Twelve years later
The latest amendment to the Building Code aspired to act on the engine of the Greek economy a lot like jumper cables do on a car; the engine in this case being, as always, construction.
Law 4067 from 2012 was 32,000 words long, but we have no idea how much it has swelled since, given that 25 amendments were published in the Government Gazette in the 12 years since then. That may sound like two a year, on average, but the law was amended four times in 2020 alone and three in 2012, so there’s no rhyme or reason.
The legislation makes all sorts of provisions, enough to fill an entire tome, a tome that constantly needs to go back to the printer’s because it’s constantly being changed. And of all the many, many rules it lays down, we know from experience that only a fraction is actually enforced. For example, the increase in the building coefficient (by 10%, 15% and 20%) if the developer reduces the plot coverage ratio (by 10%, 15% and 20%, respectively), or provisions that all contractors rushed to exploit, like the increase in the building coefficient (by 5% or 10%) if the building is upgraded for energy efficiency, or the increase in the maximum allowable height of each building by one meter if the ground floor and the open area beneath the building is used as parking spaces.
This latter provision is odd because there was a law passed years ago by Stefanos Manos that made providing parking spaces for tenants mandatory in all new apartment buildings. But this is Greece, after all – we all know that laws are passed for the sake of being there and not for being implemented. We cannot remember whether there were any significant reactions to the 2012 law when it was passed; indeed, the biggest concern at the time revolved around the opening up of closed-shop professions, which didn’t go ahead after all. What’s even odder is that the law survived 12 years before its constitutionality was challenged. It didn’t even change under leftist SYRIZA, which made a big deal of its ecological concerns with regards to the built environment.
So, a law that passed unread and unchallenged in the midst of the economic meltdown will be judged now, 12 years later, and after towering apartment buildings and other behemoths have been built all over the country.
We are all waiting for the Council of State, the country’s highest administrative court, to decide whether the more controversial provisions of the new Building Code violate the constitution. Unfortunately, we can all imagine what will happen even after it issues its ruling.
Remember that hotel near the Acropolis in the Makriyianni neighborhood? The Council of State ruled that the top floors had to be demolished because they violated protections in the area. The decision was passed in 2019. In 2023, though, Kathimerini wrote about how a judge had to be assigned to ensure that the demolition took place, because the Athens Municipality was “unable to abide by the 2019 ruling.” The ruling from 2023 gave the hotel three months to comply…