‘Laws’ of the market overrule official state legislation in construction cases, says TEE
Almost one in every three building permits issued in Greece contains some form of irregularity, according to the Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE), an international conference in Athens heard yesterday. Besides the insufficiency of regulations and planning and the lack of a land registry to date, the sector is plagued by local and regional land exploitation networks, which illustrates the political dimension of the problem of illegally built houses. The state’s technical advising council suggested that since the state continues to legitimize illegal houses, it enforces people’s perception that irregularities will go punished. TEE President Yiannis Alavanos told the TEE conference on «Illegal Homes and the National Economy» yesterday that although the exact number of illegal houses is unknown, it is estimated that of the 100,000 building permits issued each year about 25-30 percent contain irregularities. «The official policy to date may say it condemns illegal houses, but in practice it legitimizes them, paving the way for a new generation of illegally built constructions,» said Alavanos, who went on to suggest that «in Greece, the general construction regulation is neither applied nor implemented in its main clauses. On the contrary, the clauses imposed by so-called market laws in the form of informal construction regulations seem to apply across the board.» He also noted that «most fines imposed were never confirmed by the competent economic agencies and, of course, were never paid.» He then asked for a radical change in the operating system of town-planning authorities, the simplification of town-planning legislation, the acceleration of procedures for the creation of a land registry and the execution of reliable and continuous checks. The president of the Chartered Surveyors Association and deputy mayor of Athens, Chronis Akritidis, expressed his reservations about the current land registry project, noting that «recording all properties, as the European Union has requested, is a mere accounting process which does not illustrate the country’s problems in the sector of land and property, does not determine the use of land and does not guarantee a fair land policy.» Guest scientists from the United Nations highlighted the international dimension of the problem, saying that about one in every three people on the planet lives in an illegal house or shantytown.
