Matosinhos moves ahead with 500 affordable homes

A bank loan is expected to allow work to begin without having to wait for the green light from central government.

Matosinhos City Council will proceed with the construction of 500 new homes for affordable rent, financed through a loan of 40 million euros.

The information was given to the Lusa news agency by the mayor, Luísa Salgueiro, who highlighted the municipality's financial and delivery capacity. “So we are going to take out a loan” from the banks.

Matosinhos delivered 100% of the projects it set out to carry out under the Recovery and Resilience Plan, handing over more than 500 dwellings, between new construction and rehabilitation, but Luísa Salgueiro considers that the municipality “needs more” and “wants to do more”, as reported by Observador. “We have not solved Matosinhos's housing problem and we are at a decisive stage in which we either wait for national measures or we move ahead, and we are going to move ahead”, without waiting for central government, not least because more than 200 of the 500 dwellings are the responsibility of the IHRU.

The mayor explained that, of the 40 million euros to be borrowed from the banks, the council will recover more than 20 million euros, corresponding to the 60% that falls to the Government and which will subsequently be channelled into other investments.

All these homes will be built on municipal land and are aimed at the affordable rental market and the middle class. One of the developments will be exclusively for young people up to the age of 35.

The homes are expected to be completed and handed over within three to four years.

Part of the same loan will be used for the rehabilitation of seven housing estates, comprising 1,173 homes that were not included in the Recovery and Resilience Plan.

The loan request will be discussed at the next public meeting of the municipal executive, scheduled for this Wednesday.

Luísa Salgueiro believes that municipalities have been “severely harmed” by the Government's delays and difficulty in reaching decisions on housing, recalling that responsibility for building housing lies with the Government and not with local authorities, and regretting that it has been transferred to municipalities without the necessary means.

She believes that, with the Recovery and Resilience Plan completed, the Government should already be launching a new housing strategy: “we should already have taken decisions, we should already be making resources available”.

Luísa Salgueiro also points to the three-year delay in transferring the management and refurbishment works of schools to municipalities. This work should already be under way but, so far, the applications have not been assessed. She therefore believes that municipalities able to make up for these government delays should do so.