Over 600 Valencia city residents live in shanty towns

VALENCIA'S mayor has announced plans to move over 600 residents out of shanty towns and into social housing, setting aside €1 million to buy up properties.

Joan Ribó (Compromís) said that during lockdown, when the city council focused more than usual on social welfare, it unearthed a 'serious housing issue': hundreds of families, including 117 children, living in 'inhumane' conditions in shacks across the metropolitan area, with no mains water or sanitation, and often without even windows.

Shanty towns have sprung up quickly during the pandemic, and an estimated 610 people with no other home are said to be living in them.

Ribó says lockdown severely aggravated the problems suffered by society's most vulnerable members.

Homeless people were unable to self-isolate, and residents in poverty and elderly people with no family available to care for them were unable to go to their day centres, as these were shut.

The council reportedly spent €7.2m on social welfare programmes during the Covid19 shutdown, but the availability of social housing is woefully inadequate, Ribó argued.

He wants to buy up more homes, including ruined ones for renovation, encourage people with empty properties to let them, and set up subsidised renting and buying schemes and shared housing with 'social companions' for those unable to fend for themselves.

Additional attention to the elderly and disabled, including home care services, and 'rehab' schemes for the homeless to get them off the street and back into society and jobs are part of

Ribó's new 'social cohesion and inclusion plan'.

This will include helping people to apply for and obtain the new national minimum income (Ingreso Mínimo Vital), at the same time as processing their applications for the regional government's mimimum income scheme (Renta Valenciana de Inclusión), a benefit for those on exceptionally low or no income.