More Real Cement and Less Ideological Cement.
Stories about how we once ate bark to build our houses are amusing, but they are not instructive.
Unfortunately, exact figures for Slovenia are not available, but comparable data from abroad show
that housing is currently the least affordable it has been in the past 150 years. This means that
experiences from the previous century are useless in this one, as building a house or buying an
apartment was much easier back then than it is today.
The reason for the housing shortage and the long-term decline in homeownership among
households lies in the misguided priorities of our governments. Instead of unleashing the creative
forces in society and turning Slovenia into a construction site, it fights against creation and tries to
solve problems through class struggle.
Because it dislikes entrepreneurship and private initiative, the ruling politics force us to choose
between housing for young families, AirBNB tourism, or real estate investment—when in fact, we
need all three for the future. Because it does not believe in the harm caused by excessive spatial and
construction regulations, it searches for "saboteurs of the working people," blaming them for the
housing shortage—our neighbors who dared to inherit, build, or even invest in more than one
property. And it plans their expropriation with a new tax that, by exempting the first property
instead of providing a general tax relief on its value, violates the fundamental principle of horizontal
tax fairness—that people with equally valued properties should pay the same tax.
It is high time that, alongside the devalued concepts of sustainability, equality, and decarbonization,
we inject some common sense into our housing policy.
A Thousand Times Nothing Killed the Donkey.
Let's make a provocative back-of-the-envelope calculation. Since independence, despite emigration,
Slovenia's population has increased by approximately 130,000, while household size has decreased
by half a person per household. These numbers mean that to maintain the same level of housing
supply since independence, Slovenia would have had to build about 190,000 new apartments. This
is not an argument against immigration—at least not useful immigration—but it is a motivation to
consider whether our spatial and construction regulations allow for fast and large-scale housing
construction to meet current needs. And a hint for those seriously considering this: "No."
If we take into account other factors, such as the shift in settlement patterns due to the centralization
of the state and the ideological-political resistance to comfortable and economical personal
transportation on beautiful and wide roads (which previously alleviated this issue), as well as
increasingly stringent spatial and construction laws that have caused a real housing recession—
leading to only half as many homes being built in the last decade compared to the previous one—
then current housing prices are neither an enigma nor a conspiracy. They simply reflect the supply-
demand ratio created by these restrictions.
There are simply too few homes. Politicians' dreams of vacant apartments that can just be fairly
redistributed through taxation, solving everything, are as naïve as relying on abandoned railway
tracks for a functioning transport infrastructure. For things to change, young people must stop
believing that politics can solve this problem for them and instead demand that politics stop
throwing obstacles in their way when they try to solve it themselves.
The answer to the question of how the shortage arose can be found in an ancient story about a father
and son who tried to bring as many small items as possible down the valley on a donkey. Each kept
piling on more until, in the end, the donkey collapsed and died. The moral of the story is: "A
thousand times nothing killed the donkey."
This "nothing" that we have been piling onto the housing donkey every year since independence
consists of spatial regulations, construction regulations, and government interventions in the market
that prevent it from responding quickly enough to the population's needs. To enable fast and
economical construction of new housing, we must abandon some harmful dogmas and practices on
which the current complicated, expensive, and above all, dysfunctional system of housing supply is
based.
"Let's Destroy All Nature."
First, we need to stop being afraid that we will "destroy all nature." I understand that politics scares
us with the need to preserve at least some untouched nature for future generations, that farmland
must be protected for self-sufficiency, and that forests are our greatest treasure. But these fears are
unfounded. Slovenia is very large, and throughout millennia, we have managed to build on less than
4% of its land, including all buildings and infrastructure. More than 96% of our country remains
unbuilt, and even if every household without a home tomorrow claimed 500 m² of land, it would
require less than half a percent of Slovenia’s total area.
We do not need to ban dispersed construction, nor do we need to mandate the use of degraded land
before releasing new land, nor should we pursue ideological environmental goals like the
government's declared "0% net developable land" policy. The impact of home and apartment
construction on these concerns is negligible. If we want cheap land in well-connected locations
where it is economical to build, we must significantly increase the supply of developable land. And
since this quantity is determined not by the market but by the state, all we need for lower land prices
is political will.
Housing is Not a Human Right – A Shovel and a Concrete Mixer Are.
In the past, people could build homes according to their abilities—on cheap land, on their own, with
the help of family and friends. Once the house was habitable, they moved in to avoid rent and
finished construction gradually. Since then, we have managed to ban or significantly restrict all
these useful practices. Due to social partners' demands to combat illegal work, we have banned
family and friend assistance. Under the pretense of safety concerns, we have overregulated simple
family home projects to the point where self-building, which was once feasible for workers with an
eighth-grade education, has become too complex even for highly educated people—not technically,
but legally and bureaucratically. Moving into a house without an occupancy permit is now strictly
punished with fines, and state-owned utility companies even help enforce this by cutting off water
and electricity "for your safety."
The previous generation was able to lower the cost of their homes with compromise solutions that
are no longer allowed today. For example, if certain utilities were not available on a plot of land and
therefore made it cheaper, people built rainwater collection tanks and septic tanks. They could
choose cheaper insulation and heating systems better suited to their circumstances. Today, such
practices are either blocked at the spatial planning stage, made difficult by the building permit
process, or outright banned.
We are still among the wealthier countries in the region. Prefabricated houses from Bosnia and
Herzegovina and Serbia are still affordable for Slovenian households with an average salary.However, our construction regulations prevent us from building them. If you somehow manage to adapt such a house to meet all our technical requirements and it still remains affordable, then some last-minute bureaucratic nonsense will stop you anyway—perhaps a zoning requirement specifying
the allowed color of the facade or the permitted roof slope and type.
And if all of this seems truly ridiculous to you, and you believe that a family should have a home of
their own choosing and not one dictated by neighbors or people who lived in the region 300 years
ago, then—they will explain to you that you are just a Gypsy from Rakova Jelša.
"Long Live Socialist Yugoslavia, and Down with Socialism!"
Young people today rightly ask why workers can no longer build their homes when they actually
could in Yugoslavia. The answer is not socialism. Three out of four homes in Yugoslavia were not
built by the state but by the people themselves. The Jazbinšek Law privatized only 160,000 state
apartments—today, Slovenia has 865,000 apartments. The reason people were so creative lies in
Yugoslavia’s informal construction liberalism. Older communists knew, unlike the younger ones,
that socialism is something you talk about, not something you actually do, and that people need to
survive the state’s care. Ironically, the former totalitarian system was less repressive about breaking
irrational rules than today’s democracy—resulting in one in seven buildings being illegal at the time
of independence.
It’s the Regulation, Stupid.
Today's spatial and construction restrictions are mostly written by detached ideologues at the behest
of lobbyists. They are designed for a specific class of people who can afford them, while everyone
else is blocked from home ownership by the ban on cheaper alternatives. If you disagree and
believe these regulations are well-intentioned, ask yourself: How is it that the same people who
regulate your carport for "safety" never thought to require fire escapes and alarms in school
dormitories—still unregulated in Slovenia?
Our constitution states that the state creates conditions for everyone to obtain suitable housing. A
housing policy in line with this should focus on the cost of new housing and evaluate all regulations
by their impact on affordability.
Perhaps after independence, EU accession, NATO membership, and adopting the euro, it’s time for
a new goal: enabling every Slovenian to build their own home by removing unnecessary obstacles
and rewriting spatial, construction, and environmental laws from scratch—simply enough for
everyone to understand. By doing so, we won’t just improve housing access but also boost
demographics and social security for all.
