Galery

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This is where informality and illegality meet, they get together. All countries in the world have these issues and are fighting with informality, because the state is running so far behind in devising the usage of land, the zoning of land and the planning specifications of land. Humans do it before that. So, they build and decide that this is no longer going to be forest land. This is going to be urban or commercial area. And then they request from the state to legalize them. And if they create enough pressure, in other words, when they are many, many more than just one person, than that pressure is becoming difficult for a state to handle and legalizes that. But this is nothing else but a continuation of a problem. That is why I was telling earlier that to pretend in a straight face that informality is a good thing and to do nothing about resolving it is really disrespectful. And I would say intellectually lazy. The issue of illegal buildings is very much related to the fact that people in this country don’t have very clear property rights. I mean that they do not have clear definitions of usage and zoning of land. And a property right is not just a title. It is not just a contract. A contract between two people is an informal property right. What makes it a formal property right and a completely secure right is the moment that the people, the owners, are able to declare ownership around the world of their little piece of land. And that happens only if they register their ownership in a public registry. So, if it takes more than an hour to register your property in a public registry than there is a problem in the system. And in Greece we have eight different entities one person has to go to transfer a piece of property. That one person has to also go and do a lot of research and even at the time he registers it – remember I told you at the very beginning that when your formal road is so complicated it becomes also insecure. So, in the case of Greece, you may go through the eight different organizations, you pay a lot of money, you waste a lot of time, you go back and forth, and then something happens, something changes, things are not the same any more and many people decide that the best way is to cheat. So, this is really a result of the informality. The illegal house is cheating, it is corruption and it is a result of illegal housing and of informality.

Is the legalization of all illegal buildings a solution to the problem?

No. It is refining of the system the solution to the problem. It is to really go to the roots and fix it once and for all. It is to create property rights system. It is to create productive and very predictable processes that are there and they do not change. That is the resolution to the system. You told me that it is super important to have legalization. People do it for different purposes. They legalize such properties, governments do it to get money. But that does not mean that there are not going to be illegal entities. So, a responsible policy maker should actually be engaged in reforming the whole system so that it does not happen again.

What about informality and illegal immigration?

Illegal immigration is very much a political issue. It is interesting why does it happen more in one country than in another? And a lot of people say that it also happens in America. Well, America is also rather informal. The United States and especially the areas where illegal immigration happens there is a lot of laxation of rules.

So, in Greece we have a set of informal structures that do not even give very good services to the actual citizens of Greece let alone the illegals. This inability, this weak government is what allows for illegal immigration to take place. Now, we could have said that we have illegal immigration when people come through our borders but then we can take them back. And the second reason is that we can not take them back very easily. It is not as simple as say some. The illegal immigrants themselves they are not stupid. They know very well how to come in. They burn their papers so we do not have a way to return them back. And it is very hard for us to enforce a very radical change and at the same time keep the balance of a modern Western European country. And at the same time handle a country that has very many government issues, very complicated and very serious issues. And I think it is going to become even more serious together with the economic crisis.

How did you get involved with the project in Bulgaria and why did you decide to put it in the city of Dupnitsa?

Institutions are the key, the pentacle of economic growth that is sustainable. And the institutions mean agreements, they mean contracts. And the basic agreement is the agreement of the security one has over his property, whether this is movable property, whether this is my glass of water, or whether this is immovable property – my house. It is more important for immovable property and that is why we started working on immovable property. We started working in developing registries and systems, data bases that provide security over the right of ownership.