis and that at their core the land use would be predominantly residential with a low mix (retail and low-traffic trade), with the possibility of a medium mix in the land use in its main axes (services and medium commerce). In simple words, that centrality should be taken advantage of to build the greatest possible number of homes in a city that Already at that time, 17 years ago, he accused the poverty of soils really suitable to address its urban expansion.
That is why the announcement of a project located in the heart of the sector, whose destination was anticipated to be 85 percent hotel and commercial, set off alarms.
That’s where the mobilization of the residents began; rights of petition and participation of ten neighboring residential units as interested third parties in the licensing process. Among the piecemeal information that they managed to obtain from the Curatorship, they learned about the requirements that the curator Marco Antonio Jaramillo Ospina was analyzing and that, after requesting adjustments in the destination of the project, the licensing process was still being studied.
Indeed the yellow fence was ‘mutating’ in these months with some grafts that announced the adjustments. The project went from 162 suits, 27 apartments and 10 premises to 108 hotel suits, 27 apartments and one commercial premises.
According to Andrés Franco, one of the detractors, the only interest of the people behind the project is to find the loophole, the technicality, that allows them to accommodate the regulations and build their building. The discussion about the legal and regulatory viability of the controversial building has multiple aspects and interpretations, but so far none is definitive. What they are doing, without revealing their cards, is to prepare their next legal and administrative moves in case the license is approved.
They also say they are clear that, more than a discussion about regulatory and legal minutiae, this case essentially offers a discussion about what is at stake in the future of the city.
The “monsters of tourism”
“Seeing the problems that the city is going through regarding sexual exploitation, in the midst of the dynamics of tourism, Who would think of allowing a short-term rental project located across the street from a school? of music where there are dozens of boys, girls and adolescents?” That is the question asked by one of the residents and that seems to find an echo among the majority of the residents of the neighborhood.
Indeed, only a small street would separate the students of the Music School (which is part of the Mayor’s School Network) from the flow of hundreds of tourists who would enter and leave Unik every day.
Parents point out that peace of mind would be completely lost to allow free mobility of their children in the neighborhood, given the way in which Commercial sexual exploitation mafias operate in a camouflaged manner against children and adolescents.
Among the residents of the neighborhood there seems to be a consensus that the strategy advanced by the mayor Federico Gutierrez to confront sexual exploitation will not have a fundamental impact if the mayor’s office does not take a real and active position against this type of projects and situations.
“On the one hand, the mayor’s office undertakes strategies against those monsters that come with tourism: sexual exploitation, drug consumption and trafficking, but on the other hand Institutionalism allows tourism to transcend everything and find all the facilities to settle in a residential neighborhood and in front of an art school for children and young people,” emphasizes one resident.
Another of the owners points out that he has identified seven major problems that would arise from the construction of this building. Among these, coexistence problems, based on the hundreds of cases that occurred in short-rent apartments and suits in the city; increase in insecurity due to the dynamics of illegality that migrate to where these projects are located; change of residential vocation of a neighborhood called to be a model of urban densification; the deterioration in mobility, since effectively the roads in the sector are infarcted and the dynamics of homes and public services would choke traffic more; gentrification and, with this, the progressive expulsion of residents due to the increase in rents and square meters; the arrival of the complementary offer that usually appears with these short-rent businesses such as bars and party venues (Unik himself contemplates a bar among his spaces).
Jorge Iván Osorio, resident of one of the three units adjacent to the lot of discord, points out that cases like this show that the mayor’s office has to take an active role and establish preventive measures against projects like Unik, while Medellín discusses in depth the updating of the Territorial Planning Plan. He maintains that short-income projects like this have proliferated in the city sheltered in the cracks that a POT has approved a decade ago when the tourism phenomenon, gentrification and other factors did not exist as they do today. “The mayor’s office has to have tools to act with prevention, because these projects are going at an overwhelming pace and when we have an updated POT “The urban chaos is going to be difficult to repair,” point.
Who is behind Unik?
The mayor’s office addressed this issue just this week. Although the neighbors had already tried to contact her to request mediation, they only heard from the Territorial Management and Control Secretariat last Friday when officials visited the lot after EL COLOMBIANO consulted the department about this case.
According to the response from the Secretariat, during their visit they found documentation and the situation of the lot in order and, in addition, they pointed out that although in the current POT the sector appears as a predominantly residential and low-mix area, the Partial Plan, in its article 36, establishes that “the accommodations are within the complementary uses compatible with residential use.”
However, they pointed out that the Undersecretary of Urban Control will verify that the actions of the urban curator in this process comply with the norm and there are no irregularities and that “it will provide the necessary support to citizens, preparing the technical and regulatory reports that may be necessary.”
The company that acquired the lot also spoke out. Until now, residents called it “a ghost project.” due to the limited information available on the internet about the applicant, Promotora de Proyectos Río SAS, and the lack of any channel with which to establish contact. EME Real Estate, A company founded in 1997, is the company that intends to build Unik on that desired corner.
The company responded in writing that the changes to the fence were due to a formal issue: “due to an inadvertent error by the fence supplier, At the time of printing it was indicated that the project would have 10 commercial premises, when in reality it was 1,” he assures. And they point out that the second change “was due to the update of the number of suites in order to adjust it in accordance with the observations made by the Curatorship in this regard (…), to comply with the parameters stipulated in the Partial Plan of Santa “Mary of the Angels”.
Regarding the question of why develop a short-term rental project in an area with a broad residential vocation, they responded that they adhere to the Partial Plan that “determined that on the main axes of the neighborhood, there would be a mix of uses (housing, commerce and services) ”. And they complemented that “although more than 10 years ago Santa María de los Ángeles was a neighborhood purely of residential houses, since 2007 we have seen how this has been changing with the arrival of large residential buildings, business centers such as the Chamber of Commerce, health centers such as the Clínica del Campestre and Sanitas, offices and shops on Avenida del Poblado, leisure parks and centers of worship and art, including the church and the music school, among others.” And they talked about the benefits of the neighborhood as an attraction to build their project. “To talk about Santa María de los Ángeles today is to imagine the ideal of a city where everything is less than five minutes away, not only because of its proximity to two of the most important roads in the Poblado (Avenida Poblado and Las Vegas).”
Faced with the question about the lack of dialogue and clear information before the community, they stated that “the information about the project has been socialized through the channels established in current regulations, particularly, in the Single Regulatory Decree of the Housing Sector No. 1077 of 2015” and that The neighbors have become an interested party in the licensing process. The answer, however, beyond the technicality It doesn’t really clarify why they haven’t sought out the community. to establish a channel of dialogue in the face of the manifest uncertainty that the project unleashed or if they plan to do so.
While waiting to hear the decision of the Curatorship and to be able to sit down and try to convince the new owners of the corner to bet on the continuity of residential development in the sector, the neighbors who have mobilized against this project say that they want May this case encourage a discussion that the city can no longer evade: Is Medellín’s priority to offer comfort at all costs to tourists? or do everything in its power to guarantee decent habitat for its citizens?
“To what extent should we accept that tourism penetrates to the detriment of the possibility of housing and a healthy environment for the inhabitants of a city with a gigantic housing deficit? Only in El Poblado, Medellín has already given Lleras, Provenza, Manila and Astorga to tourism, how much more does it have to give?“Questions Franco.
