Speculation: Lisbon is one of the unfit cities to live in.

Tuesday morning. Manuela, a second-year student at the University of Lisbon, wakes up on her friends' floor in the city center, gets ready and heads off to class. But she's not celebrating after a night out: she tells me she "lives on the floor Monday through Friday after two months of looking for a room. "

Manuela's story is not unique. Leston, a Portuguese-Angolan resident, told me that his cousin "had difficulty moving to Lisbon from South Africa because it took him three months of prepaying rent." As geographer Agustín Cocola-Gant tells me, to rent an apartment, Lisbon residents, known as Lisboners, "must allocate 50-60 percent of their salary to''rent if they have a well-paid job. If you get a minimum wage job, forget about renting. "

In March, Lisbon was ranked third in the world for being unable to support itself when local wages and rents are taken into account. Its housing market seems more strained than in larger cities such as Paris and New York. Although housing prices are rising, the population has declined. In the 1980s, 20,000 people lived in the Alfam neighborhood. Today, only one thousand people live there. Older residents are being forced to leave the neighborhoods where they have spent their entire lives. This exodus "hinders our ability to establish neighborhood relationships," says Ana Gago, a researcher at the University of Lisbon who conducted qualitative research in Alfama. "And this, na'. "in my opinion, brutal."

More than half a century ago, Lisbon rebelled against right-wing dictatorship and chose the path of people power in the "Carnation Revolution." Back then, the right-wingers and conservatives were so obnoxious that the new major parties called themselves Social Democrats (center-right) and Socialists (center-left). How did Lisbon go from there to a situation where it is squeezing its people so hard? "Boom" and "squeeze".

According to Luis Mendes, a geographer at the University of Lisbon and a housing consultant at the local council, Lisbonians have been hit by a veritable "perfect storm" of dysfunctional policies. After democratization and decolonization, Portugal arrived in the mid-1970s with 'weak foundations for development,' explains Simone Tulumello, also a geographer''University of Lisbon. He argues that subsequent governments have focused on developing "low value-added activities, among which tourism is the golden egg".

Portuguese tourism flourished even during the Great Recession, when the European Central Bank and the International Monetary Fund bailed Portugal out of debt on the condition that austerity measures and investment deregulation were imposed. Portugal went along with this by developing a "golden visa" that granted European Union citizenship to investors who paid with, for example, the purchase of a property worth 500,000 euros, and a temporary residency program to attract European real estate investors. Both programs became''popular.

There was also an increased focus on tourism development to attract investment and create jobs. Although this came at a relatively low cost, the jobs created were often poorly paid. The local mayor's office attempted to renovate Lisbon's crumbling buildings by encouraging further investment and entry into the global housing market. The sales tax on renovations dropped from 21 percent to 5 percent. "This," Mendes explains, "is when this neoliberal trend started." Lisbon boasted its many advantages, gracing the covers of several magazines and topping several rankings. It became a dream city for tourists, digital nomads and startups. Madonna and Michael' have moved here. ''The neoliberal justification for rent law was that if you gave landlords more flexibility, they would put more housing on the market,'' Kokola-Gant replies when I tell him of this figure, ''and now we have less housing.'' The situation now, he says, is one where "prices are in line with global, not local, purchasing power. "

Not everyone agrees that the phenomenon of tourism and speculation is hurting residents. If too many properties were being converted to tourism, Lisbon should not have empty houses, says Filipa Roseta, housing adviser of the Social Democratic Party (center-right). "If you take a good look at the figures, the big number is 48,000 empty houses [not counting hotels]. This is the problem we are now i''Great Britain or even the United States, it forces the masses to live in abject poverty. Today there are six thousand households in the city waiting for housing. This is why many evictees have been forced to leave, and some neighborhoods have shrunk by a quarter since 2011. "The city government is simultaneously rebuilding and losing population," Tulumello said. "It's a complete failure. "

Influential circles There are winners and losers in Lisbon's current situation. While some are being evicted, other locals are profiting from renting apartments. However, everyone knows those who have suffered because of this transformation.

Their dominant ideology was that a market that had the power to act exactly 'as it should' would ensure a happy equilibrium between supply and demand. This has meant giving the private sector incentives (tax cuts), flexibility (easier evictions) and even public land, on which, according to the new housing minister Roseta, plans are underway: 'We are developing a policy that combines public and private: the city provides the land and we ask someone to build. That way, the rent will be more affordable because the investor didn't pay for the land. "

Although one-third of these homes are to be rented out in''rent at an "affordable" rate, it is clear that the real benefit of such a scheme goes to the private investor. Two things justify support for this ideology. First, the number of voters who keep their money in real estate has become significant enough that the council is desperate to keep prices rising despite the volatility of this situation. And, more extreme, the scandals have shown the link between capital and parties.

In addition, a political culture in which Lisbon is seen as a nest for public bodies has discouraged the autonomous municipalism seen in Barcelona (where they have reduced the number of apartments rented out through Airbnb) and New York (where they have moved to take legal action against oil companies). Cleaning up accordingly, measures,''undertaken by the mayor's office, did not dare to affect the rise in prices and the strength of landlords.

The Affordable Rental Housing Program (Programa Renda Acessível), conceived to create seven thousand affordable rental apartments through the collaboration of public and private exclusively on the apartment floor is considered progressivist. Seven years later, only a few hundred have been built. Instead, the private sector did its own thing, building profit-demanding luxury apartments for international elites, speculators and digital nomads.

In 2020, Mayor Fernando Medina launched a "bold plan" to bring Aireb back into the long-term rental market. International attention was drawn to the 'Renda Segura' program, which offered an attempt at short-term rentals in five years' time''renting apartments that the owners had stopped renting through Airbnb to the city for 1,000 euros a month, with the city paying everything up front. The city rented these homes at an affordable price to long-term tenants. Overall, according to Gago, this helped ensure that "over the pandemic, the only sector that hasn't lost money is the landlord. "

There was a minimum rent level for landlords - at the taxpayer's expense - if they found it difficult to find short-term tenants. And many had no trouble doing so. Tourism dropped by half during the pandemic, but it didn't disappear. Despite the early excitement, the Renda Segura program put fewer than two hundred residences on the long-term market. Because tourist revenues were so lucrative, the overwhelming''Most Airbnb owners believed they would be better off waiting for tourists to return than renting to the city for five years. They were right: tourism has already returned to pre-pandemic levels a year earlier than analysts predicted.

In Tulumello's opinion, the council's "choose not to use the stick, but choose the carrot" narrative of its failure. "It didn't work because the other carrot [waiting for short-term rentals] is much more attractive." In fact, new data shows that the housing offered under the program was predominantly of poor quality. Councillor Rozeta claims that one dwelling received by the council through the program was rejected by thirty-families. She believes that the previous''Medina's administration, in order to keep the program popular, tried to acquire as many homes as possible, accepting almost all applicants. "Some owners applied because they couldn't rent through the market. Now we have bad houses that need repairs and we can't find people who want to live in them. "

Although the state has passed some useful laws to protect citizens' housing rights, such as a ban on evicting some people over 64, much more intervention is needed. Lisbon could use an existing law under which it can confiscate neglected housing from owners and renovate it for public housing. As Cocola-Gant says, although the council "hasn't used it with that''s excuse that it lacks money, such an excuse is false because the PRS program has cost the state millions in tax rebates." Another solution he suggests for vacant housing is to "require owners to rent it out" at controlled prices if they want to keep their homes. Tulumello also mentions moving from incentives to intervention, "Plan and decide, 'How many hotels and tourist rentals do we want?" "How many permits will we give?" Then everything else has to be for housing, and housing works in accordance with housing laws, with long-term contracts." As a mitigation measure, golden visa programs and tax credits could also be ended. It would also''people may stay. Given Lisbon's population losses, it is likely that the electorate will be both smaller than before and rather richer and more inclined to favor neoliberal measures. If current policies continue, this trend will continue. This shows how the right-wing can gain power over the country's metropolitan area.

Despite the "perfect storm" of Lisbon politics, the mechanisms are not specific to Lisbon. The housing and property internationalization in Athens and Berlin are well known, as is the financial stabilization of real estate in London and Dublin. Emerging from the pandemic, Lisbon is at a critical crossroads. Activism is on the rise, but the new administration, unlike the socialists, 'does not recognize that''there is a problem,' says Gago. Returning to the eurozone crisis, it says the impact of the pandemic means it may have to find ways to increase foreign investment. "Now," says Gago, "we're back to where we were.".