Lisbon, Aug. 4, 2025 (Lusa) - Housing should be treated as a national priority in Portugal and the current crisis requires an emergency plan, according to two experts interviewed by Lusa, warning that otherwise the proliferation of precarious buildings will continue.
"Housing should be treated as a national priority and it is not," says sociologist Sandra Marques Pereira, a researcher at DINÂMIA'CET-Iscte, the centre for socio-economic and territorial studies at the University Institute of Lisbon.
"This does not mean that no effort is being made, but housing policy does not yet have the central role it should have given the seriousness of the situation," she said, noting that the fact that it no longer has an autonomous ministry is "an important indicator of weakening, which began with the previous government and is being repeated by the current one."
Given this, the expert does not believe "that the situation will improve" and predicts that the construction of precarious housing will continue.
“There is an urgent need for a national emergency housing plan,” argues Isabel Santana, who retired seven months ago after 40 years working for Lisbon city council, half of which she spent heading the municipal housing management division.
“This escalation in the proliferation of shacks and precarious constructions will not stop. If nothing different is done, we will have the ‘clandestinos’ we had in 1980/90,” she predicts, advocating “large-scale construction” and “coordination between central government and local authorities”.
Co-author of the Lisbon Local Housing Strategy, Isabel Santana believes that “local authorities are doing their job”, but the measures they adopt “end up being quick fixes, because the volume and scale of the needs are so great”.
With a degree in social work, she followed the operations of the Special Rehousing Programme (PER), which in 1993 removed residents from slums in the metropolitan areas of Lisbon and Porto, recalling that at the time there was “political awareness of the precarious housing situation”, closely linked to the fight against poverty.
“Today, precarious conditions are much more widespread,” she compares.
“We are not just talking about people in need and with low resources. Among those evicted at the moment, there are not only families living in shacks and precarious constructions, we are talking about elderly people who suffer real estate bullying because of short-term rental accommodation, we are talking about young graduates with master's and doctoral degrees who have no access to housing in Lisbon without help from their parents," she explains.
“There has to be a permanent programme,” argues Sandra Marques Pereira, who has been working on public housing policies.
“The Special Rehousing Programme (PER) was a closed programme, limited to metropolitan areas,” she recalls, arguing that the response to the housing crisis “must be a continuous policy”.
Isabel Santana points out that “some of the mistakes made in the PER cannot be repeated”, namely “mass construction, poor quality building, and the lack of public participation in the process, particularly in the case of rehousing”.
For the technician, “some parts of the city have improved, but there have been situations of great socio-spatial segregation”.
Isabel Santana has no doubts about situations such as the recent demolitions in the Talude Militar neighbourhood in Loures: “Where are these people going to stay? People are out in the open, people are making fires and that is unacceptable, these conditions are disgraceful”.
For her part, Sandra Marques Pereira recalls that “shacks have always been the most visible aspect of precarious housing”, but there are many other signs of crisis, such as “overcrowding and beds rented at exorbitant prices”, in the face of which “the government remains completely silent”.
SBR/AYLS // AYLS
Lusa
