The City of Prague is completing the privatization of the last house. He will not sell another
This was stated by Adam Zábranský (Pirates), a Prague councilor for housing, in an interview with ČTK. He added that now the city will decide what to do with the fund, because without the privatization fund it will have no income.
After the start of the current Prague coalition of Pirates, Prague Sobě and the United Forces for Prague (TOP 09, STAN and KDU-ČSL), Zábranský planned to stop the privatization of tenants’ apartment buildings, including those that had previously been approved. This sparked a coalition dispute. In particular, United forces demanded that sales be completed where the sale process had already begun, which concerned homes.
The city finally completed their sale, according to Zábranský, Prague is now waiting for payment for the last of them. The municipality, which according to a recent analysis has 7,265 flats at its disposal, will no longer sell more. The situation is different in the city districts, which have entrusted another 23,080 flats and which can continue to sell and often do so. In many cases, Zábranský finds this unfortunate. The coalition is now considering that the sale of flats by city districts would also be subject to the approval of the municipality, now it is only for property with a value of over 50 million crowns.
The end of the municipal privatizations will raise the question of what to do next with the fund for the development of affordable housing, which the city established in 2015 and to which the money spent on the sale of flats went. According to Zábranský, in the three years of the government, the current coalition has given about 3.5 billion crowns from the fund for subsidies to city districts, the purchase of hostels or the reconstruction of flats. “The fund is depleted,” he said. He added that for the last about 175 million crowns left in the fund, the city intends to buy 35 apartments from Prague 3.
After that, the city will decide what to do next with the fund. “When he doesn’t have an income, it doesn’t make sense for him to exist,” he said. According to him, one of the possibilities is that money from the rent of municipal flats could go to him in the future. So the city would always have to invest them back in housing development, which it doesn’t have to do now.
According to the councilor, the city districts plan to build 315 flats and reconstruct 400 of them for subsidies allocated to the municipality from the Affordable Housing Development Fund. The construction is also planned by the municipality, which established the Prague Development Company (PDS) for this purpose. According to Zábranský, it received city land with an area of about 400,000 square meters, on which it will be possible to build 6,000 to 7,000 apartments.
The first of the projects that the city of PDS commissioned for the preparation should bring 660 flats at an estimated cost of 2.6 billion crowns. However, they can still change depending on the price and the exact variant and scope of construction. The projects are only at the beginning of preparation and the beginning of the construction of the first of them can be expected in a few years. According to the councilor, the city wants to start the construction of an apartment building in Černý Most this year. It will be the first housing project of the municipality in almost 20 years.
In recent years, Prague has been facing a housing crisis due to high apartment prices. One of the solutions of the existing coalition is to expand the city’s housing stock. According to the strategy approved last year, the city wants to expand the number of its flats by 500 per year by 2030, but in recent years their number has been declining and new ones have not been built. According to KPMG’s 2018 analysis, 194,000 flats became the property of Prague after 1991, and the vast majority of them were subsequently sold off in privatizations.