The letter from the town hall was for a heart attack. They will evict us, the Ostrava tenants are desperate

However, the town hall offers replacement apartments preferentially only to certain tenants. They are thus divided into two groups. In the first are those who have a contract concluded before 2014 and will receive a priority offer of replacement housing.

In the second group, there are sixteen apartments whose residents have a contract signed after 2014. Therefore, according to the new civil code, the town hall does not have to provide them with alternative accommodation. People must leave these 16 apartments by the end of this September. Some are afraid of ending up on the street.

“I almost had a heart attack from that letter from the town hall. I will be almost eighty years old. I am able to take care of myself, I don’t want to go to a retirement home. I’ve lived here for twenty-two years,” one of the older residents of the house on Dr. Shavrdy.

Her neighbor added that he doesn’t know what he’s going to do at all, because the city hall probably won’t offer him replacement housing, since he has a contract until after 2014. “I’ve worked all my life, I’ve never had any debts, and now this is what will happen to me,” he despaired.

It was Helga Petřvalská, another senior living here for over ten years, who suspected that it would turn out like this. “My son, who is a builder, pointed out to me the bad condition of those houses. The floors of the people in the house next door started to rise. I’ve had a problem with my water pipes bursting for three years now. The hot water also heated me up, don’t want to see those extra water bills,” lamented the woman, adding that that’s why no one lives in the neighboring house on the ground floor anymore.

“The worst of the four houses are those without basements. It’s on a slope here and they said they put bad slag in the subsoil, it’s moving,” explained the woman, who is very sad that she will have to leave the apartment. “I am waiting for what the town hall will offer me. It was a beautiful place to live here.”

According to the town hall of Ostrava’s most populous part of the South, this is a very unusual situation, which the district is trying to resolve to the greatest possible satisfaction of all its tenants.

“There are serious technical problems in the houses, especially with the floor constructions, there are cracks in the walls, in the apartments there are cracks in the tiles and tiles in the bathrooms and hallways,” described the problems in the houses, the deputy mayor of Ostrava-South Martin Kret.

“Currently, the situation is such that all vacant apartments are preferentially offered to all tenants. But at the same time, we advise that it will not be possible to maintain the current amount of rent, which is on Dr. Šavrdy ranges from 36.96 crowns to 47 crowns per square meter per month,” added Ostrava-South spokeswoman Bronislava Rudinská Supíková.

According to her, the possibility to move into municipal apartments for the minimum offer price, which is 100 to 120 crowns per square meter per month, is currently only available to those tenants who are obliged to provide replacement apartments. In addition, they will not have to compete for an apartment.

However, the same conditions apply to the residents of the other 16 apartments who entered into a contract with the town hall after 2014 as to other residents of Ostrava-South who are trying to get a municipal apartment. So there is competition for an apartment. However, some of the tenants do not have the money to obtain such an apartment and the increased monthly rent. They don’t know what to do next.

However, according to the spokesperson, the management of the town hall is still solving the situation. “We try to deal with each tenant’s housing situation individually. Everyone can use the help of the social welfare department of our office and request the provision of social counseling, regardless of their age,” summed up Rudinská Supíková.

What will happen next with the four houses is currently unclear. Ostrava-South Town Hall first stated that their repair would be too expensive, so they are more inclined to demolish them. However, according to the spokesperson of Ostrava-South, the houses have not yet been decided 100%.

“At the moment, the district is primarily and gradually trying to solve the eviction of tenants in advance, and thus prevent a situation where they will have to be evicted based on the decision of experts and there will not be enough free apartments in the given period,” she summarized.

The town hall had previously assigned an assessment of the condition of the affected buildings to a professional company, which monitored the malfunctions continuously for a whole year in the period from December 11, 2022 to December 11, 2023, using two independent methods.

The resulting report showed that the cause of the malfunctions is the presence of slag embankment material, which significantly increases its volume, and the only solution is to remove the problematic slag embankments in their entirety up to the foundation joint, demolish all floors including embankments up to the overgrown terrain, demolish all partition and replacing the slag embankment with a new inert material.