Municipal apartments are not yet being built in Prague, the city management wants to change that
The municipality also founded the contribution organization Prague Development Company (PDS), which started preparing projects in which up to 8,000 apartments could be built in the future. City apartments are intended especially for people in need, the handicapped and also for so-called supported professions, such as teachers, health workers, firefighters or police officers.
There are now a total of about 30,000 apartments owned by the municipality and managed by the city districts, out of the original number of 194,000, which after 1991 became the property of the city. The majority of self-governed apartments were sold to tenants during privatization. The current leadership of the municipality has stopped privatization, but some city districts, which decide on the apartment themselves, continue to do so to a greater or lesser extent.
According to representatives of the municipality’s management, the current fund is insufficient to enable effective housing policy. The goal is therefore to increase it, which is to help the availability of housing, which has been decreasing in recent years in the metropolis as a result of sharply rising apartment prices.
The city is already planning its own construction as well as cooperation, whether with development companies, construction cooperatives or smaller civic associations. The municipality recently approved the first project of subsidized cooperative housing in Radlická Street in Prague 5, where it will provide land for construction to a newly established housing cooperative. Other similar projects should follow and be planned by some city districts.
In 2020, the municipality created a PDS to ensure the construction of apartments, which since then, according to the latest information, has started preparing about 12 projects and has plans for more. The municipality entrusted her with hundreds of thousands of square meters of land. Planned projects range in scope from individual houses to an entire quarter that would be built on Palmovka or Nové Dvory near the future metro station D. For some smaller projects, a designer has already been selected, while for others PDS has announced tenders or architectural competitions.
According to data from the Czech Statistical Office (ČSÚ), all housing construction in the metropolis ranged from 2010 to roughly between 3,000 and 5,000 housing starts per year. In 2019, the number of apartments started increased by about 6,500, but a year later it fell again by about 4,300. In 2019, according to the CZSO, the construction of about 9,700 apartments started, which was the most since 1997. This trend is likely to continue – according to data for the first quarter of this year, there were Construction of 1,935 apartments started in Prague, which was about 56 percent more than in the same period last year.
However, greater construction activity has not yet resulted in steadily rising prices. According to index of the consulting company Deloitte, which monitors the offer of new apartments in the metropolis, in March and April this year their average price rose to 151,200 crowns per square meter compared to 125,400 crowns in the same period last year, 115,700 crowns a year earlier and 107,100 crowns in 2019 .