The Roma in Vsetín are primarily missing common spaces at Poschla

Vsetín/Zlín - The apartment buildings constructed by the Vsetín municipal office in the Poschla district are more comfortable for most Roma residents. In the one-room and two-room apartments with hallways and equipped kitchens, they particularly appreciated having their own sanitary facilities. This was confirmed today by tenants to ČTK. Families miss common spaces in the smaller apartments where they could store unnecessary items, or that could be used in the winter for drying laundry.
    The opinion of the majority of tenants was confirmed by ČTK and Barbora Kandráčová, who particularly misses storage space for clothing and other items in her two-room apartment. "We still have some of them packed in bags and stored in the shared container that stands in front of the buildings by the parking lot," she stated, adding that otherwise she lives well in the house. She also sees the problem with the arrival of winter in drying laundry. In the small bathroom, laundry dries slowly and quickly smells bad, so she moves the laundry rack around the apartment.
    The city built two houses on the outskirts from more than a hundred residential containers. Each building contains 18 apartments, including six one-room, ten two-room, and two barrier-free two-room apartments. Thanks to a special technology, workers constructed the buildings in a record time of seven weeks. The three floors have minimal communal spaces, just hallways and staircases.
    Kandráčová, together with her partner Alexander Bonda and their children, occupies one of the ten two-room apartments with a total area of approximately 44 square meters. Each such apartment consists of a larger room of about 18 square meters, which also includes an equipped kitchen. The other room, which is only about one square meter smaller, is used by families as a bedroom or a children's room. An integral part of the apartment is also a hallway larger than five square meters and a similarly sized bathroom with a shower and sink.
    Each apartment, except for the barrier-free ones, has a separate toilet. Compared to the tenement house, residents have much more privacy, as in the city center they had shared sanitary facilities for the entire floor.
    The one-room apartments consist of a room with a kitchenette, a hallway, and sanitary facilities. They are 26.5 square meters in size. The barrier-free two-room apartments are located on the ground floor of the building and differ only in that they have a bathroom also connected to the toilet. Each apartment has a connection to a television antenna, an intercom, and is heated by electric direct heaters. The consumption of electricity and water is registered separately for each apartment. The rent has been set by the municipal office at approximately 80 crowns per square meter, so people pay up to 3500 crowns per month for rent.
    The contracting company built the apartment buildings in a so-called anti-vandal version. The exterior facade remained metallic, and the interior walls are made of laminated panels that are washable and replaceable. In front of the buildings, there is parking for a hundred cars as well as a children's playground. The construction of the houses cost 40 million crowns, of which nearly 20 million crowns were provided to the city by the State Fund for Housing Development. The municipal office received another ten million crowns from the state for activities related to the Roma issue, according to its spokeswoman Eva Stejskalová.
    In addition to relocating Roma to new houses within the city, the Vsetín municipal office has also evicted over 100 Roma from the Zlín Region who were having problems paying rent.