Minister supports new anti-speculative land law

Portugal’s Minister who represents territorial cohesion, Manuel Castro Almeida says the government is to “increase the supply of land” to build affordable homes for Portugal’s middle classes.

On Friday he jumped to support changes to the ‘Soils Law’ that allow housing construction on rural land, promising that the law would be “anti-speculative”.

After learning that the left will seek a parliamentary debate into the Government’s law decree, Manuel Castro Almeida guarantees, in an opinion article, that the measure “has a single goal”, that of “increasing the supply of land to build housing as a way to lower the price of houses”. Something he views as a “structural change”.

Government will now allow city councils and municipal authorities to authorise the construction of houses on land where housing was not previously permitted ”.

On Thursday, Helena Roseta, a former MP, mayor and housing expert, also wrote an article in the same newspaper in which she called on MPs to call for a debate in parliament to discuss the Government’s law, which, in her view, would come into force “without public scrutiny or debate, and without going through parliament”, in a measure passed “under the carpet” during the holiday period. Rosette indicated that the measure will have the opposite effect to that intended, and said it would increase housing costs.

Parties BE (Bloco de Esquerda), PCP (Communist Party), Livre and PAN have joined forces also calling for a debate in parliament.

Several recent studies in Europe and the US have found that building publicly subsidised low-income housing on green belt land doesn’t lower the value of homes in the area under consideration but rather increases their worth and drives up house prices.

But other studies point to a correlation between affordable low income housing estates and higher crime rates which in turn can reduce property prices for all types of housing in certain areas.

Manuel Castro Almeida argues that “the Government will not change or alter the Municipal Master Plan (PDM) of each municipality”, but rather “allow municipal bodies to do so, if they deem it appropriate and necessary”.

And he adds that there is “no better organisation than the elected locals, the representatives of the people of each district to judge with the utmost transparency what is best for their municipalities and land”.

One of the criticisms of the law came from the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities (ANMP), which warned that the diploma “presents a list of measures that clearly go beyond housing needs”, being of “generic flexibility”, as reported by Jornal de Notícias.

In Friday’s article, the Minister of Cohesion also states that “the current delimitation of the NAR [National Agricultural Reserve] integrates land of ‘marginal suitability’ for agriculture or even ‘unsuitable land’ for agricultural use”, so “it makes no sense to maintain the prohibition on building new housing on this type of land, when it has no real agricultural suitability, and when the price of houses is so influenced by the high cost of urban land”.

But the risk of speculation continues to be the biggest fear. “It will only be possible to reclassify these plots of land as long as 70% of the houses to be built are sold at a reasonable price,” recalls the minister. Therefore, the government thinks that it is “manifestly” an “anti-speculative law”.