Filipa Roseta (PSD), councilor for housing at the Lisbon City Council, said on Tuesday that “all the effort” to build social housing will be done in social neighborhoods. Inês Drummond, councilor of the PS in the autarchy, accuses the social democrat of having a “socially ghettoized of the city”.
In a colloquium on “The new path to housing”, organized by the PSD last Tuesday, Filipa Roseta said that the municipality “mapped the entire territory” having identified “about 30 disqualified neighborhoods” and that “every effort” construction of social housing “that’s where” it will be done.
“This is very important: not building in places other than the city’s slums,” said Roseta.
The PSD councilor also revealed that one of the things that the CML team did this year was “the census” of the Portugal Novo, Carlos Botelho and Horizonte neighborhoods, “which are a cancer in the city”, adding that they will now “allocate” the neighborhoods and “reclassify” them.
“Since we have this effort, since we are going to do something, it is in these places that are marked by crime and abandonment. It is the forgotten city, which we could not forget. It is in these places that all our efforts will go, which is, not only to be producing housing, but to be reclassifying the city. We could build a neighborhood in Restelo, but we are going to build a neighborhood in Beato, a place marked by crime and drugs”, he said.
The PS says that this statement constitutes “a radical change in the municipality’s housing policy and requires a quick and thorough clarification” from the CML. “The declarations of councilor Filipa Roseta are unacceptable and deserve the strongest repudiation of the Socialist Party”, adds socialist councilor Inês Drummond.
“By assuming that the CML will only build public housing in the poorest ‘and most degraded’ areas of the city, actively associating Beato with crime and drug addiction, the Housing Councilor’s statements promote and help to perpetuate stigmas about social housing, further representing a vision of a socially stratified city where the middle class is actively excluded, by the municipality itself, from some neighborhoods and parishes”, Inês Drummond also told PÚBLICO.
The councilor says that the last point “is particularly worrying when it is presented, as it happened, with concrete examples that this policy is already being applied by the councilors of Novos Tempos” (party coalition of the CML executive).
“By saying that he stopped building an allotment in Restelo (as is his legal obligation after it was approved two years ago in a council meeting of the CML) to ‘do it before in Beato, a place marked by crime and drugs’ , Filipa Roseta defends a socially ghettoized of the city”, he emphasizes.
Inês Drummond adds that, “when all European cities try to correct the mistakes of the 60s to 90s of the last century, with social neighborhoods closed in on themselves and isolated from the city, rather disseminating the public housing policy throughout the city”, Filipa Roseta “says she intends to build only in the ‘most degraded’ neighbourhoods”.
“This policy actually reverses the path that had been taken in Lisbon, with more than 700 affordable rental houses built or rehabilitated by the Accessible Income program, in the last term, on Avenidas Novas (Av. Forças Armadas, Av. da República, Av. USA, Praça do Saldanha and Visconde Valmor)”, accuses the socialist councilor.
“The stereotypes that are asserted about the territory are really the best means of reproducing and creating stigmas about certain areas of the city, even more so when the person who expresses this view is responsible for the public housing policy of the municipality”, he also says.
The socialist understands that “Carlos Moedas has to clarify, urgently, the reason for the radical change in the municipality’s housing policies” and whether “he intends to cancel ongoing projects, or in an advanced stage of study and design, for public construction in Restelo, Parque das Nações, Bairro Alto, Graça, Rua Gomes Freire, among many others”.