Social housing and injustice in Lisbon
Recently, evictions of social housing occupants have been in the news. Illegally occupied social housing, and is not, respectively, vacancy, is not unfair. What is immoral is that some people take advantage of this episode to carry out opportunistic politics. Each abusively occupied house is a family in need of housing.
No one lightly puts people out of a house. In Lisbon, around 800 urban dwellings were abusively occupied. These are situations that have dragged on for years without the City Council solving the problem. On the other hand, around 6,000 families have also been waiting for years for social housing, meeting as conditions for access due to their social and economic circumstances, without the City Council being able to respond to these circumstances.
Housing is one of the central problems in Lisbon. On the one hand, access to purchases by young people at the beginning of their careers or even by middle-class families is particularly high due to high prices. On the other hand, the rental market continues to be scarce, as a result of the instability of the applied companies, which does not promote the necessary confidence for investment in this sector. However, in Lisbon, around 48.0 vacant homes were identified.
The Lisbon Chamber has not been able to contribute to an effective response to the problem of access to housing. In recent years, the promise of 6,000 new dwellings for the Affordable Income Program was also due, in its implementation, with about 2,000 dwellings returned, which contributed to the city contributing to the offer of housing in the inheritance.
In the social housing sector, the capital’s situation is unacceptable, due to the inability to ensure compliance with rules, which contributes to the increase in waiting lists. GEBALIS – a municipal company that manages the so-called Social Neighborhoods – is responsible for around 22,000 dwellings. Of these, about 1,400 are vacant. Following the recent news about the evictions, it became public that the occasions of abusive occupation of houses were accumulating, without guaranteeing legality. Of the universe of rental contracts (supported rent), whose value is calculated according to the income of the households and adjusted whenever there are changes, there are 9,000 with rent arrears, only 3,000 with risk agreements, post, dos, 000 cumos.
Each abusively occupied municipal housing corresponds to a family, in many situations with children, who remain without decent conditions. In Lisbon, there are 800 illegally occupied houses that correspond to 800 living conditions, who have a municipal housing and who live in sub-human families.
The universe of municipal housing involves delicate social issues that must be followed by illegal occupations, whether by those who are entitled to them. But the legality of its usufruct must be ensured under penalty of contributing to a double injustice – in the abusive occupation and in the deprivation of its natural (and necessary) use.