Μake us preferred on Google Nikos Androulakis, the leader of the main opposition party PASOK, attacked Prime Minister Kyriakos Mitsotakis’s proposal to ease the country’s housing shortage by letting developers add two or three floors to new buildings, saying it would turn a national crisis into “a business for contractors.” Androulakis spoke on the second day of TO BHMA’s “Dialogues for Athens: From Myth to the Modern City” forum, a day after Mitsotakis floated the idea from the same stage. The only people who celebrated the proposal, he said, were contractors.
Greece has not faced housing pressure on this scale since the mass migration from the countryside to the cities, Androulakis told journalist Pavlos Tsimas. According to the leader of PASOK, homeownership fell sharply during the financial crisis, while the subsequent tourism boom, especially in the post-pandemic years, and the spread of short-term rentals have added to the strain.
‘Urban Canyons’
Adding floors in a city as densely built as Athens would create “urban canyons,” Androulakis claimed, filling the center with more concrete and making daily life there unbearable. He recalled a professor from his graduate studies, the late Iovi Chrysomallidou, who taught that such canyons were the greatest damage ever done to Athens and Thessaloniki.
The proposal would also further entrench existing class divisions, he said. “Who will buy these top-floor apartments? The people who can’t afford rent?” Androulakis asked quizzically. The leader of PASOK also questioned whether such a proposal would survive if challenged in court. He noted that the Council of State, Greece’s highest administrative court, had already rejected a similar scheme that offered extra floor space as an incentive to build more environmentally friendly homes. He said he was surprised that the Technical Chamber of Greece and other professional bodies had not objected already.
Instead of building upward, he said, the government should speed up town planning so that cities can expand outward, as more available land would bring down the cost of buying and renting a home.
Golden Visa
Androulakis’s main counterproposal focuses on Greece’s golden visa program, which grants residence permits to people from outside the European Union who buy property in the country. He said more than 60,000 homes had been sold through the program under its earlier rules. Under an amendment PASOK submitted in Parliament last week, owners renewing their permits, which come up every five years, would have to either live in the property or lease it long term. Short-term rentals such as Airbnb would be barred. Androulakis estimated the change could return 15,000 to 20,000 homes to the market at no cost to taxpayers.
The government rejected the amendment, and Androulakis demanded an explanation. “Does it cost a single euro?” he asked. “Were embassies bothered? Were the interests bothered that have sold off Athens and Greece to make millions and billions from short-term rentals?”
Androulakis went further and called for the program to be suspended entirely. The golden visa program was created for a different era, he said, and no longer serves the needs of Greece’s housing market. “We brought it to Greece when construction had ground to a halt,” he said. “It isn’t needed anymore.
100,000 Empty Homes
Androulakis said studies by the city of Athens put the number of vacant homes in the municipality at about 100,000, including some 38,000 with no electricity. According to the leader of PASOK, no reliable registry exists of how many of those homes could be made livable again.
One of PASOK’s main proposals to tackle the housing crisis is a large renovation program for owners who have empty properties but cannot afford to fix them up. Once renovated, the homes would become part of a social housing stock and be rented out at low rents to families and students.
He pointed to Northern Europe, where governments have run large social housing programs for decades, and especially to Vienna. On a visit in 2022, he said, the city’s Social Democrat mayor showed him a vast redevelopment project in which a large share of the homes would be rented cheaply according to social criteria. According to Androulakis, Spain, Portugal and Italy have since followed suit, with 30,000, 25,000 and 15,000 homes, respectively. Greece, by contrast, set aside very few homes in its share of the European Union’s recovery fund. When he raised the issue in Parliament in 2022, Androulakis said, Mitsotakis brushed him off. “What you are proposing would take billions,” he quoted the prime minister as saying.
Androulakis also accused the prime minister’s office of spreading “fake news” after government officials attacked PASOK for following the Spanish model on housing. Spanish Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez called a snap election this week after Parliament rejected his government’s housing decrees. When PASOK passed a law protecting primary residences from foreclosure, Androulakis said, Spain’s Socialists proposed the same measure at home. Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy’s government refused, he said, and hundreds of thousands of Spaniards were later evicted from their homes. Spain adopted the protection under Sánchez.
A City Without Sidewalks
Androulakis, who is best known for his ties to Crete, was born in Athens. His family lived in Kallithea, south of the city center, before moving to Heraklion, Crete’s largest city. Every time he came back to visit the capital, he recalled, he told himself the same thing: “I will never live here. Never. A year after he graduated, he said, a job brought him back, and he ended up staying exactly 20 years, in Exarchia and neighboring Neapoli. “So I know everyday life here very well.”
What he described was a city that has become harder to live in, starting with its sidewalks. “It is the only major European city without sidewalks you can walk on,” he said. “Sidewalks fit for human beings.” For anyone who has had an accident or lives with a disability, he added, getting through the day in Athens means one obstacle after another.
Tourism, in his telling, has stretched the city further. “How will Athens become cleaner when its infrastructure was built for one, two, three or four million residents, and we will have 15 million tourists next year and the year after?” he asked.
Then there is the commute. In most European capitals, he noted, people get to work in half an hour, while in Athens many spend an hour and a half or two. Unless that changes, he warned, living in the center will become a luxury in the years ahead.
Speaking as someone who studied sociology, Androulakis said the Athens basin’s biggest traffic problem is its shortage of grade-separated interchanges, projects that construction companies avoid and the state shies away from because they are risky, slow and require expropriations. He also called for better public transportation and smart traffic lights, and welcomed a free pilot program of electric buses recently approved by the city of Athens.
PASOK has proposed free public transportation for everyone under 24 in Athens and Thessaloniki, an idea critics have dismissed as costly. Androulakis answered them by asking the audience to imagine a young worker who earns 1,100 euros a month and pays 700 euros in rent for a studio. “Don’t we make his life better with a housing policy and a transportation policy?”
‘A Closed Circle of Power’
Androulakis argued that the government’s model of governance, which centralizes power in the prime minister’s office, has weakened local and regional authorities since 2019. “Everything is decided by a closed circle of power,” he said.
He said PASOK would not back the government’s proposed change to Article 86 of the Constitution, which gives Parliament the power to decide whether ministers face prosecution, because the parliamentary majority would keep that power. PASOK wants such cases to go to a judicial council instead. “This is not change,” he said. “It is a mockery.”
He closed with the same message he had opened with on housing. “We must not turn problems into a business for the few,” Androulakis said.
