Work begins on affordable Lisbon housing project

Lisbon City Council has laid the foundation stone at the first plot of 128 affordable homes to be built in the city’s Entrecampos district.

It will be the first of five plots on Avenida Forças Armadas with a budget of €14 million. “In 18 months time we will have hundreds of young people and middle class families living here, who without this affordable rent project from the council would not have the opportunity to live in the city centre,” said Lisbon Mayor Fernando Medina at the foundation stone laying ceremony.
A total of 476 homes are to be built on the council-owned land which will cater to young families and professionals in a total investment of €80 million.
Under the terms of the Affordable Rents protocol, each person or family should not spend more than 30% of their net salary on rent. This means that the rent for a studio flat varies between €150 and €400 and a one-bedroom flat from €150 to €500, while a two-bedroom property will vary between €150-€600. Three and four bedroom properties will cost from €200 to €800 per month.
According to Lisbon Council the other four plots in the development will, in addition to housing, have various social facilities with “everything under construction by the end of the year.”
Fernando Medina stressed that this building project, on council lands which had been “vacant for years without a future” is part of the Affordable Rent project part of a wider plan called the Entrecampos Integrated Operation with various projects in Lisbon city centre that had had “countless problems to resolve.”
“A zone that will have infrastructures from pre-school and school levels to facilities for the elderly” said the Mayor of Lisbon.
Medina argues that a “city with a short circuit in which people live closer to their places of work and where their children go to school and study offers “great protection from a lifestyle point of view, in terms of health and quality of life”, is important, as is the need to “speed up the council’s response to providing access to housing”.