Portugal should study its population and families much more frequently to know what housing it needs to build and where, demographer says
With Portugal still trying to find effective ways of tackling its housing crisis, a specialist has come forward saying that houses have been built “in the wrong place, for the wrong people”.
Speaking to Lusa on the sidelines of the conference “Inhabiting the big cities”, which took place this week in Lisbon, demographer Alda Botelho Azevedo – a researcher from the Institute of Social Sciences at the University of Lisbon – said that “there has been a mismatch between what is the trend in the type of construction and what is the trend in the population and the number of families”.
Recalling that several countries have “a regular practice” of studying population and families, Alda Botelho Azevedo suggests that Portugal should do the same every three or five years.” In terms of current practice, we’re doing things the wrong way round because we assume that since we’ll never be able to build everything that needs to be built, we build as much as we can, but then we build it in the wrong place, for the wrong people,” she said.
“We can’t go on – as we did, for example, in the 1980s and 1990s – building houses with four bedrooms when the average family size was already much smaller than that,” he explains.
That’s why, she recommends, “the first thing that is fundamental for this government to implement, as standard practice, is to estimate the population and the number of families, to be able to project not current needs, but current and future ones“.
Only then will it be possible to “identify which solutions are necessary“, she emphasised.
Furthermore, the researcher believes that new construction is not the main solution to the housing crisis, although she acknowledges that building from scratch can be “much cheaper than rehabilitation”. Alda Botelho Azevedo – whose research has centred on the demography of housing – said that a study, soon to be published in a specialised scientific journal, based on a projection of the population and families living in Lisbon until 2051, concludes that the 320,000 homes that make up the capital’s housing stock “are sufficient to accommodate the number of families projected by typology, therefore by number of rooms”.
The study “naturally” excludes dwellings in local accommodation because these are being used for tourism purposes.
Given this scenario, the researcher has no doubt that, with tax incentives and policy stability, “the accommodation that is currently vacant could be rehabilitated and placed either on the sales market or on the long-term rental market“.
Additionally, as “land in big cities is very expensive at the moment”, this new construction will necessarily have to be done “well outside the areas of greatest interest”, served by schools and close to workplaces.
The researcher also argues that there is an urgent need to increase the public housing stock, but to do so by ensuring that it is aimed at all social classes, “trying to deconstruct the stigmas surrounding public housing”.
Source: LUSA
