Olomouc, Czech Republic: Residential hotel in city center closing, where will the Romani tenants go next?
At the end of this month the residential hotel on Riegrova Street in Olomouc, Czech Republic will close after being home to approximately 135 people, most of them Romani, some of whom have been living there for decades. The building's owner is planning to reconstruct it and change its purpose.
The city says it is collaborating with nonprofits and other residential hotels to aid them with finding accommodation for the evicted. However, some of those who have to move now say the city isn’t doing enough to take care of the situation.
The residential hotel in the historical center of Olomouc has long been a source of complaints and problems. Local residents have complained that its occupants are noisy, get into petty scuffles, and spread garbage to the surrounding buildings.
The building’s owner has decided to break his lease with the operator of the residential hotel and start the reconstruction of it as a whole. “The intention which the owner has declared at our meetings together is to begin the reconstruction of the entire structure. In future there should be commercial spaces and student accommodation there,” Deputy Mayor for Social Affairs Kateřina Dobrozemská said.
Those accommodated in the Riegrova Street facility now have to move out by the end of this month. According to the head of the social welfare department at City Hall, Michal Majer, 35 of them have already been accommodated elsewhere.
“As of today we have managed to aid 35 occupants with finding new housing, and we expect to resolve another approximately 50 cases of alternate accommodation in the next few days. That leaves us with the remaining 50 occupants, including families with eight or more children, so it is quite problematic to find them other housing. We have also encountered the fact that some occupants have rejected the offers of substitute housing made to them,” Majer said on Wednesday, 9 August.
According to some occupants of the residential hotel, however, the city is not doing enough to resolve the situation. “They want to close it down here and leave the people with children out on the street. Why doesn’t the city arrange something for those of us who have lived here our whole lives?” asked Nataša Gáborová, an occupant who spoke with public broadcaster Czech Radio and who will likely move in with her son in the city of Brno, which is 80 kilometers away in a different administrative region.
“We are genuinely doing our best to make sure these local ties will not be disrupted so the children can continue to attend school here. The information was publicized two weeks ago and almost half of the people have left or are negotiating solutions for themselves. That’s a signal that we will manage to cope with this,” Dobrozemská, who is with the local Pirates and ProOlomouc (“For Olomouc”) coalition, told Czech Radio.
The city says it has been following all of the negative impacts for their clients of the residential hotel shutting down ever since the owner of the building announced his intentions, and they claim to be doing their best, within their competences, to eliminate those negative outcomes, including in coordination with chosen social service providers and with the Coordinator for National Minorities and Romani Affairs at the Olomouc Regional Authority. Should crisis cases arise in which the occupants have yet to find themselves alternate housing by the end of August, the city has prepared an evacuation center.
Dobrozemská is hoping it won’t come to that. “There are several levels of solutions, but if we won’t have to activate the evacuation center, we will be glad,” she said.
According to City Hall, the accommodation on Riegrova Street is of the hotel type and nobody is obliged to arrange alternate housing for the clients of any residential hotel. The occupants have had to pay their rents and utilities deposits; while the city is offering its aid and its advice to those who have to relocate, it is not guaranteeing them new housing.
