engleski

Protection, Ownership, Legalization and Foreign Investing - Differences and Problems, Croatian Way

Today we are facing the enormous changes in our surrounding World. The number of Earth Residents is rapidly increasing, along with their need for living space. Unfortunately one of the results of this spread is the increase of illegal buildings or even settlements. These illegal buildings create a tremendous problem in preparing Physical plans and their later implementation into anything that could be named "organized and planned". Croatia has faced these problems like other mediterranean countries. Besides large cities or small villages, Adriatic coast is the area that has been mostly confronted with this problem - the flood of illegal buildings and construction. In tourist world Croatia is recognized as the country of 1000 islands, and a country that has the coastline of the mainland more than 1700 km long. If the island shorelines are counted then the length arises up to over 5800 km in length. The elongated islands extend parallel to the shore, separated by channels creating a very desirable area for tourist development. /ls most of the land is privately owned in Croatia, this creates another problem in preparing plans. In order to be able to get more money from their land, the owners sell it as a land for so called "weekend or summer houses" or the land is used for building apartment buildings for tourist rental. In order to fight this problem, in 2004 Croatian Government adopted a legal document named Regulation on Governance And Protection Of The Maritime Coastal Area that was meant to protect the Adriatic coast from uncontrolled Planning waste of land. The Articles of the mentioned Regulation were incorporated into the Physical Planning and building Act in 2007, and slightly changed into the Physical planning Act of 2014. In July 2012 Croatian Government adopted an Act On Treatment Of Illegally Built Buildings, setting very detailed rules which buildings could be legalized, what was needed for their legalization and how much it will cost the owner of an illegal building to make it legal. We planners thought that finally our headaches were over. But, that was of a short breath. Soon we discovered that many buildings were legalized regardless the adopted plans and their ordinances. In preparing urban or Physical plans after these legal documents were adopted we discovered that many of the terms and conditions were not in accordance with other legal documents. The meanings of the terms differed. The answers we received from the Ministry made even more headaches. This chaos has created another problem - a problem that many foreign investors are faced now with: they have the land, they have the promises from local governments, they are willing to invest but they cannot do that. Why? The reason lies in non compliant legal documents. In this paper I will try to pin-point, through several examples of problems I have been faced with in my professional planning practice ; the problems that arose from legal documents (regarding the land ownership, legalization of buildings, protection of the natural resources and Coastal areas and the miss-leading meanings of terms in our legal system).

Illegal construction, illegal building areas, legal treatment

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