Strictly speaking, it’s average abode size (as square meters per person). Historically most people lived in blocks of flats (“Dom” is house, “Mieszkanie” apartment/flat):
It’s much harder to build a house nowadays as opposed to the ’90s—now you actually have to ask for permission. Up to 70m^ is basically send a piece of paper to the local council and if they don’t reply in a month you can build it. Larger buildings require you to wait up to 2 months and have a proper project drawn up by an architect. This is skipping over some details, but it’s generally eminently doable to get permission.
There are other restrictions (min. plot size, distance from water/electricity, it needs to be on land that is classified as building land), but it’s easy enough to do that. It’s harder to change the classification of a field to building land, but as long as the field isn’t a good one, it’s often doable (especially if you know the appropriate people, takes up to 3 years, costs something like $10k).
So you have people building houses for their children next door in villages, Suburbia popping up around cities and new block of flats being built everywhere. When I first saw my current flat (around 2015, also Wrocław), there were around 10 new blocks, and then lots of old factories. Now there are a square kilometer or three of new blocks of flats, and the only reason they didn’t go further was because there’s a river there. My previous flat had a lovely view of a massive oak tree and a kilometer or so of old orchards. Now there are new blocks of flats everywhere.
I reckon it helps a lot that most builders in Europe are Poles (there was a large exodus when Poland joined the EU), so they have lots of experience in actually building things, and have a lot of Ukrainians willing to do the cheap labour required.
Strictly speaking, it’s average abode size (as square meters per person). Historically most people lived in blocks of flats (“Dom” is house, “Mieszkanie” apartment/flat):
It’s much harder to build a house nowadays as opposed to the ’90s—now you actually have to ask for permission. Up to 70m^ is basically send a piece of paper to the local council and if they don’t reply in a month you can build it. Larger buildings require you to wait up to 2 months and have a proper project drawn up by an architect. This is skipping over some details, but it’s generally eminently doable to get permission.
There are other restrictions (min. plot size, distance from water/electricity, it needs to be on land that is classified as building land), but it’s easy enough to do that. It’s harder to change the classification of a field to building land, but as long as the field isn’t a good one, it’s often doable (especially if you know the appropriate people, takes up to 3 years, costs something like $10k).
So you have people building houses for their children next door in villages, Suburbia popping up around cities and new block of flats being built everywhere. When I first saw my current flat (around 2015, also Wrocław), there were around 10 new blocks, and then lots of old factories. Now there are a square kilometer or three of new blocks of flats, and the only reason they didn’t go further was because there’s a river there. My previous flat had a lovely view of a massive oak tree and a kilometer or so of old orchards. Now there are new blocks of flats everywhere.
I reckon it helps a lot that most builders in Europe are Poles (there was a large exodus when Poland joined the EU), so they have lots of experience in actually building things, and have a lot of Ukrainians willing to do the cheap labour required.