Portugal’s worsening housing crisis hits a diverse neighbourhood

Lisbon, Portugal – On the banks of the Tagus River, south of Lisbon, a large clearing near Segundo Torrao is littered with heaps of rubble.

Until half a year ago, this empty plot was full of houses and families.

Now it is the background of a battle between the people who live here and the municipality that is trying to remove them and their homes.

More than 60 families from this self-built neighborhood learned in June last year that their homes were slated for demolition by the Almada municipality – which cited the risk of flooding from an underground water channel and the structures on it.

Many have long hoped for better homes. But not everyone here has been offered permanent resettlement, leaving some in vulnerable situations and on the verge of homelessness.

The first homes were demolished last October, but demolition has since stalled amid protests and legal disputes over residents’ rights to their homes.

“The way the council has been operating is illegal on so many counts that I don’t even know where to start,” said Marina Caboclo, a lawyer representing seven of the families involved who has issued a series of emergency orders against the council. to stop demolition in October.

Caboclo said residents received demolition and eviction notices in a “chaotic and random” manner last June, with some saying they missed a resettlement because they weren’t home when the council knocked on their door, or because they didn’t attend a consultation meeting, which she says is “completely illegal”.

“The council’s rehousing plan was based on a 2020 population survey of the neighborhood,” Caboclo said, “which has since failed to account for changes such as births, deaths, relocations.”

As a result, some are allocated houses that are too small for their whole family, and others are not offered any other housing at all.

Eighteen families were excluded from the resettlement plan.

Renata Camargo is part of Canto do Curió, a cultural and social organization that works in the area, and supports a number of families threatened with eviction.

“We have no idea what criteria the council bases its decisions on,” she said.

“The way it has treated residents is inhumane. A pregnant woman was told she couldn’t get a bigger apartment ‘because the child might not even be born’.”

“It is illegal under Portuguese law to evict families in vulnerable situations without first providing them with resettlement, but this is clearly not being respected,” explained Caboclo, who also criticized the municipality for only providing temporary resettlement for families during the winter in a holiday park. and a youth hostel on the other side of Greater Lisbon.

“It seems that the municipality treats these people this way because they live in a poor, self-built neighborhood and because many of them are immigrants,” she adds, “there is no respect for their rights and not at all for their dignity. .”

Amnesty International says it is concerned about “the lack of empathy and constructive communication” from the municipality of Almada.

“One of these days I know they’re going to demolish this house — and I have nowhere else to go,” said Helena Sousa Carvalho, a 66-year-old woman who traveled with her from São Tomé and Príncipe three years ago. daughter, who is being treated for cancer in Portugal.

Sousa Carvalho was refused a new home by the municipality and still lives in one of the remaining structures that could not be demolished in October.

She has not heard from the council since December, when she refused to leave the neighborhood for temporary accommodation on the other side of Lisbon.

Like others who have remained in their homes awaiting a response from the council to their appeals, Sousa Carvalho lives among the erratic construction debris and rubbish left behind by the excavators nearly six months ago.

“The situation here is terrible,” said Maria da Glória, who lives with her brother, sister and their children. “Now there are cockroaches, rats and plagues of flies like we’ve never had before.”

Maria’s family has appealed the council’s decision not to resettle them, but like others in their situation, they have not received any response for months. “We have no idea what’s going to happen to us,” she says, bursting into tears.

“My son was so traumatized by the October demolitions that every time he hears a loud noise he thinks the house is going to be demolished with him in it.”

‘Beginning of the end for Segundo Torrao’

Segundo Torrao’s origins lie in the migration from Lisbon in the middle of the last century, when people moved to the outskirts of the city and built their own homes from scratch.

Like dozens of self-build neighborhoods, the construction of the houses evolved over time from shacks to bricks and mortar; they also often changed hands as people moved in and out.

Today, about 2,500 people live there, and much of the population consists of first- or second-generation immigrants from the former Portuguese colonies of Cape Verde, Guinea-Bissau, Angola and Mozambique, many of whom live in precarious conditions.

Nevertheless, despite a nearby cement factory, the neighborhood enjoys an enviable location on the quiet, sandy banks of the river, overlooking Lisbon, and within walking distance of the affluent beach district of Sao Joao da Caparica.

There are strong suspicions that the city council has other plans with the land and that the entire neighborhood will be evacuated.

Last October, Mayor Ines de Medeiros wrote in the municipal magazine: “However long it takes, this is the beginning of the end for Segundo Torrao.”

Huge swathes of the southern Tagus riverbank, once a dormitory for workers serving the city of Lisbon, are earmarked for redevelopment amid Portugal’s tourism.

Segundo Torrao is minutes downstream from the Almada Water City Real Estate mega-project, which projects “a mega-urban zone” of more than 800,000 square feet (957,000 square meters) of tourism-based infrastructure.

Land and real estate prices in Portugal have soared over the past decade, fueled by a tourism boom, foreign investment in real estate and a low housing stock.

Average house prices rose by more than 13 percent last year alone, with rents rising by almost 38 percent, meaning the average rent for a family apartment in central Lisbon is now four times the minimum wage, at around 2,000 euros. euros. ) per month.

In February, Portugal announced plans to end the Golden Visa program, which allows real estate investors from non-EU countries to become Portuguese residents, one of the measures in a package launched by the government has been proposed to tackle the housing crisis.

The crisis has been further exacerbated by rising inflation and interest rates straining low- and middle-income households.

On Saturday, thousands protested in several cities calling for affordable housing.

A recent survey by Portuguese consumer watchdog Deco Proteste reported that 66 percent of families in Portugal are experiencing financial problems and are struggling to pay utility bills, food and fuel costs.

Meanwhile, social housing accounts for just 2 percent of Portugal’s housing stock, far less than the European average of 12 percent, leaving few safeguards for the most financially insecure.

More than 38,000 families in Portugal live in “degrading living conditions”, according to Amnesty International, which says the number has increased since 2018.

In a recently released country report, the rights group criticized “reports of forced evictions that left people in worse housing situations – including homelessness in some cases – a situation that disproportionately affected people of Roma and African descent.”

Prime Minister Antonio Costa has repeatedly promised to solve “decent housing for all families in Portugal” by April 2024, echoing slogans of the governments before him – but within a year that seems impossible to achieve.

“In its housing policy, the government does not seem to give priority to rehousing people who live in shacks or self-built neighborhoods,” said Silvia Jorge of the Center for Innovation in Territory, Urbanism and Architecture at the University of Lisbon.

“We know from the lessons of the past that slum resettlement projects are lengthy and extremely complex.”

In 2023, it will be exactly 30 years since Portugal launched the “PER” (Programa Especial de Realojamento) rehousing program, designed to demolish hundreds of self-built neighborhoods and rehouse their communities in purpose-built housing estates, at a time when the country was striving to create a more modern and European image.

But the PER, which is still ongoing, has produced mixed results and has been criticized for turning precarious communities into ghettos.

Like many who have been resettled in the decades before him, Adriano Kunzingami says he would have stayed in Segundo Torrao if he had the choice. His house was a stone’s throw from the water’s edge; now it is in ruins.

His two children sit on the rubble he left behind.

“We moved here a few months before my oldest son was born,” he said.

“We couldn’t afford to rent anywhere else, and this was a fun place for kids to grow up. Living here was part of getting my life back on track, finding work, starting a family.”

Their house is gone, but Kunzingami and his sons regularly return to the neighborhood. His children still attend the local school and their mother, with whom he shares custody, lives nearby.

Like many of the residents here, Kunzingami was hoping for a chance at a home with better conditions within the community he has been a part of for more than 10 years.

Instead, he is housed in a one-bedroom apartment more than 30 km away.

“But,” he said, “Segundo Torrao will always be my home.”

The Almada Municipality, the mayor’s office and the Ministry of Housing all declined to comment.