There are Only 30,000 Municipal Apartments in Prague. The City Wants to Build More

In recent decades, Prague has built very few new municipal apartments. The current administration is looking to change that and approved a strategy whereby the city should build at least 500 rental apartments per year by 2030.

City apartments are intended especially for people in need: the handicapped and also for so-called supported professions, such as teachers, health workers, firefighters or police officers.

Flats owned by the municipality and in the administration of the city districts now total only around 30,000. This is down from 194,000 in the ’90s, after which sell-offs and privatization greatly depleted the city’s stock.

The current management of the municipality has stopped privatization, but some city districts, which make their own decisions about apartments, are still selling property.

According to representatives of the municipality’s management, the current fund is insufficient to enable effective housing policy. The goal is therefore to increase it, which should help the availability of housing, which has been decreasing in recent years in the metropolis as a result of sharply rising apartment prices for a variety of factors. The apartments are to be built in Palmovka and Nové Dvory.

The city plans to strengthen its own construction and also cooperate with private entities. The municipality recently approved the first project of subsidized cooperative housing in Radlická – Prague 5, where it will provide land for construction to a newly established housing cooperative. Other similar projects should follow and some city districts are also planning them.

In 2020, the municipality created the Prague Development Company to ensure the construction of apartments, which, according to the latest information, has started preparing about 12 projects and has more planned. The municipality entrusted it with hundreds of thousands of square meters of land.

According to data from the Czech Statistical Office, all housing construction in the metropolis has ranged from 3 to 5,000 apartments under construction per year since 2010. Last year, according to the CZSO, the construction of almost 10,000 apartments began, which was the most since 1997.

This trend is likely to continue – according to data for the first quarter of this year, the construction of 1,935 apartments was started in Prague, which was about half as many as in the same period last year.

However, greater construction activity has not yet resulted in steadily rising prices. According to Deloitte, their average price rose to 151,200 crowns per square meter in March and April this year, compared to 125,400 crowns in the same period last year.