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Albania, the country with the highest number of empty homes, OECD and INSTAT: 32.9% of them are unoccupied

2024-06-29 15:31:00, Sociale CNA
Albania, the country with the highest number of empty homes, OECD and INSTAT:
Illustrative photo

The depopulation of the country due to mass emigration, but also the aggressive expansion of construction have climbed Albania to the top of the world for a problematic indicator. That of empty apartments.

 Capital has crossed the data published the data published a month ago by the OECD with those announced by the Population and Housing Census of INSTAT.

According to them, it turns out that Albania is today the country with the largest percentage of empty homes in the world. But how did Albania reach this point? INSTAT's historical data show that the share of empty housing has been increasing since 2001.

But growth seems to have accelerated in the last decade, as the country faces new waves of mass immigration, while construction grows at an alarming rate. In the 2001 Census, the share of unoccupied housing in Albania was, according to INSTAT, only 11.3 percent. of the total.

In 2011, the figure increased to 21.7 percent, while in the last Census of 2023, the share of empty dwellings reached 32.9 percent. This means that there are currently 356,000 unoccupied apartments in Albania.

According to INSTAT, currently 40 percent of apartments in buildings are empty, unoccupied. This corresponds to a figure of almost 180 thousand unoccupied apartments. So now, the problem is not the displacement of the population from the countryside to the city, but the emptying of apartments in the cities.

While 40 percent of the buildings are empty, multi-story towers continue to rise in Tirana, competing with each other to see which one is the tallest. And despite this boom in supply, prices continue to rise at an unstoppable pace.

For many experts these paradoxes are explained by other factors beyond the legitimate ones. According to them, the construction market recycles and is fed by money that comes from illegal sources, such as drug trafficking, but also rampant corruption.

Recently, this phenomenon has started to worry partner countries as well, which are equating the construction boom in Albania more and more with traffic money. /CNA





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