Židlochovice plan to build a house with 20 municipal apartments in the square

Židlochovice – Židlochovice in the Brno region plan to demolish an old low building in the upper part of the Míru Square and replace it with a building featuring 20 municipal apartments, an underground parking lot, and retail space on the ground floor. These apartments will be in the so-called affordable housing regime, in which the city sets rent 20 percent lower than the market rate. The city has received a grant for the project and will wait to see if the current government will also support the construction with funding, said Mayor Jan Vitula (Your Židlochovice) to ČTK. By summer, the city could have a building permit.

The city, with approximately 3,700 inhabitants, currently has 100 municipal apartments and hopes to double that number in the coming years. According to Vitula, the construction is expected to cost between 80 and 90 million crowns. The city will handle the construction itself, rather than through a developer. "Construction can be done for 60,000 crowns per square meter, while developers today sell for prices over 100,000 crowns. We can wait a year to see if the state provides any grants, but we could finance it ourselves at a reasonable interest rate, not the one that is currently on the market," said Vitula.

The building will feature a mix of apartments with one to three rooms, and since this is not social housing, Židlochovice can set their own conditions for rental. According to Vitula, increasing the number of municipal apartments is the only realistic lever to reduce commercial rental prices. "Otherwise, there is no brake in the market, because Czechs buy apartments as investments. Municipalities must build," believes Vitula.

There is a high demand for housing in Židlochovice, and the city administration has long been striving to ensure that the city's expansion is not too rapid. "It's a twenty percent increase over 20 years," added Vitula. For several years, the city has been working on the construction of a new district in the location of Líchy, which could accommodate several hundred people, but the preparations are progressing more slowly than Vitula would like. "And we have one more location, but that is still more of an idea," he added.