Door to Door Movement asks Miguel Pinto Luz to revoke urban leasing regime – Society

The Porta a Porta movement, which defends the right to housing, this Friday urged the new Minister of Infrastructure to clarify whether he is available to revoke the new Urban Lease Regime and intervene to regulate the market.

“The new minister is required to comply with the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, in particular its article 65, and not the opposite. The new minister is required to take the side of those who need a home to live”, he argues the Door to Door movement, in a statement sent to newsrooms.

“It is essential that the new minister states from now on whether he is available to revoke the new Urban Lease Regime, and, therefore, intervene to regulate the rental market”, he argues.

For this movement to defend the right to housing, Miguel Pinto Luz, who will be the next Minister of Infrastructure with responsibility for housing, should intervene “in the prohibition of evictions without an alternative to decent housing” and “in the construction of public housing”.

He also wants to know whether the new minister “is willing to prohibit the collection of bank installments on first home loans above 35% of each household’s net income, mobilizing the banks’ extraordinary profits for this.”

In the same statement, the Porta a Porta movement says that, more than the name that will be responsible for this portfolio or the underlying organization, it is concerned about the policies that will be followed, arguing that the minister that follows changes the chosen path until here.

He states, in fact, that the measures included in the Democratic Alliance (AD) government program are based on “logics of subsidy and tax exemptions”, which benefit “transfers of family income to rentier capital”.

“The State is diminished and proposes the continuation and deepening of the collusion with economic groups (…) for housing which, combined with the proposal on the ‘flexibility’ of land use and occupation, are a new comfort for activities speculative in the field of housing”, he criticizes.

He also states that, in the past, the strategic options of the right-wing parties that were in the Government “were at the service of the banks, with bonuses and credit support, or at the service of funds and large property owners with the liberalization of the rental market” .

Porta a Porta therefore defends that it is fundamental that Miguel Pinto Luz revokes the new Urban Lease Regime, leaving the guarantee that the movement “will continue its steady path of presenting and reaffirming proposals and developing the struggle that will impose solutions needed”.

In the informative note, the movement also takes the opportunity to appeal to civil society to take to the streets on April 25th, demanding “Home for All!”, remembering that solutions can only be achieved through struggle in the streets.