Amadora's First Reduced-Rent Flats Go to 56 Tenants at an Average of 463 Euros a Month, in a Prefabricated Timber Block Paid for by the PRR

Amadora City Council handed over the keys to 48 new flats at Cerrado da Mira, in the parish of Mina de Água, on Saturday 31 October. They are the first homes the municipality has let under its renda reduzida (reduced rent) scheme, and the average rent will be about 463 euros a month, according to the council's own announcement.

The block holds 46 one-bedroom flats and two two-bedroom flats. It was paid for by the Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (PRR, the EU-funded Recovery and Resilience Plan) and forms part of Amadora's local housing strategy. The handover came on the same day that thousands marched for housing in Lisbon and Porto.

Who moves in

The council says the 48 flats will house 56 people: 32 women and 24 men, with an average age of 37.3. Fifteen of the leaseholders are under 30, and the new tenants' average gross salary is 1,229 euros a month.

Rents are set according to household income, so that no household spends more than 35 percent of its average monthly income on rent. Mayor Vítor Ferreira called it "a rent adjusted to each person's income" and "much more affordable than the market". The Secretary of State for Housing, Patrícia Gonçalves Costa, attended the ceremony and said the way forward was "to build more, faster and better".

The rules of the scheme

Applications ran from 25 May to 19 June, and that round is now closed. According to the programme page, applicants had to:

• be adults and either Portuguese citizens or foreign nationals holding a valid residence permit;
• have lived or worked in Amadora for at least three years;
• have an average monthly household income of no more than four times the IAS (Indexante dos Apoios Sociais, the social support index), or 2,148.52 euros;
• not own a home anywhere in the Lisbon Metropolitan Area, and not owe money to the council, the tax authority, Social Security or the SIMAS water and sanitation service.

Flats went to the best-ranked applicants for each flat size. The council says the contracts:

• last five years and cannot be renewed;
• carry a rent that is updated each year by the legal rent-update coefficient;
• do not bar tenants from applying again under the programme later.

The council has not said whether it will open another round, either at Cerrado da Mira or elsewhere. New calls are published on its housing pages.

Built in a factory

The building is the municipality's first hybrid construction, made largely from timber modules prefabricated off site. The design-and-build contract went to Grupo Casais after an international public tender. It was worth 6,879,398.37 euros before VAT and carried a 540-day construction period. The council cites the builder's own figures for its CREE system: about 70 percent less waste, a 59 percent smaller carbon footprint (it uses a third of the concrete of a conventional building) and 50 to 70 percent less construction time.

The show flat was furnished by IKEA under a partnership with Casais. The council says the Alfragide store has offered the new tenants a 10 percent discount on purchases over 1,000 euros, plus a financing offer.

Why it matters

Forty-eight flats is a small number set against the demand: Portugal has finished only about two in three of the new homes it licensed over seven years. But it shows what PRR-funded municipal building looks like once the keys are in tenants' hands. It joins other public rental projects reported this week, including the IHRU's 40 homes in Bragança, the land Lisbon kept for affordable housing in the Alta de Lisboa, and the European Investment Bank's new 300 million euros for affordable homes.