Bratislava has completed construction of a city rental apartment building with 103 rental flats

The availability of housing and the general offer of housing in Bratislava, rental housing in particular, has been insufficient for a long time. A roof over the head is one of the most important problems that people have to deal with in life. The capital city itself currently leases out approximately 870 flats, and over 1,000 more are managed by city boroughs, which is too few to claim that the housing problem in Bratislava has been resolved. Since September of last year, the city council has received more than 1,000 applications for rental flats. Currently, a total of 228 applicants for rental flats are on the capital city waiting list, and another 450 are waiting for replacement rental flats, with the waiting time for a flat being approximately seven years. Such figures clearly show that Bratislava needs more rental flats.

“Housing development has been one of my key topics from the start, and I’m glad that together with my team we are managing to take concrete steps to increase the availability of housing in Bratislava. We have launched several measures to support housing. These include reconstruction of neglected city flats, our own construction of rental flats, or the founding of a city rental agency that helps people find affordable and stable housing. We are the only city in Slovakia to transparently agree with developers that in exchange for modifying the zoning plan in favour of increasing the built-up area, they will transfer to us, in the form of a contribution, 5% of the flats that they will build as a result. We thus already have hundreds of flats on the way, and we are also working on several projects to build our own rental flats,” said the mayor of the capital of the Slovak Republic, Bratislava, Matúš Vallo.

One of the city’s own projects for the construction of rental flats is a new residential building on Muchovo námestie in Bratislava’s Petržalka borough which has 103 such flats. The city began building it in August 2023, with the Ministry of Transport of the Slovak Republic also taking part in the co-financing of the construction, which provided a non-refundable subsidy for the project. Additional financing was also secured through a loan from the State Housing Development Fund, and the rest was the capital’s own resources. The new building with rental flats is presently being approved, and the first tenants will soon be able to move in.

“I am truly pleased with this success, that after many years we were able to carry out our own construction of a building for rental flats. This project is, of course, primarily about housing, but there will also be a quality park and civic amenities. Thus, this new construction brings not only functional but also aesthetic improvements to the entire location. I consider this building to be an exceptionally important milestone for the development of rental housing, and I believe that with this project Bratislava has begun a new era of systematic construction of rental housing after years of treading water and not solving the problem of affordable housing,” said the Deputy Mayor for Rental Housing and Housing Development, Lenka Antalová Plavuchová.

Tenants in the new apartment building will be people who are at a disadvantage on the housing market, are in housing need, or are acutely threatened by housing need, but also people who provide services in the public interest in Bratislava, whether they are employees of social service homes, city police, health workers, or even teachers. The city is able to put together a diverse composition of tenants thanks to new conditions for allocating city rental flats, which were adopted last year with the aim of increasing the availability and efficient use of the housing stock through a fairer and more transparent process of allocating rental flats, thanks to which the flats will be given to those who really need them.

“Bratislava was really lacking such a project, and I’m very glad that it was created with our contribution and that together we will help the groups just mentioned. With the classic rental market in Bratislava, unfortunately, many could only afford such nice and high-quality housing with great difficulty. We have a great interest in supporting the construction of new rental flats throughout Slovakia and especially in Bratislava, where the demand for them is really high,” said Minister of Transport Jozef Ráž.

However, the construction of urban rental flats for the city does not end with the completion and handover of the new municipal rental apartment building in Petržalka. In the close vicinity of the new rental apartment building, a second such building with approximately 50 more rental flats is to be built as part of the second stage of the project. Further, the city is already working on preparing the construction of additional rental apartment buildings on Terchovská ulica in the Bratislava borough of Ružinov and on Žitavská ulica in Bratislava’s Vrakuňa borough, and has other projects in the works, the implementation of which could add over 400 flats to the city’s housing fund in the coming years.