The Casa para Viver platform will deliver a letter to the Palácio de Belém this Monday with demands regarding housing and will appeal to the President of the Republic to view the problem as “a national emergency”.
“We are keen to deliver, first hand, an open letter to the President of the Republic because the housing problem is configured as a national emergency, on a scale as large as the health problem”, André Escoval, from the Porta a Porta movement, told Lusa.
For this person in charge, housing “needs to be one of the causes of this Presidency of the Republic and it has to be embraced now”.
The Casa para Viver platform – which brings together dozens of associations and collectives in defense of the right to housing – called for a series of demonstrations on the 21st in 14 cities across the country to demand solutions to the housing crisis.
André Escoval considered that the new measures announced on Thursday by the Governmentsuch as the acceleration of evictions, “they will worsen a brutal problem at national level, which is people no longer having a roof over their heads”.
“We understand that the President of the Republic clearly needs to say what he thinks regarding the problem we are experiencing in housing, and it is also understood that it is necessary to break with the set of policies that brought us here”, he also said.
The four essential questions
In the open letter to be delivered in Belém, the platform defends four essential issues for fulfilling the right to housing provided for in article 65 of the Constitution of the Portuguese Republic.
Thus, the platform defends the regulation of rental prices, the freezing of the value of real estate credit installments at February 2026 values (before a possible increase in interest rates due to the international situation), the minimum duration of rental contracts equal to or greater than ten years and, also, the presidential veto of “a possible change in the law on evictions, because more evictions will not solve the problem”.
“We cannot continue to have Portuguese families suffocated for two reasons: the price of rent and the end of the lease contract, because nowadays the contracts in place last for a year or less”, explained the activist.
André Escoval also appealed to the President of the Republic to, in light of the government’s new measures, “clearly state which side he is on”.
“Year after year, evictions increase. If we are going to make a legislative change that will take people en masse onto the streets through eviction, then what we are doing is worsening the problem,” he said.
To deliver the document in Belém, the movements Porta a Porta, Vida Justa, Primeiro Esquerdo, Projeto Ruído, Interjovem, Associação dos Inquilinos Lisbonenses, Associação do Património e da População de Alfama, among others, will be present..
A weekend of protests is coming
Not next Saturday, demonstrations are confirmed in 14 cities across the country: Lisbon, Porto, Portalegre, Barreiro, Lagos, Covilhã, Funchal, Braga, Coimbra, Aveiro, Viseu, Leiria, Vila Nova de Santo André and Benavente.
The manifesto “It’s no longer possible! We return to the street for Casa para Viver!” has already been signed by around a hundred organizations.
A set of changes to rental laws with a view to overcoming the impasse in resolving undivided inheritances and making evictions quicker.
