European Commission “ambicious” in wanting to clarify AL rules

“ Awe have the ambition of the European Commission to want to clarify the rules for regulating short-term rent (local accommodation), but unfortunately the proposal is not very clarifying. For Portugal, the good sign is that the legislation in force already incorporates almost all the principles presented in the current legislation and in this new proposal,” Lusa Eduardo Miranda, president of ALEP, told the agency.

The community executive today proposed the new Accessible Housing Act, focusing on regulating local housing to relieve housing pressure, and the European Housing Commissioner considered that local housing “is part of the problem” of the European Union’s housing crisis (EU), highlighting the “very worrying” situation in cities such as Lisbon, where rents increased by 103% in 10 years.

Dan Jørgensen indicated that in many cities and areas in the EU “the increase in housing for short-term rental has led to ordinary people being excluded from their own homes and this has led to an increase in prices that is totally unacceptable”.

For Eduardo Miranda, the proposal presented “part of a diagnosis” that the body has been defending for several years, namely that “the insufficiency of supply is the structural cause of the housing crisis and restricting AL does not solve the lack of homes and can create very negative impacts on the economy and employment that must be assessed before any new regulation”.

For ALEP, today’s recognition represents “an important development in the European debate”, but it leaves “an unresolved contradiction: if the structural problem is the lack of supply, the European response cannot remain focused solely on the creation of mechanisms to restrict the AL that the Commission itself considers a secondary phenomenon, relevant only in some specific locations.

“The diagnosis is right,” said Eduardo Miranda, but the choice “of medicine is the wrong one”, stressing that “the problem is the lack of supply of houses”.

“Europe itself recognises that restricting local housing does not solve this structural problem. Our concern is that this focus on restrictions to AL directs the measures to AL as an easy response to a complex problem linked to lack of supply ", stressed the responsible.

According to Eduardo Miranda, the body also shares the concerns expressed by the main associations of the sector at European level in the main association of the sector in Europe, the European Holiday Home Association (EHHA), regarding the ability of the proposal to meet one of the objectives it proposes: to bring greater clarity and legal certainty to the regulation of short-stay accommodation in Europe.

“ The new proposal rightly states that it is not enough to say that there is a housing crisis in order to restrict an activity as relevant as AL. The text reinforces that any restriction has to be based on objective data, that it is necessary to prove the causal relationship between local housing and the housing problem and even if any measure has to take into account local indicators and be proportional”, said the president of ALEP.

According to the person responsible, these principles, in a way, “were already in the Services Directive. The problem is that the proposal does not clarify what justified restrictions, causal relationship or proportionality mean and transfers conflicts to national courts without first bringing about the clarity it has promised.”.

Eduardo Miranda considers that, in this way, the result may be “greater fragmentation and conflictuality, but at national level, since the Commission withdraws its role as arbitrator in this process”.

“ The positive reading for Portugal is that we are several steps ahead on this path: we have a national record that with the recent cleaning allows to bring objective data, the new law gave more instruments for local power, defined levels of gradual restrictions based on indicators in line with the principle of proportionality ", he said.

The responsible also needed to “adjust some points”, considering there are some cases of regulations “without foundation and even illegal, such as those of certain municipalities in Madeira”.

“ But it is fair to say that most municipalities are working on balanced and positive solutions,” he said.

For ALEP, any restriction should demonstrate that it effectively produces more permanent housing and assess its economic and social impacts, considering that the question “is not how many local housings are withdrawn from the market”, but how many houses can be “effectively returned to housing and at what cost”.

“Restricting without measuring results can mean losing economic activity and employment without creating more housing,” said Eduardo Miranda.

Something that the new proposal makes “absolutely clear is that extreme solutions of prohibitions, with generalist character, without taking into account the local reality, without impact studies or objective data, as was the Program More Housing, are not admissible” he pointed out.

For ALEP, the European proposal continues to fail in essence, recognises that insufficient supply is a structural cause of the housing crisis, but does not respond enough to that problem.

“Regulating AL is not doing housing policy. The crisis only resolves by increasing the supply, through more construction, recovery of vacant properties and greater agility in licensing... If we continue to choose the easiest target instead of facing the most difficult problem, we will continue to have the same crisis”, concluded Eduardo Miranda.