The Porta a Porta movement, which defends the right to housing, today urged the new Minister of Infrastructure to clarify whether he is willing to repeal the new Urban Lease Regime and intervene to regulate the market.
“The new minister must comply with the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic, especially Article 65, and not the opposite. The new minister must take the side of those who need a home to live in,” the Porta a Porta movement said in a statement sent to the press.
“It’s essential that the new minister says straight away whether he’s willing to repeal the new Urban Lease Regime, and thus intervene to regulate the rental market,” he argues.
For this movement in defense of the right to housing, Miguel Pinto Luz, who will be the next Minister of Infrastructure with responsibility for housing, should intervene “to ban evictions without alternative decent housing” and “to build public housing”.
He also wants to know if the new minister “is willing to ban the charging of bank installments for first home loans above 35% of each household’s net income, mobilizing the banks’ extraordinary profits for this purpose”.
In the same statement, the Porta a Porta movement says that, more than the name that will be in charge of this portfolio or the underlying organization, it is concerned about the policies that will be followed, advocating that the next minister change the path chosen so far.
He also points out that the measures included in the government program of the Democratic Alliance (AD) are based on “subsidization and tax exemptions”, which benefit “the transfer of income from families to rentier capital”.
“The state is diminishing itself and is proposing to continue and deepen the collusion with economic groups (…) for housing which, together with the proposal to ‘make land use and occupation more flexible’, is a new comfort for speculative activities in the field of housing,” he criticizes.
He also points out that, in the past, the strategic choices of the right-wing parties that have been in government “have been at the service of the banks, with subsidies and support for credit, or at the service of funds and large landlords with the liberalization of the rental market”.
Porta a Porta therefore defends Miguel Pinto Luz’s decision to repeal the new Urban Lease Regime as fundamental, leaving the guarantee that the movement “will continue its firm path of presenting and reaffirming proposals and developing the struggle that will impose the necessary solutions”.
In the press release, the movement also takes the opportunity to call on civil society to take to the streets on April 25, demanding “Home for All!”, remembering that solutions can only be achieved through fighting in the streets.
