BE accuses Pedro Duarte of maintaining Port dependent on tourism and real estate

A concelhía do Porto do Bloco de Left (BE) accused today the mayor, Pedro Duarte, of not breaking with the “economic model excessively dependent on tourism and real estate” during his first year of governance.

“Pedro Duarte arrived at the Chamber recognizing the excesses of an economic model excessively dependent on tourism and real estate. It was an important diagnosis. A year later, the resulting break with this model is missing” considered in a statement the bloquists, justifying it by “the housing crisis remains the central issue of the city”.

For the mayor of Porto do BE, the recent episode of inclusive zoning, in which Pedro Duarte’s executive approved allowing the replacement of affordable housing by financial compensation in seven real estate projects (and later reversed), “says a lot about its priorities and about the ease with which the right to housing gives way to real estate interests”.

Pedro Duarte took office as mayor of Porto a year ago, on November 5, 2025.

The bloquists also criticized the various municipal interventions to illegal housing and sealing them without finding solutions for the people who lived there, they considered that they showed “a clear contempt for the concrete consequences of these interventions on the lives of the people who are victims of these circumstances”.

Making a bridge between these seals, the hiring of private security for the neighborhood of Cerco and the intervention in the Viaduct of Grijó, the municipal group stressed that they demonstrate that there is “a common feature in a particularly rapid governance to mobilize police, surveillance or cleaning services in the face of problems whose root is eminently social”

“ A city does not solve poverty, exclusion or lack of housing by removing them from public space. It solves them with public policies able to act on their causes ", defended.

The partial demolition of the Transparent Building “without a process of participation equal to the importance of that equipment”, the “continuous postponement of the transfer of competences from the municipality to the parishes” and the “devaluation” of warnings about the Historic Center of Porto were some of the criticisms left by the Left Block.

The BE council acknowledged, however, the “advances” brought by some decisions such as the gratuitousness of public transport to Portuenses, the removal of heavy vehicles from the Internal Beltway (VCI) and the return to the National Association of Portuguese Municipalities.

“ We have no difficulty following the decisions that improve the city, whether they are proposed by us or others, and even less so when those who once refused them come to recognize their need. But some good decisions are not enough to change a city model,” they defended.