LISBON — “I miss everything: the smell, the people,” Vanessa Rocha, 47, says of the Lisbon neighborhood where she was born and raised. Although she was forced, about seven years ago, to leave the Amalfa neighborhood, part of the Santa Maria Maior civil parish, she says it’s still in her blood.
“I lived with my partner and my son in an apartment on Rua dos Remédios. The landlord died and his son ended the contract. He turned the house into an alojamento local vacation rental,” she explains. Her hope of one day being able to return was rekindled recently, when she saw a Santa Maria Maior Parish Council publication about the Regresso ao Bairro (“Return to the Neighborhood”) program intended to bring residents back. She started sharing the initiative on social media.
“I miss seeing children playing in the street. My son doesn’t play here,” she said of her new neighborhood, Penha de França, northeast of the Alfama.
For now, Return to the Neighborhood is just an idea, but an one that the president of the Parish Council, Miguel Coelho, has been fighting for for several years: to recover vacant municipal houses in order to bring back those who, like Vanessa, have been pushed out of the neighborhood.
While neither the Parish Council nor the Lisbon City Hall has any say about the vacant buildings, Coelho knows what the city has noticed. “We’ve lost a lot of social fabric, and a lot of authenticity,” he said, adding that the program is “a way of fighting gentrification.” That is why the Parish Council has challenged Lisbon City Council to come up with a model that would allocate funds to restore unoccupied housing.
Real estate bullying
Rocha’s story is not unique in Lisbon’s historic center. According to voter registration data, the Santa Maria Maior district lost 28% of its population between 2013 and 2024. Along with the population loss, came a decline in the number of houses available and more vacation accommodations.
“At the very least, there is a very big coincidence between the districts in which there was a greater drop in population, and a greater drop in family housing, and alojamento local rental activity,” said Alda Botelho Azevedo, a demographer and researcher at the University of Lisbon’s Institute of Social Sciences (ICS-UL).
In 2018, Santa Maria Maior registered 3,666 alojamento local units, which provide short-term accommodation services, namely to tourists. Since then, Lisbon — and Portugal — have strengthened tenants’ rights by changing the controversial 2012 “Cristas” Rental Law, increasing controls and supervision of alojamento local, and creating containment zones in various districts (Alfama, Mouraria, Castelo, Bairro Alto, Madragoa, Graça and Colina de Santana).
Some landlords the illiteracy of tenants and even emotional pressure to push them out.
But that hasn’t been enough to stop residents from leaving. That is because some landlords resort to tactics such as “real estate bullying” — using the illiteracy of tenants and even emotional pressure to push them out — as researchers Fabiana Pavel and Ana Estevens explain in their study “Stories of eviction and resistance: being elderly in the center of Lisbon.”
The Santa Maria Maior Parish Council relayed one such incident on its social media in 2021. Over five years, a resident of Rua do Ouro was deprived of stairway lighting, had his elevator and mailbox removed, and, finally, the door of the house broken down and the property inside destroyed.
While the council set up a legal support office to assist people in such situations, it’s president, Coelho, argues the council must go further; it must reverse the situation and allow residents to return.
A pilot project with 20 houses
Coelho began to develop the idea for Return to the Neighborhood at the end of the previous term, together with Lisbon’s then mayor Fernando Medina. Realizing how many empty municipal housing units there were in the parish, Coelho proposed that the Parish Council itself should be part of the solution to the loss of residents.
“Proximity always gives better results than more distant intervention,” Coelho said. “While an engineer and an inspector from the City Council have to inspect construction work across the entire city, here, at the parish level, everything moves faster, errors and mistakes can be detected, and more pressure can be put on companies.”
Recently, the Benfica Parish Council also took a step toward responding to the housing crisis by proposing the sale of a plot of land owned by the City Council to build 50 affordable housing units there, under Portugal’s Recovery and Resilience Plan. The proposal was approved by the Lisbon Municipal Assembly on April 16.
In Santa Maria Maior, work has progressed: through observation and conversations with the residents, the Parish Council identified around 100 unoccupied units. Due to the change in mayor, the Return to the Neighborhood program was never implemented. But the idea hasn’t gone away.
For now, Coelho has suggested testing the model with a pilot project of 20 houses. Working with the City Council, the idea is to allocate money to renovate the homes, which would then be offered at an affordable rent. To be eligible for this selection process, potential tenants would have to show that they have been the victims of eviction, real estate bullying or an unaffordable rent increase in the past 15 to 20 years.
A new idea? How is it done abroad?
Pavel, an architect and specialist in rehabilitation, gentrification and the right to the city, said the Return to the Neighborhood program is a good way to combat the gentrification in Lisbon’s historic neighborhoods. “I think it’s an excellent and feasible idea, given that there are municipal affordable rent programs. Basically, it’s using what already exists and applying it to a specific case,” Pavel said.
While a program to return former residents to the historic center doesn’t seem to have been implemented in any other city, other cities have turned unoccupied spaces into affordable housing.
In Ireland, for example, a platform invites citizens to identify unoccupied houses, in an effort to pressure owners and local authorities to put them to a new use. In Birmingham, England, the city council put 340 vacant houses to new use between April 2023 and February 2024. In Baltimore, in the United States, the startup Parity is renovating vacant houses and then selling them to residents at affordable prices.
But when considering whether the Return to the Neighborhood program can work, and can improve quality of life in Lisbon’s historic center, one important question is whether people want to move back.
People are also deciding to leave because of the noise, the lack of facilities.
Pavel believes that the majority does, citing the Marchas Populares, Lisbon’s summertime carnival parades, when people return to their former neighborhoods in the historic center. “It’s a simple and obvious example that people still have ties to the neighborhood and feel part of it,” Pavel said.
Rocha is an excellent example of this; she has participated in Alfama’s parade for 14 years, a passion she inherited from her father, who organized them for 20 years. “I think everyone would like to go back,” she says.
But Pavel stressed that the program must be complemented by other policies to address other reasons why people leave, saying “People are also deciding to leave because of the noise, the lack of facilities. Life in the historic center is getting worse and worse. The City Council has given more value and importance to real estate developments, while restaurants and traditional commerces have been disappearing.”
Pavel, who lives in the Bairro Alto neighborhood, offers some ideas for improving quality of life in the historic center: regulating rent, creating an office to monitor vacation rentals, and promoting more affordable housing programs. In addition, she concludes, “we need to work on the quality of the neighborhoods, on commerce, on hygiene and noise and on public facilities.”
