Portalegre criticizes “disparate” IHRU requirements to recover homes

A president of Portalegre House, Fermelinda Carvalho, today considered “a nonsense” the level of demand that the Institute of Housing and Urban Rehabilitation (IHRU) presents to municipalities for housing rehabilitation projects.

“ The level of demand placed by IHRU in these interventions, in our view, is nonsense. It requires [the installation of] heat pumps, solar panels, it requires ‘everything and a pair of boots’, which makes rehabilitations extremely costly”, he criticized.

Fermelinda Carvalho, elected by a PSD/CDS-PP coalition, spoke at today's chamber meeting, which the Lusa agency followed through the Internet, having addressed the subject of housing in the county, after a question asked about this matter by the only councilman of the PS.

The municipality, which revealed that the municipality has about “470 dwellings”, also explained that, within the framework of the Local Housing Strategy (ELH), the municipality had a “large majority” intervention plan “in 108 vacant and inhabited houses”.

“To add” to this, he continued, two more applications were approved for rehabilitation of return homes purchased by the municipality, to be recovered and to be “created a scholarship” of houses.

This scholarship, he explained, aims to house people in these properties while the rehabilitation works take place in their homes.

“It’s a process that is a little late. When we arrived at the city council, we had to prepare the technical project for these buildings all, which took some time, and then we have launched contests ", said.

Fermelinda Carvalho also stressed that “there is a lot of difficulty” in finding contractors, especially to perform “this type of works” of rehabilitation, and listed a set of technical situations that keep entrepreneurs from building this type of projects.

The municipality, which has an ongoing housing delivery program, recently developed a competition for the allocation of 10 houses, with the initiative counting “about 90 candidates”, indicated at the meeting Councilwoman Lurdes Porto (PSD/CDS-PP) and later Fermelinda Carvalho,

“It’s not as serious as in other municipalities, because maybe if it were in other regions, we had 10 houses and a thousand candidates,” the mayor said.

Throughout his intervention, he recalled the investment that is being made in the creation of housing in the municipality, both by the municipality and by private and other entities, and ensured that the executive is “following closely” the problems related to this sector.

At the meeting, the mayor also revealed that the space of an old lanific factory, located in a vast area in the “heart of the city”, was recently acquired by privates.

The mayor, who did not advance acquisition values or other details about the future to give that space, merely said that the executive knows “more or less” what investors intend to develop in that area.

“They are working for the recovery” of the property and the surrounding area” and “no one invests such a great amount for nothing to happen,” he said, considering that this acquisition “is good news for Portalegre”, since it is “a degraded area, in the heart of the city”.