The Polish government will abolish the requirement for permits to build single-family houses in order to tackle a housing shortage and allow more Poles to achieve the “dream of having their own place”, the development minister, Waldemar Buda, has announced.
The changes, which will be presented in the autumn and are expected to take effect from January 2023, will help reduce the construction time of houses by as much as several months, Buda told news service Wirtualna Polska.
“Today, piles of binders are taken to offices and it is expected that every page, every few hundred thousand pages, will be verified there and maybe the office will notice something or not,” said Buda.
“After the changes, however, the responsibility for the construction process will be borne by the party which prepared the project, that is the architect, and the party supervising the construction,” he explained.
“We are not only amending the building permit; we are also removing a procedure that was even more onerous for many, which…is a notification of completion and an occupancy permit,” he said. “Often a house or a building was standing and was ready, but was waiting for an occupancy permit.”
“A house [construction] free of formalities is supposed to make it easier for Poles to realise their dreams of having their own place,” added Buda in a further statement.
His ministry noted that, if the area planned for the house lacks a spacial development plan, owners must first contact the local authorities, which will issue a document on development conditions within 21 days.
Alongside Buda’s announcement, the ministry also published a set of 22 architectural plans for homes up to 70 square metres in size that can be downloaded and used for free.
Source: Eurostat
Poland is ranked in the bottom few among European Union countries in housing statistics such as the number of rooms per person and household size, with a lack of affordable housing forcing many families to remain in overcrowded properties.
In 2020, Poland recorded the second fastest increase in house prices in Europe. Eurostat data also show that nearly half of Poles aged 25-35 now live with their parents. In 2020, this issue affected 2.6 million people, 172,000 more than in 2019.
According to estimates, there is a shortage of at least 500,000 affordable homes on the market. The problem has been further exacerbated by the arrival of a huge number of refugees from war-torn Ukraine, while at the same time many Ukrainian men working in construction in Poland have returned home to fight.
Schemes aimed at helping people buy their first home have sought to address the problem, including partial loan repayments for families with children and a guaranteed downpayment for first-time homeowners.
The government has also worked to simplify building permits to address supply-side constraints. As of January 2022, a house of up to 70 square metres can be built in Poland using a simplified procedure.
Main photo credit: Pixy
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
