Covid created an opportunity': Lisbon to turn
tourist flats into homes
Initiative offers landlords the option of renting
their properties to the city for a minimum of five years
Ashifa
Kassam
@ashifa_k
Tue 1 Dec
2020 05.00 GMT
For
centuries, the maze of narrow, cobbled streets that make up Lisbon’s Alfama
neighbourhood has told the story of the city’s past. But in recent years, as
trendy cafes and tourist flats proliferated, the historic quarter began telling
a worrying tale of the city’s future.
A rapid transformation
had rippled across the city centre as Airbnb-style tourist rentals swelled to a
third of the properties. As locals found themselves priced out and communities
began hollowing out, many began grumbling about the aftershocks of
terramotourism – a tourism earthquake.
That was,
at least, until the pandemic brought tourism to a standstill. “In a certain
sense Covid has created an opportunity,” Fernando Medina, the mayor of Lisbon,
told the Guardian. “The virus didn’t ask us for permission to come in, but we
have the ability to use this time to think and to see how we can move in a
direction to correct things and put them on the right track.”
The city
seized on the moment to cast new light on a programme that was in the works
prior to the pandemic: an ambitious plan to convert some of the city’s more
than 20,000 tourist flats into affordable housing.
The
initiative, billed by the city as a “risk-free” option, offers landlords the
possibility of receiving up to €1,000 a month by renting their properties to
the city for a minimum of five years. From there the city takes over, finding
tenants and renting the homes at a subsidised rate capped at a third of the
household’s net income.
For
landlords, the rental income is likely to be lower than what they might earn
from tourists down the road. But the city is betting that the long-term, stable
income – and the offer to pay an advance of as much as three years’ rent – will
win over landlords as they grapple with the uncertainty generated by the
pandemic.
Lisbon’s
efforts hint at how the pandemic has given governments around the world
leverage to reshape their approach to the housing crisis. “Just as employment
and work are likely to change profoundly as a result of the Covid-19 crisis,
housing is likely to change as well,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal, the United
Nations envoy on the right to housing, told Reuters in May. “I hope we see it
as an opportunity to reimagine housing for the post-Covid-19 world.”
A handful
of governments have started doing just that. In England officials have promised
to make 3,300 homes available to rough sleepers by next May, while Venice has
struck an agreement that will see some tourist flats rented to university
students.
Others have
fast-tracked plans already in the works. In June, two hotels in Vancouver, with
173 rooms between them, were purchased to house some of the city’s most
vulnerable. “The Covid-19 pandemic has put into even sharper focus our urgent
need for housing,” the city’s mayor, Kennedy Stewart, said in a statement.
Months earlier the Californian city of San Jose said it would accelerate a $17m
plan to build up to 500 tiny homes to house homeless residents during the
pandemic.
In
Barcelona the virus added impetus to a long-running crackdown on empty homes.
In July officials sent a warning letter to 14 banks and investment funds whose
stock of 194 homes are believed to have been sitting vacant for two years. If
the homes were not rented within a month, the letter warned, the city would
move to expropriate them at half their market value and turn them into social
housing. “The plan was there,” said Lucía Martín, the city’s housing
commissioner. “What Covid did was make it even more necessary.”
Some have
set their sights on short-term rentals, in plans that could nudge landlords to
list them on the long-term market. Amsterdam recently banned vacation rentals
in its central old town and imposed restrictions on rentals in other
neighbourhoods, while legislators in the Czech Republic have rolled out
legislation aimed at better regulating tourist flats. In September Toronto
began requiring short-term rental operators to register with the city, a move
aimed at allowing officials to enforce a bylaw restricting short-term rentals
to principal residences.
The
critical role of housing was laid bare early on in the pandemic as governments
around the world turned to lockdowns to rein in the spread of the virus, said
Leilani Farha, a former UN special rapporteur on adequate housing. “And it
couldn’t be more stark. Because in the face of a novel virus for which we have
no medicinal cure or protection, the only protection we have is our homes.”
Months
later, however, she described the approach of governments as “patchy”. The housing
crisis has sharpened in places like the US, where tens of millions of people
face evictions, and India, where reports have emerged of forced evictions in
Indigenous communities and informal settlements. Even as the pandemic continues
to wreak havoc on people’s livelihoods, many governments have been reluctant to
extend protections such as bans on evictions and foreclosures.
“I think
that governments did realise, maybe in a new way, ‘Oh dear, we have trouble on
our hands,’” she said. “But what I’m not seeing enough of is the structural
changes that we need.”
That’s
where Lisbon is hoping it will be a mould-breaker. The city’s programme comes
with a caveat for landlords in the historical centre: once their contract with
the city is up, they will not be able to return the property to the short-term
rental market.
“We need to
make a shift,” said Medina, the mayor. “It should change the way the housing
market works here in the city.” The city has budgeted €4m for the programme,
allowing 1,000 properties to take part, with the national government offering
to double that number if there is enough interest.
So far the
response has been tepid, with just 177 owners expressing interest after the
first appeal for participants. “There was a wait-and-see approach,” said
Medina, as landlords held out hope that tourism would rebound. The city is
expecting an uptick in demand after its second round of recruitment.
Where the
programme has already made waves, however, is in the northern city of Porto,
where officials announced earlier this year that they would launch their own
version.
Ultimately,
Medina hopes the initiative will help strike a balance between locals wrestling
with the fallout of their town becoming one of western Europe’s hottest
property markets and a tourism industry that has played a critical role in
ushering in urban renewal and lifting the city out of financial crisis.
“There is
that tension: too much of a thing is not good, but too little of it is a
problem,” he said. “It’s a question of balance. Having a house cannot be such a
burden that you have to have two or three jobs – that’s not a dignified life
for anyone.”
• The
headline of this article was amended on 1 December 2020 to better reflect the
content of the article.
Sem comentários:
Enviar um comentário