There are only 30,000 municipal apartments in Prague. The city wants to build a new | Company | News | Prague Gossip
In recent decades, Prague has practically not built municipal apartments, the current management of the municipality wants to change that. In this election period, it approved a strategy according to which the city should build at least 500 rental apartments per year by 2030. 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.
According to the municipality, there are few municipal apartments
There are now a total of about 30,000 apartments owned by the municipality and managed by the city districts. Originally, the city acquired 194,000 of them after 1991, but most of them were sold by the local government to tenants through privatization. The current leadership of the municipality has stopped privatization, but some city districts, which make their own decisions about apartments, 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 apartments are to be built in Palmovka or Nové Dvory
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 the Prague Development Company to ensure the construction of apartments, which, according to the latest information, has started preparing about 12 projects and has more planned. 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.
Almost 10,000 apartments were built in Prague last year
According to data from the Czech Statistical Office, since 2010, all housing construction in the metropolis has ranged from roughly 3 to 5 thousand new apartments per year. This year, according to the CZSO, the construction of almost 10,000 apartments started, which was the most since 1997. The trend is likely to continue. In the first quarter of this year, the construction of 1,935 apartments started in Prague, which was about half more than in the same period last year.
However, greater construction activity has not yet resulted in steadily rising prices. According to the Deloitte index, which monitors the supply of new apartments in the metropolis, their average price rose to 151,200 crowns per square meter in March and April this year, compared to 125,400 crowns in the same period last year.
