Czech Republic: New law would mean thousands at risk of homelessness
News server iDNES.cz reports that more than 3 000 socially excluded people live in residential hotels throughout the Czech city of Brno. A forthcoming amendment would restrict residency in such facilities to the length of one year but does not address what would happen to those who have to move away after a year’s time.
For example, one 35-year-old woman from Brno has four children and is expecting another soon. She lives with her children and her partner in an unfinished studio ("holobyt") at Bratislavská 40 in Brno.
To rent the cell-like room in a building that strongly smells of excrement due to its poor sewerage, she pays CZK 6 500 per month. The single room is equipped with just a bed, a cold-water sink, a table and a television.
She shares a communal bathroom and kitchen with four other families on the same floor. Thousands of other people in residential hotels around Brno live in similar or even worse conditions.
City Hall estimates the number of such people at between 3 000 and 5 000. To rent a single room they can even pay as much as CZK 10 000 per month.
Those people could be moved, for example, into any of the 600 empty municipally-owned apartments in the center of Brno (more on which below). However, Libor Šťástka, the mayor of the Brno-střed municipal department, has a different opinion as to why people are in the residential hotels and not in the municipal properties.
"People don’t want apartments, they prefer to go live at the residential hotels, they must be getting enough money from their welfare to do that," Šťástka said last November during a public debate about the situation in the area around Cejl street convened by the Czech daily Mf DNES and the weekly RESPEKT at a well-known Brno theater. Romani activist Karel Holomek disagreed with that: "They can’t get apartments because they are in debt," he told Šťástka during the debate.
The City of Brno owns almost 300 vacant apartments in that troubled locality alone, on Bratislavská, Cejl, and Francouzská Streets. Applicants for them must not owe any back rent for any other property and must be able to show that for the past five years they have not owed any back rent or utilities for longer than half a year.
These terms also make it impossible for the insolvent to reside in shelters, because in order to apply for a place in a shelter, they must also have applied for a municipally-owned apartment. People with good credit are not interested in living around Cejl Street because of its bad reputation, high rents, and the poor state of the housing.
The city is losing enormous sums in unrealized revenues – for the 600 vacant apartments in Brno-střed, City Hall could be taking in more than CZK 3 million per month. Six years ago the city’s housing department presented a plan to develop the Cejl area.
With support from the European Union, 61 new apartments will be built on Bratislavská, Francouzská, Přadlácká and Spolková Streets by 2015 and another 180 will be repaired by the city. The project is estimated to cost almost half a billion crowns.
Apartments fit to live in could, however, be provided in a much cheaper way. "We have about 15 vacant apartments. People who want to move into them must put down a cleaning deposit of roughly CZK 100 000, which no one local can afford. That’s why the apartments remain empty," says František Tulej, administrator of a city-owned apartment building at Bratislavská 41.
Bureaucrats are directing monies elsewhere and have planned to reconstruct the building next door at Bratislavská 39, where the repair of each apartment will cost almost CZK 2 million. Apartments in the building at Bratislavská 40, discussed above, remain vacant as well.
In 1999 the city created 43 unfinished studios in that building to accommodate rent defaulters. Currently only five are occupied.
Lottery for social apartments
"This could be changed by building social apartments, but there are very few of those in Brno," Filip Fuchs, a lawyer with the DROM nonprofit organization, says. Tenants pay only half the market price for a social apartment in Brno.
The city’s housing commission began assigning social apartments just two years ago. In February 2012 and May 2013 they held lotteries to choose 10 families (out of approximately 180 applicants) for social housing.
The rules for awarding such a lease are strict. For example, the monthly income of an eight-member household applying for a social apartment must not exceed CZK 25 100.
The same rules apply to social apartments as do to any other city-owned residential properties. The insolvent cannot apply for them.
Many socially vulnerable families therefore find themselves in a trap. Because of their previous debts they cannot lease a city property, not even a social one, while they cannot even consider renting from a private landlord because they cannot afford the move-in deposits.
For such people, the only way out remains one of the 42 residential hotels in Brno. "There is a need to arrange for the relaxation of the rules around applying for municipal apartments so they can be occupied," said Jitka Tesařová of the Social Welfare Department at Brno City Hall, speaking at a December meeting attended by representatives of the city, nonprofits, and the regional authority.
The motivation of some politicians to change the situation, however, is doubtful at best. For example, Sabina Tomíšková, the former mayor of the Brno-sever municipal department, was vice-chair of the New BTS firm while she was in office, and that firm owns the Pyramida residential hotel on Francouzská Street.
Prior to her election, Tomíšková was also CEO of the Bytasen firm, which is now facing charges of having defrauded the city of more than CZK 100 million. Those charges were filed three years ago by another previous mayor of Brno-sever, Leo Venclík.
Venclík is a member of the board of the ARX Invest firm, which owns a residential hotel at Jarní 52. Tomíšková has long defended herself against the charges.
Tomíšková did not leave office until last December. Ever since her election in 2010 she was in a conflict of interest.
As mayor it was her job to ensure that as many municipally-owned apartments as possible found tenants. As an entrepreneur, however, she was making money on the fact that people were not being granted municipal leases and had no choice but to end up renting from private landlords.
The terms of renting from such private landlords are more than harsh. "If just one tenant doesn’t pay their electricity or water bill, the owner cuts off the entire residential hotel. Either someone forces the person who owes to pay, or we have to come up with it ourselves," one occupant of a residential hotel on Markéta Kuncová Street in the Židenice quarter of Brno said; the R. Hero Reality firm, which owns that property, makes almost CZK 5 million a year on it thanks to the housing contributions for its tenants that are paid from the state budget.
Even though residential hotels are the only solution for many people who have lost their access to a normal apartment, the state has decided to strictly regulate them. Last August a regulation took effect in which the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry requires residential hotels to be properly certified as buildings intended for housing and their occupants to actively seek to live in apartments elsewhere.
More restrictions would be imposed by the forthcoming amendment, according to which occupants of residential hotels will not be able to draw their housing subsidy at such an address for more than one year. "We want to stop the long-term abidance of people in the residential hotels, which are not primarily intended as permanent housing. The bill is ready to submit to the government. We have proposed that it take effect as of 1 January 2015," said ministry spokesperson Petr Sulek.
Only one-third of the residential hotels in Brno would be able to meet those newly-established criteria. Should the stricter rules actually take effect, hundreds of families would have just one year to find permanent housing outside the residential hotels.
If they do not find other housing, they will no longer be able to draw their housing subsidy, which they are existentially dependent upon. In a situation where former debtors are unable to apply for municipally-owned apartments and do not have the money to pay deposits to private landlords, rental housing is unattainable for many residential hotel occupants, and there is a very real chance that as of 1 January 2016, hundreds of families will lose the roof over their heads.
