The chairman of the Social Democratic Mayors (ASD), Hélder Sousa Silva, was of the opinion on Friday that the More Housing package, confirmed by the Socialists in parliament, is “a handful of nothing”, which does not solve the problem of the lack of housing will solve. in Portugal.
The mayor of Mafra (Lisbon district) also considered that the possibility that the Chambers would “take on the responsibility of entering other people’s properties, occupying them and renting them in some way due to the negligence of the owners, would be a completely harmless measure.”
“I don’t see any mayor adhering to these guidelines, no matter how vague and open they may be published, but we don’t have the resources to do so, nor will we want to, and we’ve already said it openly,” said he. marked.
Hélder Silva believed that the housing package proposed by the government “will miss a big opportunity” and should have invested in the involvement of private parties, “because it is the private parties that have to carry out the construction”, and in the involvement of private parties. landlords, to also build and invest in rental properties, in addition to providing more incentives to local authorities, which have already proven themselves in the past in the construction of social housing and/or youth housing.
“Finally, the state should take a regulatory position, and the social state should support all families who need to rent or buy, for example, through subsidized credits, young and non-young, and also through a rental bonus,” he defended. .
The mayor also accused the state of limiting rents “in a very authoritarian way”, questioning the return on landlords’ investments, “when this should be liberalizing, with tenants getting the amount they need to pay landlords”.
“That would get the housing market moving, something we don’t see in this huge package, which is basically a handful of nothing – lots of writing, lots of grapes and few grapes,” he concluded.
Hélder Sousa Silva also highlighted the “extremely negative” opinion of the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP) and mayors in general about the government’s proposal, as the executive has “found scapegoats to explain the absence of public policy in the area of housing in recent years”, when he opined that licensing in local authorities is “slow” and makes the process of building housing difficult, “which is completely incorrect”.
Another scapegoat, according to the mayor, was local housing, when the idea spread that “it is an attack on housing construction” and that “the bad guy” is diverting many houses that could be used for permanent housing, which “is true in some remaining cases could be”. points”, but it is not national as a whole.
“For example, in my municipality I have 7,000 local accommodation beds, but of these 7,000 beds, certainly more than 6,000 have been built ‘ab initio’ to soon become local accommodation, from ‘surf camps’, hostels, ‘surf houses’ and ‘n’ situations that were never housing until they opened as local accommodation,” he said.
Today, Parliament re-approved, without changes, the Mais Housing program, which was approved in a final global vote in July, with only the positive vote of the PS, after a revision following the veto of the President of the Republic.
The most controversial measures are the suspension of the registration of new local housing outside low-density areas and an extraordinary contribution to this business, the forced rental of houses that have been vacant for more than two years and the imposition of a limit on the value of new contracts and rental of homes already on the market.
The package also provides for exemption from capital gains tax for owners selling houses to the state, the end of the new ‘golden’ visas, an increase in the deduction for family members under the Family IMI, changes to the autonomous rate of property income and exemptions of taxes for owners who remove their homes from local accommodations before the end of 2024.
Source: DN
