On its way a new Neighborhood Plan with a "minimum" of 300 M€
The executive agreed with Comuns to allocate €400M to it in 2027 and 2028
BarcelonaThe Government has launched the second edition of the Neighborhood Plan, one of the Salvador Illa executive's flagship measures. The socialists will make available to municipalities a fund of, "at least", 300 million euros to act in particularly vulnerable neighborhoods, assured the spokesperson and Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque. This is 29.3% more than the amount invested in the first call.
"These are areas that have been left out of major transformations and that require this update and fine-tuning," stated the spokesperson and Minister of Territory, Sílvia Paneque, at a press conference. The Generalitat will subsidize actions that simultaneously involve improvements in public spaces, social cohesion, and environmental sustainability.
Pending Parliament giving the green light to the budgets, the Neighborhood Plan has an allocation of 200 million euros, the same as last year. However, Paneque stressed that this is an "initial" amount, "expandable, at least, up to 300 million in the coming weeks".
The spokesperson has not detailed if this year the initiative will reach the 400 million agreed with Comuns for 2027 and 2028, one of the agreements that have enabled the endorsement of Jéssica Albiach's party to the budgets. The Government will finalize the exact figure of this year's call once it has received the applications from all interested town councils.
More municipalities
The Generalitat expects to receive more applications than in the first call, when it received 83. Then it ended up distributing a total of 232 million euros among 20 neighborhoods in cities such as Olot, Amposta, Vic, Tortosa, Figueres, and Santa Coloma de Gramenet.
In general terms, medium-sized cities presented proposals to act in old town centers; larger ones proposed projects in housing estates created during the 60s and 70s, and the smallest ones, in villages. According to sources from Territori, it is not an exact rule but "a bird's-eye view".
The construction of new housing is outside the Neighborhood Plan because the executive has opted to channel action in this area through the Plan 50,000, but it does include renovations and improvements. It is similar in the case of facilities: new educational, health, or police centers cannot be built because these are decisions framed within sectoral plans. In the case of schools with portable classrooms, since the center already exists, the construction of the building can be accommodated.