Prague is preparing 8000 city apartments. But he doesn’t know who and what he will build them for
The PDS’s flagship projects include an eight-hectare area in Palmovka, which is owned by the capital. PDS promises to build “a completely new district with the ambition of a state-vibrant center of the right bank of the Vltava”. It consists of residential and administrative buildings with restaurants, cafes, shops and services. There are also civic amenities in the form of a primary school and a cultural center with a library. Prague wants to build about 2,200 city apartments here.
“Palmovka is comparable in size to Anděl with its size, industrial past and development potential. While in Smíchov the reconstruction of brownfields is being driven by private investors, in Palmovka it is initiated by the city thanks to its continuous ownership, ”describes Petr Hlaváček (elected as TOP 09, now the Prague leader STAN).
Another golden egg represents thirty hectares of land in the vicinity of the future metro station of line D Nové Dvory, where Prague plans to build a new district with accessible housing and civic amenities together with the transport company (DPP) and the city districts of Prague 4 and Prague 12. “After the change of the zoning plan, it will be possible to build up to two thousand flats in Nové Dvůr. The construction of the entire district will take place in stages and will take ten years, “said Hlaváček.
Apartments in Ďolíček
There are also large areas for development in Dolní Počernice and Kyje, for example. The plot next to the Bohemians football stadium in Vršovice is extremely lucrative. There, this year, PDS announced an architectural competition for the design of a house with up to 140 rental apartments.
“In 2018, Prague had 90,000 square meters of gross floor space in the project construction phase; today, 890,000 square meters is in active preparation,” sums up the results of two years of work of its fifteen-member team by PDS chief Petr Urbánek. It currently includes 56 so-called investment projects.
“From autumn 2020 to May this year, approximately 12 million crowns were invested in the preparation of urban housing projects. It was mainly a study, preparation of documents for the tender and architectural competitions, “said Urbánek.
Who will pay for it and build it
Thus, Prague has yet to invest in housing construction in the order of hundreds of millions of crowns. What it is funded for is not yet clear. “Our task is to check the financing in some alternative ways, we will know more in two to three months,” said Urbánek, adding that the issue of future project financing is not crucial for the PDS’s activities at the moment. Its task now is to ensure the design phase.
Deputy Mayor Hlaváček added that funding would come next in the next election period. “Not that I don’t have to deal with it, but we don’t have to know right away,” Hlaváček said.
Likewise, it remains unanswered who will build the apartments. PDS in its current form does not have the slightest power to do so. “The moment the first project obtains a territorial decision, the political representation of the decision will have to decide who will be feasible. So far, the idea prevails that the municipality could solve it through the investment department, “said Urbánek.
According to Hlaváček, for example, a third of the flats would be a city, a third could be realized by cooperatives or the so-called baugruppe, and the same part would be competed by the private sector.