Carlos Moedas had already complained that he was not heard when defining new housing policies – including several measures to be implemented by municipalities -, now it is Rui Moreira’s turn to sharply criticize the government’s announcement. For the mayor of Porto, the government has “decided to recall the housing policy through confiscation” and this “without listening to the municipalities”. This is all the more serious as it is an area where local government has “historical interventions and built knowledge”.
“The withdrawal from the municipalities of the regulatory instruments they had adopted, overlapping with the PDM [Planos Diretores Municipais] democratically and locally approved, the government continues to define everything without any consultation,” Rui Moreira stressed in a statement this Monday, accusing the executive of “nationalizing all housing policies” – with an “interventionist streak” and a “centralist obsession”, along with a “self-defeating Bolivarian urge”. A plan that, the mayor of Porto expects, will have bad results: “We have no doubt that the whole will fail, regardless of the goodness of some part”.
The mayor of Porto points the finger at measures such as the “extinction of an economic activity as relevant as local accommodation, the forced rental of private property and the freezing of rents in new contracts”, qualifying them as decisions that ” undermining the key factor”. in the public-private relationship: trust”. And he adds that this one “irreversible negative effect that this plan has already created” – “it frightened and removed private market confidence, representing the overwhelming share of investment in housing”.
An action that contrasts with what Rui Moreira describes as a total ineffectiveness of the Executive in solving problems in this sector. “Look what has happened in the city of Porto in the last seven years: the central state, through the Institute of Housing and Urban Rehabilitation (IHRU), was unable to build a single social housing and was unable to promote a single affordable income project”, accuses the mayor, adding that the “state housing stock has not been restored”. In contrast, says Rui Moreira, the municipality of Porto succeeded in “building 211 social housing units, making available nearly 2,500 units in assisted rent and 185 in affordable rent” and “investing approximately 150 million in its social housing stock”, with the private sector was involved. and “building a foundation of trust that successive interventions by the central state have always undermined”.
Faced with this scenario, Moreira even challenges the government to “seize” the fires in the municipalities – “If the government understands that it is time for the central state to do everything, believing that a fruit salad of individual measures solves the problem”, Dan “must be consistent and seize the housing stock of the municipalities and take over management”.
With this position, the mayor of Porto thus joins the criticism already heard in Lisbon, where the mayor of the municipality, Carlos Moedas, qualified as “very serious” that the government had not consulted the municipalities, pointing to measures in related to local accommodation. Moedas already kept that up on Friday the city “will be the actor to solve the housing problem”, so the path cannot be one of “prohibition” or “obligation”. Instead, the executive “enters the territory of the mayors and says it will ban local accommodation and this and that” – “We cannot allow people to enter the administration of our territory without consulting us”.
Economy allows for changes
Last Thursday, António Costa announced a comprehensive package of measures to tackle the housing shortage in Portugal increasing the number of properties available for housing, especially on the rental market, simplifying permitting procedures and the fight against speculation. Measures announced include forcibly renting vacant properties or imposing a brake on new rent increases, as well as ending new local housing permits, proposals that have generated the most controversy. And if, at the end of the Council of Ministers, António Costa guaranteed that the government will be attentive to the period of public discussion of the diplomas, voices have since been heard in the executive that concedes the measures. Interesting, both from the Ministry of Economy: first it was the supervising minister, António Costa Silva, who said that the government will have “the humility to calibrate the announced proposals”.; then it was the turn of the Secretary of State for Tourism, Nuno Fazenda, to argue that there could be “improvements”, namely with regard to local accommodation.
Source: DN
