The president of the Municipal Council of Oeiras, Isaltino Morais, considered, this Thursday, that one of the problems that Portugal faces in terms of housing is property: “the Portuguese are forced to be owners”, he said, recalling that the problem is already has existed for decades.
From the mayor’s perspective, there were never any great incentives “to put houses up for rent” and the Portuguese ended up being “slaves to banks for 30 or 40 years”, and that is how we ended up today.
Isaltino Morais considers, contrary to what many experts have been advocating, that “supply and demand work”, but only “for those who have money to buy a house”. For this reason, he considers that some of the measures proposed by the new Government do not make sense, namely the reduction of VAT on construction (which “goes into the pocket of the real estate developer, not the family”) and the exemption from IMT for young people , as there are no houses. “If a young person can afford a house nowadays, it’s because they don’t need this exemption”, he said, remembering the high prices of houses.
The solution, he said, involves public housing. Oeiras already has 5% of public housing and, with the PRR, hopes to go further. At the moment, there is already 400 million euros programmed at this level (although, so far, the entire amount has not been approved).
“The problem of public housing is crucial to solving the problem of families who need homes, but also to regulating the market. Developers don’t build for those who need a house, they build for those who have money,” he said.
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Porto already has around 12% of public housing
Also for Rui Moreira, president of Porto City Council, public housing is one of the pillars for resolving the housing crisis. Recalling the “imbalance between supply and demand” that exists today, he recalls that, on average, public housing in Europe is 7% and that Portugal should already be, at least, at 5%. “In Porto we already have around 12%”, he revealed.
Thus, the problem is not so much for the lower class, but for “people who are on the threshold of the middle class”, who are unable to pay a rent, but who are also not traditionally included in social housing.
And he threw it at neighboring municipalities: “around me there are municipalities where this policy [habitação pública] is not a priority, where public housing is 2%, because they say that [as pessoas] they will put pressure on Porto.”
Furthermore, Rui Moreira recalled that immigration will not stop and that those who came here to work will also bring their families, in need of homes.
At the “Portugal Habita” conference, organized by CNN Portugal Summit within the scope of SIL – Salão Imobiliário de Portugal, at the Lisbon International Fair (FIL), in Lisbon, Rui Moreira and Isaltino Morais spoke on the panel “Public housing policies: the role of the local authorities”.
