Before being New York, the great American metropolis was baptized by Dutch settlers as New Amsterdam. Three centuries later, that name crosses the Atlantic again, but to land in Barcelona. New Amsterdam Developments (NAD) is today one of the best-known – and at the same time most opaque – real estate companies for having threatened the homes of Barcelona tenants. Their business model, which, according to neighbors, consists of expelling tenants from their homes who pay still reasonable rents to create colivingshas angered the Catalan Government and Barcelona City Council. Especially when the company has only imported to the city the practices that one of its partners has used in New York for three decades with his real estate agency Stone Street Properties, which has been taken to court for alleged harassment of tenants and non-payment of salaries and loans.
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