In 1974 we moved to Nea Smyrni from Kolonos to be closer to our Leonteio school. It’s like going to the village! Everything seemed so much bigger to me, and so it was: sidewalks, streets, especially large houses with beautiful gardens.

But the demand for housing was rampant, and the proliferation of automobiles made the area easily accessible. After all, we were also part of the problem: we lived in a new building. However, like all apartment buildings of that time, it was low-rise, four-story, with a beautiful green area on the ground floor. These green spaces were important: along with the long sidewalks, they created oases on every street. Nea Smyrni was a real garden city.

This also did not last long. In the 1980s and 90s, height restrictions were loosened, and eight-story (and higher) houses are being built in the current stage of reconstruction. Green spaces have been replaced by car parks and most sidewalks no longer exist. All this was done at a time of complete and universal condemnation of the “cementation” of Athens and compensation. We knew what we were doing, there were no excuses.

Often the replacement of a one- or two-family home with a significant number of apartments serves an urgent need. This is always a great financial temptation, especially if the old house requires expensive repairs. From here, the more floors and parking spaces, the better. The authorities generously granted all this, and thus the garden city disappeared. There is another side: individual houses are also a collective good, because they offer beauty to everyone. But the costs are borne only by the owners. Moreover, building an apartment building next to or behind them is enough to destroy their privacy, thus lowering their value.

Nea Smyrni is a classic case of the “tragedy of the commons” when individual interests prevail over collective interests. Was this development a one-way street? Perhaps it would be possible to completely ban multi-family buildings, such as residential buildings. in Paleo Psychic. But Nea Smyrni has always been a middle-class area, and something like that was impossible. What was possible was limiting the height of buildings and protecting gardens and sidewalks. But greed and the pressure of society associated with it penetrated there as a sum of petty interests. And, as usual, the hypocrisy of vague discourse about cementing followed, which is also the classic way society shirks its responsibilities and copes with its guilt.

Mr. Stathis N. Kalivas is Professor of Political Science and Gladstone Chair at the University of Oxford.