Prague 1 has suspended privatization. People will no longer miraculously get rich in city flats
The City Hall of Prague 1 will immediately stop getting rid of its flats. Within a year, he wants to work out a new housing concept and compile a list of people who may feel that they have been promised privatization. Some of them could be bought again next year, but there probably won’t be many of them and it will be under stricter conditions. If the owner wanted to sell the apartment, the town hall would gain a pre-emptive right at a lower than market price.
The Prague 1 City Council assigned three tasks to councilors on Tuesday evening. Prepare a new housing concept to determine how the town hall will handle its approximately eleven hundred apartments. Analyze how it has privatized its housing units over the last twenty years. And put together a list of people who could find the feeling that the city would still sell them apartments.
“We anticipate that we will have the list within a year. From there, we will select flats that will be privatized once in the first quarter of next year,” says David Bodeček (pirates), Prague 1 councilor for housing. For now, however, the privatization of local flats is over.
The councilor estimates that out of the tenants of eleven hundred city flats, about four hundred of them may feel wronged, because they are people who have previously been informed, ie unofficially, that their apartment will be privatized.
However, if this did happen, the town hall would have only seven hundred flats left, which, according to the current coalition, is not enough. “It is not possible for us to get rid of the housing stock, and then come up with the idea that we need to expand it, and buy or build or rent it from private individuals for expensive flats,” interruption of the Bodeček privatization process.
Today, the councilor is not able to estimate what part of the town hall’s flats he will privatize in a year, because there is no consensus in the coalition. It can be units or dozens of them. In any case, the town hall will mostly look to settle historical injustices for these flats. “An example is real estate, where all apartments were privatized except for one unit,” explains the councilor.
The apartment was sold at a profit of 6.5 million
In addition, the town hall will start to impose stricter conditions on new apartment owners. On the one hand, he will want to include a clause in the contract of sale that would prevent people from using illegal shared accommodation, and on the other hand, he wants to reserve the right of pre-emption in Prague 1.
If the new owner decided to do so, he would have to sell it to the city district, in addition to the privatization price – probably only increased by inflation in recent years. In such a case, the town hall would regain ownership of a similar one for which its tenants sold.
Thus, for example, the situation should not be repeated when the former management of the town hall, now run by TOP 09 executive Oldřich Lomecký, sold a city apartment to Kateřina Hamr, a member of TOP 09, for a ninth of the market price. A year later, she got rid of it with a profit of 6.5 million crowns.
According to Bodeček, all the above-mentioned measures are intended to ensure that the city district has a sufficiently large housing stock for the occupation it necessarily needs, but which they often cannot afford to live in Prague. “Whether they are teachers, employees of Na Františku Hospital, city police officers or possibly officials. Plus, of course, they need part of the flats for social housing,” the councilor concludes.