Matosinhos Hands Four Municipal Plots to Housing Cooperatives for 140 Affordable-Rent Homes — 90-Year Direito de Superfície, €75k Subsidy, Rents 20% Below Market as the State's €250M Cooperative Fund Stays Missing

The Câmara Municipal de Matosinhos, the Greater Porto municipality that built roughly seven thousand cooperative homes in the two decades after 25 April 1974, has decided to do it again — only this time for the rental market rather than for ownership. On Friday, 25 April 2026, mayor Luísa Salgueiro unveiled the Programa de Apoio à Habitação Cooperativa de Matosinhos at a public presentation, the centerpiece of which is the gratuitous cession to housing cooperatives of four municipal plots by direito de superfície for ninety years, renewable for an equal period. Across the four parcels, the programme expects the construction of 140 dwellings destined for arrendamento acessível — affordable rent capped at 20% below the local market median.

The application window opened the same day and runs for one month, closing on 24 May 2026. Cooperatives may apply individually or in agrupamento; the winners take the project from architecture and licensing through construction, financing and long-term management of the empreendimento.

The four plots, parish by parish

The municipal cession is granular and locally readable:

• City of Matosinhos — Rua Eng.º Fernando Cayolla: 25 dwellings.
• S. Mamede de Infesta — Rua de Ormuz: 40 dwellings.
• Custóias — Rua Soares dos Reis: 35 dwellings.
• Custóias — Rua Nova de São Gens: 40 dwellings.

That's the entire programme on one page: two parishes carry 75 of the 140 fogos — Custóias alone takes 53.6% — and the city centre of Matosinhos itself accounts for less than a fifth of the total. The geographical spread is consistent with where the municipal land bank sits and where the demographic pressure is most visible: S. Mamede de Infesta and Custóias both border Porto and have been absorbing the spillover of the Porto rental crunch for the better part of a decade.

The legal frame — Lei n.º 56/2023 and the new generation of cooperatives

The programme sits inside the framework created by Lei n.º 56/2023, de 6 de outubro — the housing-package act usually shorthanded as Mais Habitação — which carved out a chapter for what the Government called the Nova Geração do Cooperativismo para a Promoção de Habitação Acessível. The intent of that chapter was to revive cooperative housing as a delivery vehicle, but specifically pivoted toward affordable rent (rather than the ownership model that dominated cooperative output in the 1970s and 1980s) and emphasising sustentabilidade, accessibility and community.

The instrument the Câmara is using is the direito de superfície — a real right under the Portuguese Civil Code (Articles 1524 and following) by which a landowner cedes the right to build and maintain a structure on a plot to a third party for a defined term, after which ownership of the structure reverts to the soil-holder. Ninety years, renewable, is at the long end of what Portuguese municipalities typically grant — long enough for cooperatives to amortise construction debt across multiple generations of tenants without the municipality losing the underlying land.

Tenant rents must come in at 20% below the local market average, and the dwellings flow through the Programa Nacional de Arrendamento Acessível (PAA) — which entitles the construction works to VAT at the reduced 6% rate rather than the standard 23%, a non-trivial saving on a forty-flat block.

The municipal package — €75,000, IMI exemption, Via Verde

Matosinhos' contribution beyond the land is concrete:

• Architecture-cost subsidy of up to €75,000 per project.
• Full exemption from taxas urbanísticas (planning fees) on the cooperative project.
• Via Verde Habitação Acessível — a fast-track licensing channel inside the Departamento de Urbanismo for projects flagged as affordable.
• IMI (council tax) exemption for the entire duration of the direito de superfície, i.e. across the full 90-year term.
• The municipality also takes on the access-road and public-space works abutting each plot; the cooperative is responsible only for connecting the building's grid links to the public utilities.

Stacked, the package transforms the unit-economics of a Portuguese cooperative housing build. Land at zero cost; planning fees waived; council tax waived for 90 years; VAT cut from 23% to 6%; €75,000 toward the architects' and engineers' fees. The remaining hard cost is construction itself — and that is where the programme is exposed.

Who the homes are for

The intended tenant pool is identified in the programme rules and explicitly limited:

• Famílias com dificuldades no acesso ao mercado — households shut out of the open rental market.
• Jovens que pretendem emancipar-se — young people leaving the parental home for the first time.
• Pessoas com necessidades especiais de habitação — accessibility-priority tenants.

This is not habitação social in the strict sense — there are no income ceilings on the scale of the IHRU social-housing stock — but it is also not market rental. The 20%-below-market floor, combined with the targeted groups, places it squarely in what Portuguese housing policy now labels the arrendamento acessível middle tier.

Five 20-point criteria — how cooperatives win a plot

Candidate cooperatives will be scored on five equally-weighted criteria, each worth twenty points:

1. Years of activity of the cooperative since constitution.
2. Number of dwellings the cooperative has built or promoted historically.
3. Social or economic responses currently managed by the cooperative.
4. Percentage rent reduction below the value of the Portaria de Arrendamento Acessível ceiling — i.e. cooperatives that go further than the 20% floor get more points.
5. Technical merit of the architectural and operational project.

The municipality has signaled it will give weight to communal facilities in the technical-project score — shared lounges, coworking and study rooms, children's activity space, and event areas usable for cooperators' birthdays and gatherings. Lavandarias and other shared services managed at the condomínio level may be operated as income-generating for the building, lowering the rent-recovery burden on the dwellings themselves.

The missing piece — the €250 million the State never delivered

For all the local generosity, the programme has one structural problem: nobody wants to lend to Portuguese housing cooperatives.

When the Costa Government rolled out the Nova Geração do Cooperativismo chapter in late 2023, it announced — alongside the legal framework — a €250 million envelope to finance cooperative construction, plus a public guarantee allowing cooperatives to access bank credit on commercial terms. Neither has materialised. Salgueiro was direct on Friday: 'Continua a faltar o financiamento que o Governo prometeu, que anunciou e que nunca aconteceu.'

She added that the Câmara has already gone shopping for alternatives: the European Investment Bank (BEI), IFRU (Portugal's urban-rehabilitation financing instrument), and Banco Português de Fomento. None had a credit line that fits a cooperative-housing build at the scale the programme contemplates. Guilherme Vilaverde, one of the founders of the historic Cooperativa de Habitação As Sete Bicas and a movement elder present at Friday's launch, was equally blunt: only cooperatives 'que tenham recursos e alguns ativos' — that already have capital and assets — will be able to make the numbers work in 2026.

This is why the programme is structured the way it is. By layering land-cost, fee, IMI and VAT savings on top of the €75,000 subsidy, Matosinhos has done as much as a Portuguese municipality can do to push a cooperative project across the line without writing a construction loan itself. The financial-viability study that forms part of every application is, in practice, the binding constraint: the Câmara is not going to award a plot to a cooperative that cannot show the bank statements to build on it.

Why this matters beyond Matosinhos

For an expat audience, three things stand out. First, the cooperative model is uncommon in most Anglophone home countries — but in Portugal it is a recognised legal form (cooperativa de habitação e construção) and accounts for a substantial share of post-1974 affordable housing stock, particularly in the Porto metro. Tenants of cooperative buildings hold contracts under the Novo Regime do Arrendamento Urbano (NRAU), with the same eviction protections and caução rules as any other rental — the difference is the rent ceiling and the management body.

Second, this is a direct municipal response to the Greater Porto rental compression that has pushed median rents in the Porto metropolitan area beyond €2,305/m² in INE's Q1 2025 freguesia data — a number Matosinhos voters live with. The four plots will not move that median. But cooperatives that win them will be obliged to keep their rents at least 20% below it for, in practice, as long as the buildings stand — a structurally different proposition from a one-off PAA contract.

Third, the programme is a quiet test of the Nova Geração do Cooperativismo in the absence of the State funding that was supposed to make it work. If Matosinhos lands four cooperative builds without the €250 million, every other municipality with land and political will is watching. If it does not — if the Câmara has to thin the programme or extend the deadline because no cooperative can credibly demonstrate construction financing — the gap between the 2023 housing-package promise and 2026 delivery becomes very public.

Either way, the candidacy window closes 24 May 2026. The next data point will be the number — and the financial credibility — of the cooperatives that file by that date.