Most tenants of Prague city flats in social need are behaving decently, but there are some problems and the municipality is trying to solve them. This was stated by Adam Zábranský (Pirates), Prague’s councilor for housing, in an interview with ČTK. There have been recent reports in the media that tenants of apartment buildings are complaining about less adaptable neighbors from municipal flats. According to the councilor, the problem is that people often do not even send complaints to the municipality.
Complaints of tenants of town houses in Řepy, Modřany, Malešice or Střížkov were recently resolved by the municipal control committee. According to its chairwoman Alexandra Udženiji (ODS), the tenants complained about noise, drug use, but also aggressive behavior on the part of some tenants of municipal flats.
Zábranský said that only two of the complaints were received by the municipality’s housing department, which concerned apartments in Prague 10. Both were resolved, one household would not renew the contract and move the other to an apartment on the ground floor, where noise caused by children would not bother .
He added that the current coalition’s goal was to ensure that no children in the metropolis lived in hostels or shelters, which was adapted by the allocation of rental apartments. According to him, under previous sets, flats marked as social were not allocated to people in really difficult life situations. During this election period, according to the councilor, the municipality rented about 400 flats to households in need, allocated another 450 to representatives of supported professions and 300 seniors with disabilities.
According to him, problems can arise in the case of the socially weakest. “Clearly there is a risk, no one can predict,” he said. He added that the municipality tries to place a maximum of one-fifth and in some cases only a tenth of these tenants in one entrance and provides them with the services of social workers. According to him, in case of problems, people should turn directly to the municipality. “I appeal to people to really file complaints, because the housing department has a set mechanism for resolving them,” Zábranský said.
According to him, the problems may affect a maximum of ten percent of households, and in many of them the city has already decided not to renew the contract or terminate the lease. However, the statements are complicated. “If a tenant gets stuck, it is quite a big problem to evict him, if he defends himself in court, it takes some time,” Zábranský said. He added that complaints are far from limited to tenants of social housing and not all of them are justified.
In recent years, Prague has been facing a housing crisis due to high housing prices. According to a recent analysis by the city’s Institute of Planning and Development, the municipality manages 7,265 flats, and a further 23,080 are entrusted to the city district. Of the total housing stock in Prague, the municipality and town hall own only 4.5 percent of flats, which is a consequence of previous privatizations. The current city management has declared that it no longer wants to sell the flats and, on the contrary, wants to increase the city fund.
Source: CTK
