| Everyone is guilty of endless hopescrolling on property websites. You type in the city of your dreams, set the price to ‘no maximum’ and arrange the results from the highest to lowest price just ‘to see what’s out there’. It feeds a few minutes of harmless whimsy to see what a city penthouse that costs fifty times your annual salary would look like until you tell yourself that you wouldn’t actually buy it because the wallpaper is odd. Suddenly break time is over, you “save it for later” and it's back to work. Classic. |
| The world of property apps has grown into both a marketplace and a vision board but Portugal has found a third variant: the exposer. ‘Devolutos’ (trans. vacant) is an app that has been uncovering one of the strangest phenomena at the heart of Lisbon’s housing crisis, unoccupied, off the market homes. At a time of severe housing crisis, over 12% of Portugal's housing stock is empty and boarded up. Users of Devolutos can find and post geolocated pictures of abandoned houses on the app as a way of exposing the scale and spread of underused properties. Houses are shown on an interactive map and uploaded images are digitally ‘tagged’ with the app’s cross-like logo. The app has been met with both praise and criticism with landlords threatening legal action against the publicising of private addresses whereas supporters claim it is a catalyst for housing reform. |
| Portugal’s housing crisis is one of the most complicated in Europe but one of the most entrenched causes is a niche aspect of family law - inheritance. Empty houses are often a symptom of the method by which houses are passed down from one generation to another. When a family member dies, a complicated inheritance process kicks in and lasts for years before it can be resolved. As homeowners try to navigate it, houses remain empty and the repositories of apps like Devolutos grow further. As the country tries to address it by legislation, some demand an overhaul of the legal system itself. |
Padlocks, padlocks and more padlocks
| The images on Devolutos are stark. The interactive map is peppered with crosses across cities like Lisbon and the app claims to have registered 5240 empty houses out of an estimated 48000 in the capital. While the app is limited to a handful of cities, empty properties can also be found in Portugal’s rural areas. Urbanisation and a shift away from the agricultural industry in the 20th and 21st centuries pulled populations into large cities, often leaving parcels of land and properties abandoned. Towns and villages saw sharp population declines in recent decades as owners moved and land was left without formal titles or ownership records. Beyond housing, this created an even more pressing threat of wildfires as untouched swathes of flammable shrubs and forests could not be safely managed. The end result seems counterintuitive. At a time of acute housing shortage, Portugal doesn’t solely have a supply problem, it has an access problem. |
| Empty housing sits within a wider context. Extensive regulation, time consuming permit approvals and surging house prices have meant that affordability is well beyond the reach of everyday citizens. Labour productivity, measured as the amount of ‘output’ created per hour worked, is one of the lowest in the EU and construction costs are steadily rising. The result is that new homes simply are not being built fast enough to keep up with the increasing demand. The effects are felt most when students and youth are unable to move out of family homes or priced out of student housing. |
| Like many other cities, Lisbon has also fallen prey to the ‘Airbnb-ification’ of its housing stock. Almost a fifth of houses in Portugal are used as second holiday homes and remain empty for the majority of the year. The capital is a hub for digital nomads who are lured by tax incentives on foreign income and the promise of sunshine. Property sites such as Flatio advertise homes not just by the number of rooms, but by the speed of the Wi-Fi. The cost of living for digital nomads in temporary rentals is considerably lower than for residents and local cafes and shops all evolve to cater towards a more transient demographic. Housing stock and apartments are removed from the market, especially in tourist friendly city centres and the supply of housing gets pushed further out. |
| With such delays, an unwanted consequence of properties being left unused for such long periods of time is that they slowly fall into disrepair and require renovations in order to become habitable again. With increasing costs of construction, renovations become unaffordable and the cycle persists. |
Blood is thicker than water
| The law at the heart of the ghost housing market is called Herança Indivisa or ‘undivided inheritance’. It states that upon the death of a homeowner, the entire estate is passed onto their partner and children with the intention of preserving bloodline inheritance. Even in cases where the deceased had written a will, a portion of the inheritance is reserved for close family members as a form of forced heirship. Its roots lie in Roman law as a means of preventing heirs from being disinherited without reasonable cause. The law is a tool to ensure family and generational wealth and thus inheritances are shared between heirs. Instead of assets being divided up by person (for example Child A receives the house and Child B receives the farm), heirs receive a stake in the overall inheritance and as a result, do not own any one item outright. In the case of a house being passed onto three children, one child cannot sell the property by themselves as it is legally split between all three siblings. Where there is no agreement between siblings, properties can remain stagnant for five years. |
| Undivided inheritance is also a product of the number of siblings a person has. Today, Portugal has the highest proportion of families with only one child, however, this wasn’t always the case. Until the 1960s, Portugal had high fertility rates with an average of three children being born to one woman and it was only in the 1980s that this number fell below two. Children who grew up in mid-20th century households would have grown up with multiple siblings and in recent decades, would have likely lost their parents. Properties owned by a parent would have been passed down to multiple direct descendants and as a result, would have become trapped in the complexities of undivided inheritance. As families grow apart and cousins and distant relatives move abroad, the challenges worsen as little to no meaningful action can be taken on properties without the express consent of all of the heirs. At the scale of a country it forms what we see today in the form of shuttered houses. |
Complicated answers
| Earlier this year, Portugal passed a law stating that if an inherited property is still at a stalemate after two years, a single heir can force its sale. It came as a part of a wider package of housing reforms to expedite the processes within a sluggish housing market, however, legal experts have warned that these do not address the fact that the property market is tied to a labyrinthine court system. Portugal’s current civil courts are experiencing extensive backlogs, staffing shortages with over 600,000 pending cases, a number that has risen for two consecutive years. They warn that the problem of stalemates is not just a product of difficult family negotiations, but the lack of affordability of legal action. Heirs to properties are not equally wealthy, leading to a mismatch that often takes over four to five years to resolve in the court system. With such delays, an unwanted consequence of properties being left unused for such long periods of time is that they slowly fall into disrepair and require renovations in order to become habitable again. With increasing costs of construction, renovations become unaffordable and the cycle persists. In the capital, the city’s catering to the influx of digital nomads is a double-edged sword. The city has embraced technology-first solutions to plug the gaps in its housing market, including partnerships with prefabricated housing manufacturers to meet demands. In 2022, Lisbon hosted ‘HACKATHOME’, asking university students to come up with innovative tech-first solutions. Many ideas spawned from the need to unlock vacant housing by geolocating them and connecting them to property platforms. While all innovative ideas, housing supply in Portugal needs far greater systemic reform. The challenge of vacant housing is not an unwillingness but an inability to sell. The Portuguese case is an example of how interlinked housing is to history and culture that extend well beyond construction. The knock-on effects of seemingly unrelated industries can have tangible effects on how people live not just in Portugal but in cities around the world. Being able to unlock its historic housing stock would not just mean that Portugal could house thousands more residents, but ensure that its urban history remains intact. Buildings and houses are constructed to be lived in, they need people to maintain and clean them. Locking the supply away would not just result in a struggling housing market, but the gradual decay of urban history. |