Work

Unregulated Urban Regeneration in Athens: Greening and Taxation of the Built Environment as Impending Levers of Increasing Inequalities

Year: 2025

Type: article

Abstract: Access to housing in Athens during the first postwar decades protected a broad range of low-means social groups and enhanced their social mobility. Eventually, the city’s housing market was dominated by neoliberal policies, producing a very different social effect. Since the mid-2010s, the changes in the housing market were also interconnected with the rise in demand for housing (some of it related to tourism and other forms of ‘external’ demand for accommodation), the boom in the construction sector, the change in property taxation, the increase in housing prices, and the need to improve built properties. The analysis of three different datasets in this paper confirmed that the unregulated city’s housing market is following the spatially differentiated demand and reproducing socio-spatial inequalities. It also confirmed that the few policy initiatives developed since the early 2010s have not faced the housing needs of the most vulnerable groups because they were weak and because these needs were not their primary target. Athens seems to be one of the most unregulated cities in Southern Europe, where housing policies are far behind the needs and issues raised by increasing inequalities, and difficulties for vulnerable groups look like unavoidable outcomes.

Source: Land

DOI: 10.3390/land14040777

Authors: Thomas Maloutas, Stavros Nikiforos Spyrellis, Fereniki Vatavali

Institutions: Harokopio University of Athens, National Centre for Social research

Language: English

Topic: Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Subfield: Finance

Field: Economics, Econometrics and Finance

Domain: Social Sciences

SDGs: Reduced inequalities, Sustainable cities and communities, Peace, justice, and strong institutions

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $3,137