...Semi-detached house at Kneza Miloša 78
In July of this year, during a strong storms, the facade sculpture from the residential building collapsed and broke into pieces buildings at Knez Miloša 78. It is a modernist villa of merchant Milisav Ćirović from 1932 and a sculpture Young woman which was made for her by the famous Montenegrin sculptor Risto Stijović. In those days, amid announcements of the demolition and abolition of various symbols of the city, dissatisfaction with the non-fulfillment of student demands culminated in civil disobedience - regular traffic blockades and burning containers. Thus, the incident with the fallen sculpture was received by the public as some kind of magical confirmation of the general feeling that Belgrade is in a state of cosmic disintegration.
The continuation of the event was equally surreal: the sculpture remains lying on the sidewalk for days, and one resident witnesses from the window how a young man raises his head Young women and carries it in an unknown direction. The image of the tragically cracked stone body of the sculpture spread on social networks and caused strong reactions. Ever since the fall of the canopy in Novi Sad, we have reacted emotionally to every failure of architecture and construction, and that is quite expected; it is a mere coincidence that no one was in front of Knez Miloš 78 at the time of the explosion on July 9.
photo: lazara marinkovićBroken sculpture
In addition to emotional reactions, the event was followed in public by a fog of misinformation, untrue claims and delusions that showed how little we know about our position, rights, and opportunities, as citizens who would like to live safely and affordably in the post-transitional city. The answers to the question of why Belgrade's facades and residential buildings in general are in such a bad condition are far more interesting and complex.
HOUSING IN A CULTURAL HERITAGE
If you are the owner of an apartment in a building that has some degree of protection and cultural heritage designation, in the countries of the European Union that we look up to, as well as in our country for the last 35 years, the Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments of the City has no responsibility for repairs and renovations. The institute only has the duty, once the tenants are organized, collect or find money and begin repairs, to provide instructions on how the works must be carried out so that the result is as close as possible to the historical original, and that's all. Living in a cultural heritage is, therefore, only an additional burden, expense and procedural hassle for the owners. The idea in capitalism is that this investment in cultural property will return to them through the increased value of the property, and also, you can make a lot of money on such historic apartments in the city center through Airbnb or long-term rental, so in the end everything will balance out nicely through money. And yet, it seems that the tenants mostly don't know this: for 35 years, when a part of the facade collapsed in the center of Belgrade, they would tell the media that they knew that part of the air conditioner and how they had written to the Institute several times and begged that something be done, and then an equally uninformed journalist would end the news with the phrase "there was no reaction from the authorities."
How is it possible that residents and citizens are not informed about something this important? Whose job was it to inform them of this? In these situations, they relive the anger and sadness over and over again due to the abandonment by the institutions, a reversal that happened back in 1990.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF LIVING IN RESIDENTIAL BUILDINGS
In the socialist state of Yugoslavia, society was officially responsible for housing families and individuals and maintaining residential buildings. According to the Law from 1958, housing funds were established into which contributions from workers' wages and profits of social enterprises were paid. Then the pre-war residential buildings were partially nationalized, and workers moved into those apartments. Buildings for collective housing, as they were then called, were built with everyone's money, and they were also taken care of by public companies. So the tenants didn't have to think about anything, not the elevator malfunction, not the leaking roof, not the crumbling facade; engineers and craftsmen from public companies thought about it. The state, as the owner of the apartment, maintained both the apartment and the residential building and invested considerable resources. The assigned apartments remained social property (of social enterprises or local governments), and tenants had a guaranteed lifetime right of occupancy that could be passed on to descendants. This system was flawed and had flaws, but it was an attempt to operationalize the paradigm of housing as a universal human right.
Everything changes in the early nineties, with the collapse of the Yugoslav system and the transition to a market economy. In the Law on Housing Relations in 1990, a change was introduced whereby the state no longer has the responsibility to provide housing for all residents. Based on this legal change, those who had tenancy rights could buy the social apartments in which they lived for very small sums, and so in the next six years, over 98 percent of the apartments passed into private ownership, and housing became, from a collective, an individual responsibility. Theorists say that this process had the function of "shock absorption"; namely, the reality you knew has fallen apart, but you emerge from the situation as someone who owns a residential property, which in the so-called West then was, and still is, an unattainable dream for many. Mass privatization of social housing occurred in all countries of Eastern Europe that had some form of socialist system, and that is why the rates of ownership of apartments in this part of Europe are now much higher than in the West (in Germany and Switzerland, for example, only half of the population owns an apartment).
IN A VACUUM OF RESPONSIBILITY
photo: jelena simeunović...
By transferring the ownership of the apartments to the tenants, the state released itself from responsibility for their maintenance. The intention was that the maintenance of residential buildings, as well as everything else, would from now on be handled as in other countries with a capitalist system - privately, and each building for itself. However, for this to work, an overall legal framework defining roles and responsibilities, as well as complex mechanisms of support and coercion, had to be developed. That has never (or still has) happened here. This is how a decades-long vacuum of responsibility was created; formally, from the 1990s until today, tenants are responsible for building maintenance, but in practice no one is responsible. The new building maintenance system began to take shape only in 2008, but the most important year was 2016, when the Law on Housing and Building Maintenance was adopted. Then the housing association gets the status of a legal entity that can enter into contracts, incur debts and be legally responsible in the event of damage. A professional manager's license is also being introduced, as well as the obligation for every building to have one. A little later, a minimum monthly investment in the building's fund is prescribed, with an amount that is unrealistically low. Citizens are likely to expect an increase in this amount, as well as the introduction of mandatory payment of building insurance. To be adequate, these sums will not be small at all. The final step would be to introduce legal penalties for housing associations that did not renovate a crumbling roof or facade or carry out other essential repairs.
The maintenance system of residential buildings in our country has been developing very slowly and hesitantly for 35 years. Professional administrators say this is because reminding citizens of all the weight of responsibility they received in the 1990s is politically unpopular. It is also possible that it would encourage them to question whether the transfer was in their best interest.
RICH IN PROPERTY, POOR IN CASH
When you come across a house or building in a desirable or moderately desirable part of the city of New York with a dilapidated facade, carpentry that has never been changed or a collapsed roof - almost without exception it is the following scenario: the house or building is owned and lived in by old people who bought it for an incredibly low price in the seventies when the city was in a deep financial crisis, and when everyone who had the opportunity fled to the rich and white suburbs. Since the 1990s, the situation has been reversed: money is returning to American cities, they are becoming attractive again, resulting in a sharp rise in prices, and these people are now barely able to cope with the cost of living, property taxes and maintenance costs, often renting out part of their house or apartment for this purpose. Today, for an average 70 square meter apartment in a moderately desirable part of New York, the monthly maintenance cost is between $600 and $1000 (this includes ongoing maintenance costs, manager and janitor salaries, building insurance, and building fund participation for future work). As the owner of an apartment in the building, you do not have the possibility to avoid these costs. As with us, those who acquired real estate in the previous, different reality, and now, in the harsh market competition, cannot cope with the increased costs, often fall into debt for taxes and utilities. In the 1990s, the mayor of New York City, Rudy Giuliani, introduced an infamous ordinance that sold the city's debts to private companies that then took over the debt collection business, which usually ended with people being evicted from their single homes and selling their apartments to pay off the debt. The phenomenon of poor apartment owners (asset-rich, cash poor), that is, those who have real estate, but do not have enough income to adequately maintain it, is a rarity in the so-called West, while in Eastern Europe and here, precisely because of the described history, it is the rule. When we advocate for an orderly society and orderly cities like those on the so-called In the West, we must be aware that, in terms of living in buildings, it will look like this. Those who cannot pay will have to move from desirable locations.
SHARED HOUSING CAPITAL
It is not difficult to imagine that the merchant Milisav Ćirović maintained his building at Kneza Miloša 78. Firstly, he was the sole owner of the entire building and he did not have to collect money, agree and negotiate with anyone, which is always the most difficult part, and secondly, he was, we assume, rich enough so it was not a problem for him. In Belgrade in 1932, a poor city where 70-80 percent of the citizens lived below the poverty line and where informal settlements flourished, merchant Ćirović was able to hire the famous architect Miladin Prljević, co-designer of the "Albanija" palace, to design a semi-villa for his family and servants in the very center of the city. There were few such people. At that time, by law you could not own a part of a building, for example an apartment, but only the whole building, and the rentier lobby (through the "Homeowners Association") tried to keep it that way.
What was owned by a small group of people between the two wars, today, due to the nationalization of apartments in 1958, and then the possibility of redemption in 1990-1996, is owned by many. The large pre-war housing stock has been shredded, and we should be thankful for that. As a result, the buildings in the center of Belgrade today are class-diverse: the very poor and the new business elite live next to each other, and they are all apartment owners and are forced to talk and agree on a broken elevator.
And that is one thing that should be said in defense of the citizens: we do not have a culture of living in the building that we jointly own with the other tenants. Buildings were cared for before 1945 by private capital, between 1945 and 1990 by massive state infrastructure, and today groups of impoverished and ignorant individuals and families have to deal with it.
RESISTANCE AND THE MISSING ALTERNATIVE
When the Building Maintenance Law was introduced in 2016, activists and organizations dealing with the right to the city and social justice strongly opposed it. They warned that citizens cannot shoulder the burden of renovating buildings that have not been maintained for decades and predicted that this law, once fully implemented, would lead to debt and eviction of the most vulnerable. A year later, the organization "A roof over your head" was founded, which protects citizens from being evicted from their only home, usually due to debts.
In New York, housing activists have been advocating for years that instead of selling the debt to private individuals, the apartments should be taken over by a local housing cooperative. The former owner would no longer be able to sell the property, but he could live in it for the rest of his life, without responsibility for taxes and maintenance. After that, the apartment is taken over by a cooperative or a fund of land communities (community land trust) who manage the property in the long term and in the coming decades, on favorable terms, move people there who also cannot solve the housing situation on the market. In this way, a new model of housing support is being developed.
The most important question for us is whether we had a chance, once the privatization of the apartments took place, to solve the management and maintenance in some other way. I've tried to find a case in the world where ownership and responsibility are separated, and there doesn't seem to be one. It is necessary to investigate how other countries of Eastern Europe have solved this and whether they have more just models that respect our specific history, or whether, as in Serbia, it is a matter of gradually rewriting the Western model and not maintaining it for a long, too long time.
WHAT NEXT
We who love self-organization and bottom-up initiatives, we would say that the solution lies in solidarity and association. Class-diverse tenants could draw on their diverse individual resources - someone's daughter is an architect, someone knows how to write projects, someone has time to go to the Archives and the municipality and collect documentation, and someone has money to borrow the entire building. That's how it was in a building near Tašmajdan: several tenants paid for the renovation of the facade and now their neighbors are repaying them. However, the scale of these projects is often such that this is not enough. In large solitaires, the renovation of the facade can cost up to 700.000 euros, and this is something that can only be done with the help of state programs, European Union funds and bank loans. The solution must be systemic, which is very inconvenient in a country where the system is less and less trusted.
At the same time, stories are circulating in the city about the purchase of dozens of apartments at once, for cash. Housing capital is being consolidated again and there is no doubt that there are owners who could adequately invest in buildings, but do not do so because the Law does not require them to do so. Because of all of the above, it is possible that all we can hope for within a market economy is that the Building Maintenance Act is actually enforced: that it starts requiring buildings to be renovated and imposes fines when it is not done. At the same time, he would have to be sensitive to differences in the capabilities of tenants; there would have to be a lot more programs of non-reimbursable co-financing, subsidies and favorable loans, the city's facade repair program (as was done on Kosančićevo and Zeleni venc) should be expanded. With all that, citizens should be reminded that they have to organize themselves and that they have no choice. Otherwise, the porous city will continue to crumble in desperate need of repair.
And as for the broken sculpture, it is repairable. There are currently three similar works by Stijović in the Legate House in Belgrade Bathers, among which one is almost identical to the damaged one, but executed in bronze. All are from 1932, suggesting that the broken sculpture is from a small batch and that once restored, this bronze version could be of help to restorers.
