The Housing Department, directed by Sebastián Franquis, has allocated in the last 18 months more than 16 million euros to assist families subject to eviction and has acquired up to 134 houses for them, according to the results of the Canarias Prohogar program.
This money has been invested both in the acquisition of homes and in providing special attention to these people, in addition to intervening in a thousand legal proceedings opened against these residents to precisely avoid evictions and that they end up on the street.
“The assessment we make from the Department is very positive, with the new Housing Plan we have redesigned the Canarias ProHogar program and we are achieving good results. Therefore, I believe that it is a program that is being well received by both NGOs, as well as by the city councils and by those affected themselves,“ said Minister Sebastián Franquis in his parliamentary speech.
One of the main lines of action of the program is the acquisition of housing, an action for which 15.5 million have been dedicated in the last year and a half, which the ICAVI has entrusted to Visocan and as a result of which 62 homes have already been purchased and the acquisition of another 39 is being negotiated this year.
In addition, the Department, through Visocan, has signed several agreements with banking entities and Sareb for the transfer of 73 apartments to be used as housing alternatives to be able to respond to eviction situations.
Specifically, for this transfer, Visocan pays the banking entities 125 euros per home per month and, to this batch, we must add another three homes that the Provivienda Association has rented with subsidies granted by the ICAVI, which are also dedicated to welcoming families affected by an eviction.
Therefore, there are already a total of 138 homes acquired for the Canarias Prohogar program, of which 94 are already occupied by families who joined this plan after signing a rental contract with Visocan that is totally affordable and in accordance with the income of each family unit.
Another of the axes of this program is the support given to families affected by an eviction process, for which a subsidy has been given to the Provivienda Association for a value of 250,000 euros to rent homes for these families.
In addition, it also includes comprehensive social intervention with the people welcomed, so that they are supported in the search for a residential alternative when their stay in the resource ends. With this subsidy, a total of 17 families were responded to in 2021.
Minister Sebastián Franquis also explained to the Parliament of the Canary Islands the actions that this program is developing at a legal level to prevent evictions. In this way, the ICAVI has already appeared in more than a thousand cases (538 in 2021 and 552 in 2022) to prevent judicial eviction processes from ending with an eviction.
For the moment, "313 of these evictions have been stopped" in the last year and a half, although "it is expected that this figure could triple from now until the end of the year", the minister explained. “What must be clear is that, of all the families that joined the Canarias Prohogar program, none have been left without a home or without any housing alternative, that is, no one was left on the street,“ Franquis emphasizes.