Abstract
This paper examines the effect of build environment regulations for facades emergency repairs and embellishment, as implemented by the city of Cluj-Napoca, the second largest municipality in Romania. The scope was to identify to what extent the over taxation measure was efficient in generating compliant behaviour and what secondary effects it may have generated in people’s attitude towards the local authorities. We conducted structured interviews with 25 homeowners targeted by the policy. The qualitative analysis uncovers structural issues on how the policy was implemented and communicated to the population. It further acknowledges difficulties in managing mixed property and collective actions. We interpret the findings as a first step towards building a more comprehensive research framework focused also on included behavioural insights, as captured by our recommendations. Namely, they illustrate that homeowners were critical about the measure, both in its rationale and its implementation, and were unable to act upon a cost-benefit analysis given the ambiguous available information. The findings further acknowledge difficulties in managing mixed property and collective actions, but they also hint favourably towards the role of peer effects, expressed here as compliant neighbours’ behaviour. We interpret the results of this exploratory case study as a first step towards building a more comprehensive approach to serve as a toolkit in examining the development of innovative local policies in post-communist environments, through a combined research framework including also the significant contribution of behavioural insights, next to the traditional rational actor theories. Naturally, the usual limitations of the method also apply to our study, in the sense of non-generalizable conclusions. This fuels up the need for further research on similar regional and urban challenges in an extended multiple-case study scheme.
Highlights
The modern urban environment poses less and less doubts about the need of land and building use regulation policies
While the final results mirror the statistics of the region, the analysis reveals more details for what constitutes the foundation for housing preferences, from the overwhelming need for shelter to strategic thinking in exploiting inflation and economic reforms
The market conditions for housing management are not necessarily favourable to competition and the legal framework still lacks certainty, maintain a low appeal for investments in maintenance and renovation planning (Butler et al, 2004). This converges into the fact that a significant part of the housing stock in Romania is in precarious condition, due to lack of major renovations and improvements in the last few decades
Summary
The modern urban environment poses less and less doubts about the need of land and building use regulation policies. For the case of housing, the region stands out by a much higher rate of homeowners, ranging from approximately 96% in Romania, 90% in Slovakia, Croatia and Lithuania, to roughly 80% in Bulgaria, Estonia and Czech Republic, by comparison to an average of 50-60% in Western Europe (Eurostat, 2017; Tsenkova, 2017) This is a result of the post-communist governmental endowments introduced in the early transition phase (Druica et al, 2014) as part of the housing privatization reform (PichlerMilanovich, 2001). There is reason to include in the explanation the expansion of consumerist orientations (Druica et al, 2010) and social values associating real estate with wealth, expressed through the proliferation of owner-build housing in rural and suburban areas (Soaita, 2013) All these factors kept homeownership rates at a very high level even some decades after transitioning to a market economy. These rates coexist with overcrowded households (Chelcea and Druta, 2016), a very low percentage of build-up area (Pontarollo and Serpieri, 2020), respectively with evidence illustrating a significant lack of action regarding home improvement from the part of homeowners, either flat-owner or self-builders (Soaita, 2015)
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