The first thing you notice, walking through the renovated wing of a 1960s housing block in Marvila, is that the floors don’t squeak. Then that the windows close. Then, slowly, that the corridors have been widened by ten centimetres at a time, in a way only an architect would think to do. The flat the IHRU has just handed over is forty-seven square metres for a single-parent household with two children. The rent, set under Lisbon’s Renda Acessível programme, is €346 a month. The same flat, on the open market three streets away, would currently let for upwards of €1,300.
This is the contradiction the new generation of Portuguese architects spends every working day inside. Lisbon needs more housing than it can build. The housing it has is the housing it needs to retrofit. The retrofit budget is small. The architects, mostly under forty, are being asked to design at one tenth of the unit cost a private developer would consider sane, and to do it well enough that the people who move in stay for thirty years.
How much rent is too much
The data on Lisbon’s housing crisis is by now boring in its consistency. INE’s rental price index for the metropolitan area rose 35 per cent between 2018 and 2024. Idealista’s asking-rent index rose more. The median wage rose nine per cent. The number of formally registered short-term-let units in the city’s historical centre crossed twenty thousand in 2023. The Golden Visa programme, which was finally retired for new residential investments in October 2023, had spent the previous decade mostly buying inner-city flats for non-residents.
None of this is news to anyone who lives in Lisbon. What is news, slightly, is that the Portuguese state has begun spending money on the answer at a rate it had not, since the 1970s. The Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência, the country’s NGEU-funded recovery plan, allocated €2.7 billion to housing, the largest single envelope for municipal housing in Portuguese democratic history. Most of it lands at the IHRU, the Instituto da Habitação e da Reabilitação Urbana, which then commissions the work, mostly by tender, to architectural offices.
The architects nobody invited to the magazines
The offices doing this work are mostly small. SAMI Arquitectos has four partners and a working studio in Praça do Príncipe Real where the photocopier sits next to the espresso machine and the model of a forty-eight-unit retrofit competes for desk space with the model of a single-family house in the Alentejo. Atelier Local, in Marvila, runs eleven people, all under forty-two. Ricardo Bak Gordon, who has been doing more visible work for longer, takes on selected social-housing tenders not because they pay well, they don’t, but because, as he put it in a 2023 lecture at the Calouste Gulbenkian, the housing question is the only architectural question in Portugal that still has a political deadline attached.
The tenders are tight. The IHRU sets a fixed cost-per-square-metre ceiling that varies by region but in central Lisbon hovers around €1,650 per square metre for retrofit and €1,900 for new build. That is not a budget for ornament. The interesting design moves are therefore unsentimental: a window orientation that catches the cross-breeze the Tagus pushes up the hill in summer; a stairwell wide enough for two people to pass each other with a pram; a kitchen designed so the single most expensive object in the flat, the cooker, can be replaced without dismantling the cabinetry.
The housing question is the only architectural question in Portugal that still has a political deadline attached.
Ricardo Bak Gordon, lecture at the Calouste Gulbenkian, 2023
Reabilitar para Arrendar
The two flagship instruments are Reabilitar para Arrendar, the IHRU’s long-running facility for state retrofit of vacant publicly-owned units, and the 1.º Direito programme, which co-finances local councils to do the same. Renda Acessível, launched by Lisbon City Hall in 2018 under Fernando Medina’s socialist administration, is the rental side, a programme that hands the retrofitted units to qualifying tenants at sub-market rates indexed to household income.
The programme survived the political handover in 2021. Carlos Moedas, the centre-right PSD mayor who took over from Medina, was sceptical of Renda Acessível’s tenant-selection criteria but kept the budget envelope intact. He has shifted the political language around it, less “social housing”, more “workforce housing”, without dismantling the underlying machinery. By the end of 2024, the programme had handed over roughly 4,800 units. The waiting list, by official IHRU figures, was approximately 23,000 households long.
The neighbourhood as a design constraint
The architects are unanimous on the part of the work that doesn’t show up on the floor plans. A retrofit in Marvila, in Olaias, in Chelas, in Loures, the bairros that ring the inner city, happens inside a community that was built in the 1960s and 70s under the Serviço de Apoio Ambulatório Local housing programmes, demographically settled, suspicious of architects, and deeply attached to the staircase neighbours they have known for forty years.
Atelier Local has done some of the most quietly successful work on this front. Their retrofit of the Bairro do Pinheirinho, completed in 2023, kept ninety per cent of the existing tenants in place during the works by sequencing the construction so that families moved between completed flats inside the same block, instead of being relocated to temporary housing on the city periphery. The cost was higher; the social cost, the office argues, was significantly lower. The IHRU has since written the “in-block sequencing” approach into its standard tender brief.
The arithmetic that doesn’t close
Even the most generous reading of the current numbers does not close the gap. The combined IHRU and municipal output for 2024 was approximately 3,200 affordable-rental units. The estimated annual demand growth, calculated by the Universidade Nova de Lisboa’s housing observatory, is approximately 8,500 units in the metropolitan area alone. The PRR funding stream runs out in 2026.
Architects and IHRU officials, in private, agree on what would change the arithmetic. A larger fiscal envelope is the obvious answer. A faster regulatory pathway for retrofit, specifically, a way to bypass the slow co-ownership procedures inside condomínios when the state is the majority owner, is the unobvious one. A standardised retrofit specification that can be tendered as a regional framework rather than building-by-building is, in the offices that have studied the German Rahmenverträge and the Viennese Sanftes Stadterneuerung programme, the move that would actually compound.
What the flats feel like to live in
The single-parent household in Marvila, three months in, does the things people do in flats they intend to keep. They have hung the children’s drawings on the wall. They have rearranged the furniture twice. They have figured out which of the two windows catches the morning light and put the kitchen table under it. The mother, who works in the public health system, says the rent number is the first time in seven years she has been able to plan more than three months ahead.
The architect who designed the retrofit will not visit. Office policy: residents get the building, not the architect’s narrative about the building. There is something honourable in that and also something instructive. Lisbon’s housing programme, in its current form, only works because the people running it, civil servants, architects, ward councillors, have agreed not to be the protagonists. The protagonists are the families on the waiting list. The story will be told in the rents they actually pay, the friendships they actually keep, the children they actually raise in flats that, against the prevailing market, were built to be lived in for thirty years.
Whether the next administration of Lisbon City Hall, or the next of the República, keeps the political agreement to stay in the background is the open question. The architects have done the design work. The state has, for once, found the capital. What is brittle is the political consensus that some things are infrastructure and some things are politics, and that this thing is infrastructure. In Lisbon, that consensus is six years old. It has held longer than most of its inner-city tenancy contracts.
Sources: Instituto Nacional de Estatística (INE), Idealista price index, Confidencial Imobiliário, IHRU annual reports, Plano de Recuperação e Resiliência (Portugal), Lei de Bases da Habitação (2019), Câmara Municipal de Lisboa (Renda Acessível), housing observatory at Universidade Nova de Lisboa.
