Isaltino Morais considers that coercive leasing “will not work”

The coercive leasing measure provided for in the “More Housing” program outlined by the Government “will not work”, defended the mayor of Oeiras, stressing that the legislative package “has to be revised”.

Isaltino Morais was speaking at a conference that marked the 30th anniversary of the Special Rehousing Program (PER), held in Lisbon, in which he described the impact of this initiative on the development of the municipality of Oeiras and addressed current housing problems. Although he praised the Government for including this area in the Recovery and Resilience Plan, the mayor criticized the executive’s new package.

“The landlords who have gone into hysterics lately because they were told they were going to occupy their vacant houses, rest assured, because that won’t work. It doesn’t stand a chance,” he said.

Isaltino Morais admitted that housing is currently experiencing “a very complicated problem” and that the Government, PS and PSD do not really want to resolve the situation.

“They understand that the problem of public housing can be solved by building public housing on urban land in metropolitan areas. They lie! Land went from 200 or 300 euros/square meter to 1,600 and even more. Will public housing be built on this urban land? No. There is only one solution, if you want to be serious: expropriate land from the national agricultural reserve and build public housing there. It is the only way to solve the problem, ”he said.

Alerting to the risk of the return of shantytowns to the outskirts of cities, the mayor of Oeiras stressed that the current development of his municipality is due to the housing policy initiated more than two decades ago and that he is now building “730 fires under the PRR”, in addition to another 700 that are expected to go ahead soon.

“Oeiras would never be the municipality with the technology-based expression and the very strong business fabric that it has today if it hadn’t had this housing policy and if it hadn’t managed to eradicate all the shantytowns that existed in the municipality. Therefore, the requalification of the territory created conditions for the attractiveness of the territory”, he concluded.