Another incentive, Marques suggests, is an urban rehabilitation policy “with an appropriate fund facility to encourage landlords to renovate their properties, while maintaining their tenants and practicing accessible rents, without forgetting that there are landlords with the same economic difficulties as their tenants.”
The local council is now making housing a “priority”, Marques says, adding that the regional authority has invested more than €66 million (US$77 million) over the past three and a half years in municipal housing, including both rehabilitation and construction.
The Lisbon City Council has also introduced the Programme for Accessible Rents initiative which will offer up to 7,000 apartments in 15 neighbourhoods across the Portuguese capital for around €250-450 (US$ 290-530) per month in a bid to develop the city and attract young tenants, in particular.
There is also another programme launched by the city council aimed at saving Portugal’s traditional stores. The Lojas com Historia (shops with a history) initiative will grant €250,000 (US$290,000) of social support to 63 shops seeking to invest in conservation and restoration works, or to promote their shops through cultural activities.
The current Socialist government of Prime Minister António Costa recently modified the rental law. It now aims to protect low-income families, the disabled and the elderly, by extending a five-year transition period to protect poorer tenants from a liberalized market until 2020.
But the director of Lisbon’s Association of Proprietors (ALP), Luís Menezes Leitão, has voiced concerns that changing the rental law or banning short-term rental will have a negative impact on landlords.
“The Living in Lisbon movement has been successful in causing the rental law to be altered, but this will negatively affect proprietors,” Menezes Leitão says. “These alterations caused great distrust on behalf of landlords who stopped putting their homes on the rental market.”
Further modifications to the law will “worsen the situation, leading more and more proprietors to stop putting their homes on the market, which will drive up rents even further,” he explains.
Luis Mendes, an expert from the Institute of Geography and Territorial Planning at the University of Lisbon, recognizes that Portugal previous decision to liberalize its property market was helpful during the worst of the economic recession, but he warns that the government and the city council must try to strike the right balance.
“The city is now vibrant and dynamic, the streets are prettier and there is more employment,” he says. “The dark side is that we are not making the most of this opportunity when it comes to social justice and neighborhood patterns. We run the risk of degrading the city’s historic center and losing an important opportunity.”
Mendes’s greatest fear is that Lisbon’s urban regeneration is “destroying the city’s social fabric. Bakeries and butchers are giving way to gourmet burger restaurants.” If Lisbon “ends up like a donut, with all the people in the suburbs, it will be a dead city.’’
Originally published by Equal Times.