Haddad sees breach of agreement and withdraws endorsement of Master Plan – 06/25/2023 – Panel

Fernando Haddad, Minister of Finance, withdrew the approval he had given in the PT to support the revision of the Strategic Master Plan of São Paulo in the second vote, after verifying that the substitute text presented by the rapporteur, Rodrigo Goulart (PSD), was not according to what both had talked about on the subject.

The PT has the largest group in the São Paulo Legislature, with eight councillors, and the vote is scheduled for Monday (26).

As shown by the Panel, the minister told the party on Tuesday (20) that he agreed with the vote being favorable in the second round, given the setbacks signaled by Goulart. Earlier this week, Haddad telephoned the rapporteur and Milton Leite (União Brasil), president of the City Council, to address the matter.

However, the minister was frustrated in the following days when he found that, as he told allies, the text did not express what had been agreed between them. In view of this assessment, Haddad has communicated that the endorsement no longer exists and that today he works against the approval of the revision of the Master Plan proposed by the Ricardo Nunes (MDB) administration.

One of the minister’s main annoyances was the question of the size of the radius around subway and train stations for the construction of taller buildings. After pressure from the opposition, the rapporteur changed the distance from 1 km to 700 meters, which helped forward the initial agreement between the opposition and the government.

However, the substitutive text also changed the demarcation criteria to “reached blocks”, and no longer “internal blocks”, as it is today. In other words, a block hit by lightning would be entirely transformed into a verticalization stimulus area, which would considerably expand the 700 m radius and was seen as a “prank” by urban planners and critics of the text.

Among other points, the minister also disapproved of maintaining a device that makes the share of land for housing units on the axes more flexible. In this way, apartments with no size limit will be authorized on transport axes, generating more elitism in neighborhoods with more structure and distorting the Master Plan guideline of increasing population density in places close to public transport.

The current version of the Master Plan was prepared during Haddad’s administration in the city hall, in 2014. The first version of the revision of the plan, approved in May by the councilors, was met with criticism from the opposition and urban planners, who saw a strong tendency to incorporate demands of the real estate sector. As the Panel showed, the project absorbed 18 out of 26 proposals made by association of real estate developers.

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