Lisbon, June 26, 2025 (Lusa) - Thirteen cities across the country will take to the streets next weekend in demonstrations that the Casa para Viver (Homes to Live In) platform is organising, to highlight that "the housing situation needs urgent change".

Between Saturday and Sunday, Aveiro, Beja, Braga, Coimbra, Covilhã, Elvas, Faro, Lisbon, Portimão, Porto, Setúbal, Viana do Castelo, and Viseu will promote a day of struggle for housing and present a twelve-point Emergency List of Demands addressing the issue.

First and foremost, they propose rent control “as an urgent and necessary measure at this time” and, in parallel, an increase in the duration of rental contracts to ten years, André Escoval, one of the spokespersons for the Casa para Viver platform and a member of the Porta a Porta movement, told Lusa.

The platform also identifies “the need” to limit short-term rents, prohibiting new licences and ending tax benefits.

Stopping “all forms of eviction without alternative decent housing” is another of the demands. “We must address a problem that is already serious in itself,” André Escoval told Lusa.

On the other hand, “we must put all empty houses on the rental market, starting with public property,” and we should exclude second homes and emigrants' houses.

“We must mobilise everything else immediately to respond to this problem,” argued André Escoval.

The document includes the construction of more public housing as “a structural and necessary measure,” and it will produce its full effect over time.

“The problem we are experiencing today is a national emergency and needs immediate answers. The use of empty houses for the rental market is an extremely urgent and necessary measure that politicians should adopt to solve the problem now. We want solutions today,” claimed André Escoval.

On the other hand, they advocate increased supervision of illegal rentals.

“We are at a time when illegal rentals are very widespread in our country, and a controlling authority is absent. Nowadays, evicting someone is much easier than having an authority that monitors the existence of illegal contracts or enforces the contracts that have been established,” he said.

André Escoval pointed out that all the measures proposed in the list of demands “are political and save money for the public purse”, safeguarding investment in public housing.

“We must increase public housing beyond 2%. We need a structural solution for housing. If there is money for war, there must also be money and, above all, there must be money for effective public housing,” he argued.

Recalling that the housing crisis “has been worsening for a long time and at an accelerated pace,” the Casa para Viver platform sees the government going “in the opposite direction,” maintaining the status of non-habitual residents and “gold” visas, “discriminating between immigrants based on their investment capacity.”

Therefore, it anticipates "[the change] happening through popular initiative rather than at the will of the government" and has therefore called for a weekend of “struggle” in defence of the right to housing.

"This has to take us to the streets, to expand, to become more, to secure this government's compliance with what it currently neglects," he appeals.

In Lisbon, the rally will take place on Saturday at 3:30 p.m. in Largo de Camões, then continue to Arco da Rua Augusta.

In Porto, the demonstration will be on Sunday at 2:30 p.m., from Praça da Batalha to Aliados.

SBR/ADB // ADB.

Lusa