Lisbon is a donut with whipped cream

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We love talking about smart cities, but we risk coming to the end of this boom with sad smart deserts, cities without residents. Since Lisbon became fashionable, rents have increased by up to 200%, in others, the apartments have been sold at 3600 euros / m2 and transformed into Local Accommodation or small hotels.

Geographers talk about the donut that Lisbon was in the 1970s and 1990s and explain that it is "a model of metropolitan growth characterized by the emptying of the urban center and population growth in the suburban and periurban crowns." In 2011, Lisbon had 50,000 empty apartments - almost 16% of the city's housing - of which 78% were out of the market. With the boom, many homes returned to the market, but not to the permanent residents of the city. The problem already reaches the middle class and even the upper-middle class and includes groups of people who were not even a year or even part of this conversation: university students. The rooms in the city went from 200 to 500 euros and today no university has beds for more than 10% of its displaced students.

The Lisbon Chamber has just approved the suspension of new local housing in the most depressed neighborhoods and cannot be said to be bad. But the suspension comes late and does not include preventive measures for neighborhoods that anticipate the replication of the problem. The municipality of Lisbon already has 17 thousand houses destined to Local Accommodation (AL). As predicted, the law triggered a race. On average, 145 AL were recorded per day between summer and last week. Whole buildings after entire buildings where no one lives. Tourists go out on the street, meet tourists, talk to tourists, have lunch and dine with tourists.