Poland’s government wants to empower regional authorities to convert vacant shopping centres and office buildings into apartments to solve a housing shortage. It hopes that the proposed law, which would remain in forces for two years, will create several thousand apartments in a relatively short time.
“The rise in popularity of remote working and e-commerce as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic has left some offices and retail outlets deserted, particularly those with more than 2,000 m² of space, such as hypermarkets,” said development minister Waldemar Buda at a press conference.
“Owners [of commercial spaces] are counting their losses and, at the same time, there is a housing shortage,” he added. “We are willing to address these challenges. We want to make it easier to use such empty spaces for housing. It is better to transform them, if there is the technical possibility, than to demolish them.”
Przestrzeń wielu powierzchni handlowych czy biur pustoszeje. Ma to kilka przyczyn m. in. #COVID19 i praca zdalna. Chcemy, aby te powierzchnie łatwiej można było wykorzystać na cele mieszkaniowe – minister @Waldemar_Buda na konferencji. pic.twitter.com/gBSygVHe2c
— Ministerstwo Rozwoju i Technologii (@MRiTGOVPL) August 3, 2022
The law will allow local authorities to change the zoning of land on which there are existing office buildings and retail facilities with a sales area of more than 2,000 m².
When accepting an offer to purchase housing, the municipality will also be able to take advantage of the existing social and community housing programme (BSK) offering to cover 50% of the purchase price of the dwellings, notes the ministry, which aims to soon present the draft law to the cabinet.
In the first quarter of 2022, the vacancy rate in the Polish office market stood at 13.8% of the total stock, with the volume of availability around 1.73 million m², according to a report by AXI IMMO, a commercial real estate consultancy firm. In Warsaw alone, approximately 759,700 m² (12.2%) of office space was empty.
Meanwhile, residential property developers have seen near-record demand for dwellings in recent years, with a significant housing shortage.
According to estimates from the development ministry last year, that shortage reached 650,000 units. However, the UN Global Compact estimates it at 2 million units while Pekao, a bank, puts the figure at 4 million.
The problem has been exacerbated this year by the unprecedented influx of refugees from Ukraine, with more than one million of them estimated to currently be staying in Poland.
Poland is also lacking communal housing, owned by local authorities, offering a cheaper alternative to renting from the market. According to Statistics Poland (GUS), a state agency, as of 31 December 2020 the country’s housing stock amounted to 15.0 million dwellings with only 806,700 communally owned.
This week Buda said that “the government’s housing policy measures focus primarily on financial support for municipalities in the creation of municipal housing and participation in the creation of social housing stock”, adding that this will also be the case with our [newly] proposed changes”.
In June, Buda announced that the government would abolish the requirement for permits to build single-family houses in order to tackle the housing shortage and allow more Poles to achieve the “dream of having their own place”.
Main photo credit: Sergei Wing / Unsplash
Alicja Ptak is senior editor at Notes from Poland and a multimedia journalist. She previously worked for Reuters.
