Met bridge has highlighted the criteria by which the 30 flats in the social housing scheme will be allocated and has requested an answer from the city on whether the priority list on which the flats will be allocated is still valid.
Councillor for the Met, Nedo Ereš, pointed out that according to the city’s decision, each child of preschool age or a child in regular schooling brings three points, while the applicant who has been resident in Met for 20 years receives an additional ten points. Ereš stated that three children bring nine points, and twenty years of residence ten. According to the current list, nine applicants without any children are ranked above families with four children, and five of those nine applicants are single. The length of residence in Met has no upper limit in the scoring, so one applicant has accumulated 57 points based on residence. Ereš stated that a family would need to have the same number of points as children, which is nine children.
The Met has also raised the question of why no new call for applications has been issued this year. In January 2023, there were 85 applicants on the final list, but on the cleaned list there are now only 41 applicants. In the meantime, no flats have been built. The city cleaned the existing list in March this year instead of issuing a new call. Ereš stated that in the meantime, people have formed families, had children, and their life circumstances have changed, and for all Met families who have formed in the last four years, this scheme simply does not exist.
Ereš emphasized that the Met does not question the right of the 30 families to receive flats, nor does it seek to invalidate the procedure. He stated that the POS flats should primarily help those in greatest need, young families, and people who have been living as tenants for years. At the meeting of the City Council, Ereš was told that the conditions were those of the APN. The Law on Social Housing stipulates that the conditions, criteria, and procedure for determining the order of priority are determined by the representative body of the local self-government unit, depending on local needs and circumstances. The decision applied in Met was made by the City Council on 21 June 2022. Ereš stated that the rules are theirs, that they wrote and voted on them, and that the responsibility for them cannot be shifted to the APN.
The Met specifically requests an answer to the question of the validity of the existing list. Article 25 of the Decision stipulates that the priority list is valid for a maximum of three years from the date of its establishment. The final list was established on 26 January 2023, the correction to the final list was established on 16 February of the same year, and the cleaned list was established on 25 March of this year. Ereš stated that he is asking the mayor whether the list has been validly extended and where this has been published. If the list is not valid, he warned, someone might challenge the entire procedure.
There are 41 applicants on the list, but only 30 flats are being built, which means that at least 11 applicants will be left without a flat. Eresh concluded with the question: for whom is Met building flats?
