Portalegre's Mayor Calls IHRU's Renovation Demands "Nonsense" as Work on 108 Council Homes Runs Late

The mayor of Portalegre has called the technical demands of the state housing institute "nonsense", saying they make the renovation of council homes so expensive that builders stay away, and admitting that the city's plan to refurbish more than a hundred social homes is running late.

Fermelinda Carvalho, elected for a PSD/CDS-PP coalition, made the remarks at Wednesday's council meeting (4 November), in answer to a question from the only Socialist councillor, Público reported, carrying the Lusa news agency.

What the mayor said

"The level of demands that IHRU places on these interventions is, in our view, nonsense," she said, referring to the Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana, the national body that funds council housing work. "It requires heat pumps, solar panels, it requires everything and the kitchen sink, which makes the renovations extremely costly."

She said the council owns about 470 homes. Under its local housing strategy (Estratégia Local de Habitação, the plan a council draws up to set out its housing needs and the projects it wants funded), most of the planned work covers 108 homes, both empty and occupied. Two further applications have been approved to renovate empty homes the council has bought, to create a pool of flats where tenants can live while their own homes are being repaired.

"It is a process that is somewhat behind schedule," Carvalho said. When the current team took office, she explained, it had to commission technical designs for all the buildings, which took time, before putting the work out to tender. She added that there is "a lot of difficulty" finding contractors for this kind of renovation, and listed technical conditions that put builders off.

86 households for 10 flats

The council has also just run a competition to let 10 of its homes at supported rent (arrendamento apoiado, where the rent is set as a share of household income). The mayor and councillor Lurdes Porto put the number of applicants at "about 90". The council's own provisional list, dated 24 September, names 86 applicants, of whom 26 were admitted. The most common reason for exclusion was income above the limit, followed by missing documents. The 10 homes range from a studio of 38 square metres to a four-bedroom flat of about 103 square metres.

"It is not as serious as in other municipalities," Carvalho said, "because if this were another region, we would have 10 houses and a thousand applicants."

What it means for you

• If you rent from Portalegre council and your home is on the renovation list, expect delays. The council says it plans to move tenants into temporary flats while work is done.
• If you applied for one of the 10 flats, the list is provisional. Excluded applicants are told the reasons by registered letter and have the right to reply before a final decision, under the Code of Administrative Procedure.
• Elsewhere in Portugal, IHRU's 1.º Direito programme, which helps people living in inadequate housing who cannot afford a decent home, relies mainly on renovation, so the same complaint about costs and scarce builders matters to councils across the country.

The Público report did not carry a response from IHRU. For the national picture, see our report on how many of the homes delivered under the Recovery Plan are refurbishments, and on the 2027 budget's cut to council rehousing money.