Sorin, a former high school classmate who practiced medicine in Romania, decided to emigrate. He settled near Paris, in a town with about 3,000 inhabitants. From a material point of view, he was well off in Romania. But he felt that he could not develop professionally. Last year I visited him in his new house. He picked me up from the airport and from the car, knowing I was tired, immediately turned on the hot water so that the bath would be full when we got to his place.

The house was built in 2011, had 7 rooms plus a huge yard and offered you all the comfort you could dream of. Unwillingly, I involuntarily made a comparison with my two-room apartment in Berchen. It all started with this.

He had hot water, I had to check the government website every day when the hot water would arrive. And to top it all off, just a few hours before the deadline for hot water to run through the pipes, I was again detained for 24 hours. Weather for two weeks.

Now we have National housing strategy for the period 2022-2050 – but we’ve never been stupid in the “let’s create strategies” section.

In some areas of Romania, the quality of housing is on the verge of tolerable.

We are the most overpopulated state in the EU. Both in 2021 and in 2020. If in Europe the average figure is 18%, then in our country it is more than 40%.

Housing quality can be measured in various ways. One is overpopulation. In the EU in 2020, 17.8% of the population lived in such housing, the share decreased from 19.1% in 2010.

In 2020, the highest overpopulation rates were observed in Romania (45.1%), Latvia (42.5%) and Bulgaria (39.5%), and the lowest in Cyprus (2.5%) and Malta (4.2%) , show official data.

… and 32% live in a sparsely populated house

The opposite of an overcrowded house is an undercrowded house, meaning it is too large for the needs of those who live in it.

The reason for underemployment is that over time, children grow up and go to school or get married, leaving their parents alone.

In the EU in 2020, almost a third of the population (32.5%) lived in unoccupied housing, and this share has remained almost unchanged since 2010.

In 2020, the highest share of vacant housing was recorded in Malta (72.5%), Cyprus (71.4%) and Ireland (63.3%), and the lowest in Romania (7.1%), Latvia (10, 3%) and Greece (11.0%). ).

In the EU in 2020, 8.2% of the population did not have the opportunity to maintain the proper temperature at home

Both this winter and the upcoming one will only aggravate the problem of heating the house. The biggest problems are in Bulgaria (27.5%), Lithuania (23.1%), Cyprus (20.9%) and Portugal (17.5%), and the smallest – in Austria (1.5%), Finland (1 .8%) and the Czech Republic. (2.2%). ).

We should also briefly note that on average in the EU, 1.5% of the population did not have a toilet, shower or bath. This is most common in Romania (21.2% of the population), followed by Bulgaria and Latvia (both 7.0%), as well as Lithuania (6.4%).

For several years, the World Bank offered us to create a National Housing Fund. “The creation of a special National Housing Fund (FNL) could be a possible solution to the blockage in Romania in creating and maintaining a sufficient housing stock. The fund will become a centralized source of state support for the development of the affordable housing market through targeted financial support. The fund will consist of several specific financing components available to both the private and public sectors. The general goal of the Fund is to increase the availability of quality, energy-efficient and affordable housing. This may include rental or affordable housing or residential or neighborhood improvements.”

Add to that the fact that we are one of the fastest shrinking countries in the world, and you can see why public policy on quality of life should be a priority.

The scale of the migration phenomenon in the last decade has caused an imbalance of demand and supply in the housing sector, overcrowding in some urban centers and a large amount of vacant housing in other areas.

Real estate is rapidly deteriorating due to poor maintenance and management of older neighborhoods, the MDRAP report says

More than a third of elderly Romanians and low-income people feel unsafe in their neighborhood, according to report on the study of the quality of housing in Romania. Traffic is the most important environmental problem close to home, a problem for two out of five Romanians, the document also shows. Romania has a life pattern characterized by little change over the course of a lifetime.

Who and when built the most in Romania?

In 1990, 85% of the housing stock in Romania was built after 1945, which is currently a challenge in terms of maintaining this significant aging stock.

Most of the residential buildings currently in use in Romania were built in the second half of the 20th century. The socialist period (1961-1980) was the most significant for housing construction. Whether we like it or not, we are forced to face…

The housing stock in cities is characterized by the predominance of houses built between 1971 and 1990. The share of houses built after 1990 is about 5% for the lowest income quintile (which can be explained by the construction of new social housing) and 1-3% for all other income quintiles.

In short, according to the information we have, 90% of residential buildings are old and in need of modernization or reconstruction.

The rural housing stock is older than the urban one, the majority of housing was built between 1946 and 1970 in all income quintiles. However, rural areas appear to have a significantly higher percentage of households occupying new housing across all income quintiles. In most cases, old houses in rural areas are also unsanitary, do not have communications and use improvised means of heating, which threatens the lives of residents. The age of the rural housing stock indicates the need for modernization and construction of new houses.

The quality of housing – one in three needs urgent repair

More than 35% of the 8.8 million houses in the country need urgent repairs. These units, many of which are socialist-era housing estates, make many cities in Romania look untidy. These are more than 10,000 multi-apartment buildings built before 1980 that need structural, roof and heating repairs.

Forum credit: Dreamtime