Albox publishes its plan to regularise its illegal houses

In March of this year, just before the regional elections, the town of Albox in the Almanzora Valley announced that it was the first municipality in Andalucía to approve its plan to regularise illegal houses under the terms of the regularisation decree announced by the regional government. During a press conference given at the time the mayor of Albox, Jose Garcia (PSOE) flanked by the regional delegate for Housing and Planning in Almeria, Jose Ortiz, and the PSOE parliamentary candidate Jose Perez, declared that the decree would resolve virtually 100% of the cases in Albox.



The plan was subsequently made available to the public on the 2nd of April and AUAN, a homeowner’s campaign group, have now studied its content. “The true figure is far from the 100% claimed and the decree, when applied to Albox, appears to fix houses that didn’t need fixing and makes matters worse for quite a few that needed help. A clear case of the wrong remedy being applied when the regional government doesn’t listen to the homeowners” said an AUAN spokesperson.


198 houses can still be prosecuted

“The regularisation plan identifies 198 houses that the town hall believes cannot be regularised under the decree because they are less than four years old, incomplete, within a rambla zone, on a right of way or subject to some other form of special protection. A further 97 buildings (farm buildings, warehouses etc) also fall into this group.

These properties will now be referred to the appropriate authorities who will decide if action must be taken against them".



An additional 278 houses are on illegal land divisions

“The plan also identifies an additional 278 houses on illegal land divisions. This is where a parcel of rustic land was illegally divided up by promoters to construct houses which were generally sold on to foreigners. The decree provides no mechanism to resolve this problem as we warned from the outset” said AUANs spokesperson.



“The expectation appears to be that these property owners will surrender their individual land deeds, regroup the parcel of land and enter into some sort of shared ownership scheme with their neighbours if they wish to gain access to services such as electricity and water. As one can imagine, this creates a legal mess and is likely to be unworkable in practice” the spokesperson continued. “It should also be noted that according to the LOUA (the planning laws), these illegal land divisions can be still be prosecuted although we hope that the risk of this happening in reality is low” the spokesperson concluded.



Some positive aspects of the Albox plan

“The plan proposes to include some 80 houses that are in the courts and under threat of demolition as ‘urban settlements’. A proposal to include them in the town plan is positive even though the issue of who pays for the infrastructure needs to be resolved.“ said the spokesperson. “Of course, it is only positive if the courts are informed of this development and chose to take it into account. The decree places no obligation on the courts to do so and as many homeowners have declined to take part in the court proceedings they are unable to ensure that the court is informed. Also, there is of course no guarantee that these urban settlements will evolve into reality any time soon".




The decree - a solution? – not really

“Albox town council have followed the instructions set out in the decree and as a consequence they propose to apply legal coverage to houses that don’t really need it and have made matters worse, in the main, for the rest. The mayor indicated in March that some 497 houses were constructed illegally in Albox between 2001 and 2005. However, the majority of the 477 houses on protected land or on illegal land divisions match this description. One has to say that the numbers simply don’t add up and therefore we have to ask: what exactly has been fixed?” the spokesperson claimed.



“It’s all a bit of an ongoing shambles really. I’m sure our town halls and their planners are as fed up of complying with and justifying this nonsense as we are complaining about it. We had hoped that a change of government would bring new ideas to the table but that was not to be. Sadly, we must all plough on regardless or risk another Mr and Mrs. Prior”.



AUAN’s Priority

" 14 of the 198 houses that cannot be legalised and 60 of the 278 houses on illegal land divisions belong to AUAN members. As an organisation our priority will be to make reasoned technical arguments to have our members homes removed, if possible, from these lists. In an ideal world we would like to help everyone but we are financially supported by our members who represent a minority of those affected and their needs must come first“

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