The White Elephant(s

‘’A possession that is useless or troublesome, especially one that is expensive to maintain or difficult to dispose of’’

- Farlex Dictionary 2

The initial question we found ourselves asking was, why are the buildings abandoned? An obvious answer could be the economic crisis, and whilst this did not help, it was not the first trigger for buildings becoming derelict and unused. The problem existed before the crisis and it has a lot to do with how the industry operates and the attitude of landlords. The majority of buildings in Athens are bought, rather than rented. When owners sell their property, they decide on a number factoring in the attraction of Athens city itself and put it up for said price. Often they are overpriced and there is no interest. Instead of putting the price down, it is sat on and rarely there is a bite. Due to owners wanting to sell, they have no interest in renovating. Property tax is also low so the building can be left to sit and decay.

2 Farlex Dictionary of Idioms, “a white elephant”, Farlex Dictionary of Idioms. 2017, https://bit.ly/3LUsgzq

This collective attitude of owners is not the only issue, houses are often kept within families. When properties are past down to siblings there may be disagreements on whether to keep or sell. Resulting in nothing happening and again the building is left to suffer.

A third aspect is that Athens is an ancient city with, like most cities, less desireable neighbourhoods compared to others. This is noticed, people start moving out, nobody wants to move in and buildings remain vacant. Whole neighbourhoods deteriorate so much that entire zones within the centre is abandoned. To rejuvenate the area, buildings are sold for very cheap and then demolished, paving the way for developers to come in. This is something which happened in the neighbourhood of Gazi.

Finally, there was never any planning regulations in place when the concrete multi-housing blocks [polykatoikia] started appearing and there was no planning to save or restore any existing historical buildings. Whilst historic buildings are now protected there are still not any plans to regenerate contemporary buildings so they remain abandoned.

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Research compiled from:

3 Anastasia Koutoumanou, “Recording the use and ownership patterns of apartments in the Athenian apartment block (polykatoikia” Athens Social Atlas. Dec, 2018. https://bit. ly/363ARR4 4 Quora, “Why are there so many derelict buildings in Athens?”, Quora. 2019. https://bit.ly/3E2M1SG