Extreme overcrowding of small apartments, Veliaj "boasts" of empty apartments

2024-07-25 22:50:00, Ekonomi CNA

Extreme overcrowding of small apartments, Veliaj "boasts" of empty

Illustrative photo

Albania currently has over 356,000 unoccupied homes, while apartment prices have doubled over the past five years, becoming a source of pride for some politicians, such as Tirana Mayor Erion Veliaj. But while prices have risen and houses and apartments have remained largely empty, a significant portion of Albanians currently live in small apartments, regardless of whether they have children or not.

Detailed data on housing conditions recently published by INSTAT and collected by the 2023 Census show that a significant proportion of Albanians currently live in small and overcrowded dwellings, while the huge wave of construction seems to have produced many empty dwellings but no significant increase in the quality of housing of the population.

In total, of the 726 thousand families currently in Albania, 127 thousand or 17% live in houses smaller than 40 square meters, while another 342 thousand or 47% live in houses with a usable living area of ??more than 69 meters square. Only 10.7% of families have houses with an area of ??more than 100 square meters, while another 24% have houses with an area of ??70 to 99 square meters.

Logically, small apartments should be occupied by families with one or two members, but in reality this is not always the case.

Families that obviously live in overcrowded housing, that is, that have less than 70 square meters in use and have 4 or more members, thus reach 23% of the total or almost one in every four families. Of these, 5.6% live in houses smaller than 40 square meters, while 17.5% live in houses between 40 and 69 square meters.

According to INSTAT statistics, in 2023, 20 thousand families with 4 members each lived in houses smaller than 40 square meters and likewise, another 20 thousand who have such houses have 5 or more members.

Almost 342,000 families live in the category of houses from 40 to 69 square meters, but of these, almost 60,000 families have four members, while another 68,000 have 5 or more members.

The standards for classifying an overcrowded dwelling vary from country to country. United Kingdom standards [link], overcrowding is called when two children of different sexes have only one room to sleep in, while housing treatment standards in the time of communism provided for 9.5 square meters per family member.

INSTAT data show that currently in Albania there are thousands of families living in conditions of extreme housing overcrowding despite the abundance of free housing. Thus, 51 thousand families live in two-room apartments and have four members each, while 28 thousand families live in two rooms and have five members. In Albania there are also 21 thousand families that have six or more members and live in two rooms.

Currently, 57% of families in Albania live in houses located in urban areas, while 43% live in houses located in rural areas.

In 2023, there were 9,563 families in Albania who lived in apartments with only one room despite having 4 or more members./ Reporter.al