Long Waiting of Social Housing in Portugal

Rita Cachado, ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon

Caterina Di Giovanni, ISCTE University Institute of Lisbon

In the early 1990s, the Portuguese government set out the biggest social housing policy ever known in the country, the PER, Special Program of Rehousing. The main idea was to end up with all shanty towns around Lisbon and Porto, and to rehouse families in social housing estates.

Lisbon, more than other Portuguese urban contexts, was dotted with either small or big shanties around its outskirts, from neighborhoods with 10 dwellings, to around 500. For most situations, the location was not far from the center, although segregated and degraded. The shanties were born along with a growing industry in the 1960s and grew up in the late 1970s with refugees running from recent independent African countries that were formerly colonized by Portugal, therefore dealing with rapid sociopolitical change, including war. Once in Portugal, 500 thousand families had to find a home. A huge part of them only found the chance to build a shanty.

The municipalities registered the majority of the neighborhoods to the PER, which rehoused almost 50 thousand families until the end of 2000s. At first, the PER should be ended by 2000; in the middle 2000s, some municipalities decided they should conclude the PER by 2010; in the middle 2010s, thousands of families were still waiting for their housing solution.

The Portuguese context stresses the idea of long waiting – sometimes described as twilight zone – as an unexpected situation, though prolonged and difficult to understand. The PER was talked about in the media and by politicians as a pledge to be accomplished soon, but a lot of families never saw the end of the process. The fastest processes were the ones that rehoused people far away from city centers. One of the debates in social sciences concerning housing in Portugal is precisely upon the fact that the PER accentuated social and spatial segregation for the resettled populations, most of them afro descendants, which illustrates the existence of institutional racism in Portugal.

The resettlement processes that went slower have specific stories to be told. Quinta da Vitória in the picture was a shanty town not far from the capital Airport and close to the gentrified area of Parque das Nações, built for the World Exhibition in 1998. It counted 450 families in the early 1990s. There was a census in 1992, right before the PER law, that represents the moment when the population first felt the expectation of being rehoused. In 1998, there was an urgent need of demolition for 60 dwellings located over the line of a new road access. So, 60 families were resettled, fortunately nearby, without the need of changing their daily lives. Between 2000 and 2002, an estate of 450 dwellings was built just in front of Quinta da Vitória, but to house families from another municipality. Nevertheless, the efforts from social workers resulted in the chance of rehousing there 100 families from Quinta da Vitória. Staying in the same area is a privileged situation.  

However, half of Quinta da Vitória population wasn’t resettled in PER social housing estates. Some migrated again, 25 years after their migration to Portugal; other were compensated for the fact that the municipality did not have a solution for them; some other were occasionally resettled in houses located in other PER neighborhoods, in segregated areas. And finally, dozens of families, though living in Quinta da Vitória forever, did not have any documents proving they were living there by 1993, so they lost their right to be rehoused. The space was emptied in 2013, which means that some families waited for 20 years. Finally, a new supermarket opened in the same area in 2020.

Another situation, not directly linked with the PER policy but to the issues of long waiting, is the Bairro Padre Cruz in Lisbon. Situated on the administrative boundary of the municipality, it is the largest public housing neighborhood in the Iberian Peninsula, formed by almost 2000 municipal houses and more than 6500 inhabitants. Since its origin, it has always been in an ongoing process of rehousing, becoming an extraordinary case to analyze several housing policies, which make the history of the neighborhood as well as the history of social housing of Lisbon.

The neighborhood’s phases started in the 60s with 917 single-family dwellings - called alvenarias – building 200 apartaments in 1976, and almost 1500 houses in buildings between 1989 and 1996. Nowadays, Bairro Padre Cruz is going through another phase, which aims at demolishing all the ancient houses of alvenarias and building new social housing.

The current intervention, formally initiated in 2009 but initially discussed a decade before, was planned in phases for rehousing as well as building. The process is guided by a council instrument locally based in the neighborhood – called GABIP (Priority Intervention Neighbourhood Support Office) – which gathers the actors of the process to make decisions together about the rehousing’s phases, ensuring families would be relocated in the same neighborhood.

Despite being different from the PER policy, some critical elements remain to explore. Since it is a phased and long process estimated to last 30 years, it doesn't even go halfway, and a lot of inhabitants will never see the end of the process. Even if this is a long-lasting process, many positive elements remain, such as the participatory decision-making tool and do not relocate people far from the place where they live.

To conclude about the Portuguese housing state of affairs, a few words about the present situation: in 2018 there were about 25 thousand families with very poor housing situations, so the Government launched a legislative package, in which the “first right” program aims at new resettlements for resolving the precarious existing situations. Social sciences must look closely at this process, following unsettlement and resettlement situations, including not only housing mobility but also to social and cultural change, adaptation and resistance.

To know more…

Allegra, M., Tulumello, S., Falanga, R., Cachado, R., Ferreira, A., Colombo, A., & Alves, S. (2017). Um novo PER? Realojamento e políticas de habitação em Portugal. Policy Brief 2017.

Alves, S. (2019) Planning for Affordable Housing: A comparative analysis of Portugal, England and Denmark, Final Report, Cambridge Centre for Housing & Planning Research, Cambridge.

Cachado, R. (2013). O Programa Especial de Realojamento. Ambiente histórico, político e social. Análise social, (206), 134-152.

Cachado, R. (2013), “O registo escondido num bairro em processo de realojamento. O caso dos Hindus da Quinta da Vitória”, Etnográfica, 17 (3): 477-499 http://etnografica.revues.org/3201, DOI 10.4000/etnografica.3201

Cachado, R. (2014), “Locating Portuguese Hindus. Transnationality in Urban Settings”, Sociologia Problemas e Práticas 76, 109-124, DOI 10.7458/SPP2014763330, in http://revistas.rcaap.pt/spp/article/view/3330/3262

Di Giovanni, C. F. (2019). Social housing in Portugal and Italy: methodological issues and empirical inferences of a comparative study.

Freitas, F. (2013), Histórias e memórias do bairro Padre Cruz, Junta de Freguesia de Carnide, Lisboa 

Tulumello, S., Ferreira, A. C., Colombo, A., Di Giovanni, C., & Allegra, M. (2018). Comparative planning and housing studies beyond taxonomy: A genealogy of the Special Programme for Rehousing (Portugal). Transactions of AESOP, 2, 32-46.