the ineligible

Two stories, the same squeeze: a middle-class family with three young children lost their rented house in a fire and, for the past two months, have been playing a non-edifying ping-pong game between Santa Casa da Misericórdia and Câmara de Lisboa in order not to have to move in to the street; another family, also from the middle class, also from Lisbon, has three weeks to leave the rented apartment because the landlord is going to sell the house. The son, a Paralympic athlete, has already represented Portugal in several competitions. Once again, Santa Casa and the Lisbon City Council share a leading role and lack of responses.

We could take the testimonies of Lívia Camargo and Paulo Faria, or the account of the Grandchildren, and multiply them. Because these families swell the ranks of the new poor, working people who earn average incomes but cannot afford housing. In both cases, none of the households is automatically eligible to benefit from a municipal house, being forced to apply for affordable income support programs, whose speed is contrary to the urgency of a ceiling. This is a tremendous perversion: they are needy, but not enough.

Although the right to housing is enshrined in the Constitution, today we are at a breaking point, both in terms of housing supply/real estate speculation, and the lack of social responses to this increasingly silent army of Portuguese people who are not eligible to have a home. Public houses represent only 2% of the total accommodation in the country and if there had not been the efforts of the municipalities in the last 30 years, in the sense of doubling the supply, the scenario would have been even more disastrous. The outskirts of Porto and Lisbon are also beginning to feel the effects of this tsunami, with prices rising to unthinkable levels. It is urgent, therefore, to define a muscular strategy that does not depend on the goodness of the market. But for that, the State will have to involve the private sector, because they are the ones who dictate the rules. If we do nothing, it will not just be today’s families who are deprived of a roof over their heads, it will be tomorrow’s adults who will simply give up looking at Portugal as their home.

*Associate Director