A pet transgression
The bill presented by Public Works Minister Vasso Papandreou yesterday was the third attempt to reach a legal framework for the transfer of building rights. The bill followed two decisions by the Council of State, which ruled that previous legislation on the issue was unconstitutional. The issue of the transfer of building rights has remained unresolved for 23 years and has become the building trade’s favorite transgression, not only because it has encouraged blatantly profiteering deals and construction of oversized buildings, but also because justice has been so lagging that the 1979 law was valid for 15 years before it was deemed unconstitutional. Under this negative heritage the government is trying to reintroduce the institution, and with good reason. We should remember that the transfer of building rights is not a groundless invention, but instead reflects the effort of both the Socialist and the conservative governments to facilitate town planning and to rescue buildings of cultural and historical interest by allowing the transfer of building rights to another estate, rather than paying compensation for expropriating them when the requisite capital is lacking. This helps explain the origin of the contradictions and the many system transgressions. For compensation to be genuine, the transfer of building rights must come with tangible economic compensation, and therefore must be as exchangeable as possible (meaning that one should be able to sell the transferred building rights), as it is unlikely that the owner will have a second estate to which to transfer the additional square meters. However, the more tradable the transfer of building rights becomes, the more excessive the building on preferred land. The bill presented by Papandreou yesterday aims to strike a balance between the utility of transferring building rights as a compensatory tool and the need to protect the environment. This effort, however, only touches one aspect of the issue. The other concerns the ease with which some municipalities bind citizens’ estates with the aim of expropriating them later on but without the requisite capital. Furthermore, municipalities are encouraged by the fact that they can always resort to the transfer of building rights. The government should therefore go beyond yesterday’s bill and try to restore a broader balance between the urban and cultural concerns of municipalities and the local administration on one hand, and the right of the citizens not to give up their property without full compensation on the other. Lack of funds is not always an obstacle requiring alternative means. Sometimes, it constitutes a useful upper limit.
