The two-storey complex of tiny homes in gentrifying Marvila was bought up by developers – but nobody consulted the low-income families who have lived there for decades

When the Santos Lima building went up for sale for €7.2m (£6.4m) in Marvila, a former industrial area of Lisbon, investors might have thought they’d spotted a bargain. Running some 100m along the Rua do Açucar, the building was listed online as unoccupied and “ideal for being turned into an apart-hotel or offices”. But to its long-term residents, the advertisement came as a shock.

“I think [the companies] bought it without knowing … the state of the building, and without knowing what was inside it,” says resident Eduardo Nicola, a retired traffic policeman who lives in Santos Lima. Hidden behind the building’s grand 19th-century facade is a two-story complex of tiny homes, originally destined for workers at the nearby factories and now occupied by low-income renters.

For residents, the so-called “regeneration” of Marvila – now home to a craft beer brewery, and with the world’s largest co-working startup under construction down the road – has been extraordinarily fast. Santos Lima has already been sold twice in the past four years and as property prices continue to soar it’s now on the market again – without, it seems, any consideration for the futures of the 17 or so families still living there.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest The Abel Fonseca factory, across the road from Santos Lima, was recently transformed into a co-working space and bar. Photograph: Ana Naomi de Sousa

Like much of Marvila, Santos Lima is severely rundown – the postboxes in the entrance hall are broken, the wooden floorboards are soft and dusty, and the spiral iron banister is patched up in places with rusty barbed wire. Yet its mostly elderly residents are proud of their homes. Some were born in Santos Lima and have spent their entire lives there, like its oldest resident, Emilia, who is 92 and completely blind; she is only able to maintain her independence because she knows her home by touch.

She and some of the other residents are protected under Portuguese legislation outlawing the eviction of people aged 65 and over who have low incomes and rental contracts agreed before 1990. This poses a problem for the less scrupulous landlords in Lisbon.

Housing activists and the residents of Santos Lima say the building’s owners have been trying to force them to vacate the property. “First they changed the lock on the front door but didn’t give any of us the key, so we had to leave the main door to the building open, leaving everyone feeling unsafe,” recalls Nicola. “Then they turned up unannounced and smashed in the doors to the apartments that were uninhabited, leaving them all wide open.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Railings repaired with barbed wire inside the building. Photograph: Ana Naomi de Sousa

Though the building’s owners deny the charges, the not-for-profit organisation Habita has denounced the interventions in Santos Lima as “real-estate bullying”.

“Because these elderly people are protected by the law, they can’t be evicted legally,” explains Rita Silva, who runs Habita and is part of the Stop Despejos (Stop Evictions) campaign. “Unless they die, they will be hard to get rid of, so the landlords have had to resort to other methods. They’re not interested in offering compensation, so they’ve tried intimidation as a different way of making the residents want to leave.”

I’m on medication but I can’t sleep – I can’t even concentrate on the TV. I just don’t know what’s going to happen Alice, resident

Rui Barros, an employee of Precious Gravity and Buy2Sale, the companies that currently own Santos Lima, says no tenants have yet been with served an eviction notice, though he added that they may be soon. He accused some of them of lying and manipulating the situation in the building for financial gain: “They are just after money.”

Works under way on two empty apartments, one above the other, seemed to point towards the construction of a split-level showroom apartment, but were brought to a halt when residents launched a public campaign calling on the local council to intervene. They have been in limbo ever since. “I cry day and night,” says Alice, whose children and grandchildren live in the apartments either side of hers. “I’m on medication but I can’t sleep – I can’t even concentrate on the TV. I just don’t know what’s going to happen.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Alice, who has lived in Santos Lima all her adult life. Photograph: Ana Naomi de Sousa

In the past, low rents and long-lasting tenancy contracts meant a relatively high number of renters in Lisbon and a significant low-income population in the city centre. But following the post-crisis bailout in 2011, the government was instructed by the European troika to deregulate the property and rental markets to capitalise on its real-estate potential.

In addition, the so-called “golden visa” scheme was devised, offering a five-year EU visa to foreigners purchasing property worth more than €500,000. Huge influxes of foreign investment capital coincided with a tourism boom that has brought unprecedented numbers of short-term visitors to the capital.

For Menezes Leitão, the President of the Lisbon Landlords’ Association and a staunch defender of deregulation, “Tourism has allowed investment in the renovation of [historic] buildings and has restored pride in Lisbon and Porto … Areas of the city that were unsafe are now full of people, not just tourists but also people from here who have rediscovered their own city.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Romão Lavadinho, president of the Lisbon Tenants’ Association, beside a poster advertising a housing protest. Photograph: Ana Naomi de Sousa

But this has come at a price, resulting in the slow displacement of low-income renters from the city centre. Landlords can now make much larger profits from short-term lets – upwards of €40 a night on Airbnb – than from long-term contracts, which might have earned them €100 a month in the past. In the historic neighbourhoods, says Romão Lavadinho, president of the Lisbon Tenants’ Association “most people have already left; those who haven’t are going to be evicted”.

Even those elderly people in Portugal ostensibly protected from eviction by law are not safe, says Lavadinho. “Many landlords have found a way around the problem by offering elderly people the chance to change apartments within the building, for example moving to the ground floor – without the tenants realising that it voided their original contract and excluded them from legal protection.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Eduardo Nicola examines his rental contract, which will expire next year, shortly before his 65th birthday. Photograph: Ana Naomi de Sousa

Even if they were offered compensation to leave, tenants such as those in Santos Lima worry that they would not be able to afford homes in the same neighbourhood, with rents in Lisbon having risen by up to 35% in some areas in the last six years.

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For Lisbon’s councillor for housing and local development, Paula Cristina Marques, the issue boils down to “two conflicting visions for the city”. With the city council unable to intervene at a policy level, she stresses the need for a political solution. “The only way out of this situation is for the state to respond with legislation.”

The government has started to introduce laws that may help to deflate the housing bubble, but any structural changes may be too late for the residents of Santos Lima, despite their increasingly public campaign. Eduardo will turn 65 next year but his contract, and with it his right to remain in the building, will run out before then.

Even for his elderly neighbours, compensation is not enough to ease the pain of being forced out of their homes. “The owners of the building never did anything for us,” says Alice, “and now they come to throw us out of here at the end of our lives?”

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