Prague’s current leadership claims to be doing all it can to relieve the housing crisis in the city. To that end it’s planning to complete repairs on more than 200 city-owned flats to make them usable by seniors, teachers and families on limited incomes. But its plans to build new apartments have been delayed, making it unlikely that it will complete any by the end of its 4-year term of office in 2022.
It didn’t have to be that way, according to former mayor Adriana Krnáčková who’s been criticizing the ruling coalition over its inability to make progress. She says her administration had prepared projects for construction that the current mayor could have begun building. “We handed over prepared apartment building projects to them that they could have gotten credit for, but they refused them,” she told Hospodářské noviny. She was referring to 100 flats in Černý Most and another 350 in Dolní Počernice that her administration secured permits for.
But the city’s current council member in charge of housing Adam Zábranský described them as out-of-date projects that made no sense to build. He said the projects are currently being redesigned and that the Dolní Počernice site will be reworked so as to allow for the construction of around 1,000 units. Assuming history repeats itself, the administration that follows this one after 2022 will reject the design and order a redesign.
