The Bloco de Esquerda introduced a bill to ban the sale of real estate to citizens or companies headquartered or permanently residing abroad, as a way to counter the rise in prices in the real estate market.
On the day it organizes a session on housing in Lisbon entitled “Where are we going to live?”, the Bloco de Esquerda (BE) announced that it has submitted a bill to Parliament that aims to “enforce the sale of real estate property in the national territory to natural persons or collectively, having its own permanent residence or head office abroad”.
According to the party, this measure – broadly recently passed in Canada – aims to “counter the price increases with housing”.
However, in the articles of this diploma, BE points out that this prohibition would not apply to “Portuguese citizens with their own permanent residence outside Portugal”, nor to asylum seekers or immigrants with permanent residence.
“Real estate transactions in low-density areas” would also be excluded, as would “foreign citizens acquiring real estate, in co-ownership, with their spouse or with a de facto partner”.
In the explanatory memorandum to the bill, the party led by Catarina Martins states that “in Portugal, the fundamental right to a home has yet to be fulfilled”.
Canada and the Netherlands are an example
Bloco de Esquerda comes with statistics according to which between 2010 and 2022 house prices “have risen by 80% and rents have risen by 28%”, as a result of which the inhabitants of Portugal have spent “a ruthless percentage of their income on the house”.
However, despite acknowledging that the “housing crisis is not a Portuguese peculiarity”, the BE believes that “Portuguese governments have only exacerbated this trend with their policies of privilege and inequality”.
According to the party, the “process of gentrification and financialization of housing motivated the mobilization of citizens and local authorities in several European cities”, prompting legislative changes at the international level.
Among the examples cited in this bill, the BE specifically mentions that “in Canada, the Liberal Party government banned the sale of residential buildings to foreigners, a measure that had already been introduced in New Zealand and has recently become a reality in the islands of Ibiza, Majorca and Menorca”.
“The defenders of these measures, whose implementation is hampered by the power of real estate interests, make the same argument: competition from financial capital makes housing prices unaffordable for local citizens,” the bill reads.
For BE: “If this is the reality in Canada, the Netherlands, Germany or Catalonia, it is more so in Portugal, where salaries do not compete, neither with the financial power of investment funds nor with personal income attracted by ‘gold’ visa regimes, tax breaks for non-ordinary residents or cryptocurrency speculators”.
The party also adds that these international experiences show that “the real estate inflation process requires exceptional measures aimed at protecting the right to housing”.
In this sense, in addition to withdrawing the measures to attract foreign capital in Portuguese real estate, BE proposes a ban on the purchase of real estate intended for housing by non-residents, when located in areas of urban pressure are located. the document.
BE argues that “this measure, recently adopted in various versions by the governments of the Netherlands and Canada, is justified by the recognition of the situation of serious violation of the constitutional right to housing, on behalf of short-term financial interests”.
Source: DN
