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.