Tirana

Tirana has no housing cooperatives, and Albanian housing law offers no tenure form for them. The collective structures that do exist sit elsewhere. Every apartment block is meant to run a condominium assembly under Law 10112/2009 (the law on administering co-ownership in residential buildings). UNECE's 2024 country profile of Albania finds such assemblies still uncommon in socialist-era estates, which are left with no management or maintenance at all. The nearest thing to a limited-profit channel is Enti Kombëtar i Banesave (EKB, the National Housing Agency). It builds on municipal land and sells at cost to households chosen by income, on instalment loans of 15–25 years at 3%. The outcome is ownership, not shared tenure.

Organisation in focus

Enti Kombëtar i Banesave (National Housing Agency of Albania)

Albania’s national housing agency and the likely public landlord of the 2026 reform.

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The history explains the gap. Under communism the state built, owned and allocated the blocks. In December 1992 Law 7652 privatised state housing to its sitting tenants at nominal prices. EKB was founded a year later with a World Bank loan to finish 6,000–7,000 flats abandoned half-built in 1990, as the UNECE #Housing2030 study records. Outside the old city, newcomers organised themselves, but as self-builders rather than members. At Bathore, north of the centre, squatters built multi-storey houses on state land. Tirana's informal belt did the work that an essay on Turkey's gecekondu calls social policy by other means. Across the region the pattern has a name, ‘super-homeownership’, which Corinna Hölzl's study of cooperative pioneers in Central and South-Eastern Europe ties to the privatisation waves of the early 1990s.

The actors who could seed a sector today fall into three clusters. The first is state-led: EKB, self-financing since 2007 from a revolving fund. The second is civic and technical. Co-PLAN Institute for Habitat Development ran Albania's first urban upgrading pilots in Bathore and Breglumas, and the POLIS University Center of Excellence on Housing, Planning and Development supplies research and trained planners. The third is the one Belgrade, Zagreb and Ljubljana already have and Tirana lacks: grassroots groups linked into the MOBA network with a shared revolving fund. The clusters face different walls. EKB lacks rental management capacity, civic groups lack land and capital, and would-be cooperators lack a legal vehicle. Sasha Tsenkova and Doris Andoni argued in 2017 that Albanian cities needed a strong non-profit partner to act as social landlord.

Organisation in focus

Co-PLAN Institute for Habitat Development

Pioneer of participatory upgrading in Tirana’s informal settlements.

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Organisation in focus

POLIS University — Center of Excellence on Housing, Planning and Development

POLIS University — Center of Excellence on Housing, Planning and Development is a private university in Tirana, Albania, with a strong focus on architecture, planning, environment, urban management, and applied research. Its structure combines three main academic units with an interdisciplinary innovation center, and it also includes affiliated units such as the Co-PLAN habitat development institute, the MetroPOLIS architecture studio, and an incubator.[2][3] Its mission appears closely connected to *affordable and sustainable housing* through its planning and habitat-development work, especially via the Faculty of Planning, Environment and Urban Management and its relationship with Co-PLAN, which the university describes as its origin.[5] The faculty states that it has a “very strong social mission” by providing services and consultancy to communities and local authorities, suggesting a practical role in urban governance, spatial planning, and development policy.[5] The university also offers professional and research-oriented programs in areas such as digital architecture and territorial planning and GIS, reinforcing its applied orientation.[6] Geographically, POLIS University’s core activity is in Albania, but it has an international dimension through European academic memberships, Erasmus+ mobility, and partnerships with foreign universities and networks.[5][7] Its website also highlights English-language and international programs, indicating a regional and European academic scope rather than a purely local one.[6]

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Government has started to answer that call, though not yet with cooperatives by name. The UNECE profile advises the state to lend land and funding to non-public providers such as housing cooperatives on the Barcelona model or community land trusts on the Brussels one. The 2026 national programme goes part of the way. It turns EKB into a public company that will manage rental homes as well as build them.

The sitting government's answer is a new National Housing Programme, presented in September 2026 by Delina Ibrahimaj, Minister of Economy and Innovation. It offers 0% loans on homes up to €60,000 and a capped rate on dearer homes. For tenants, the state will pay 50% of rents up to €500. New developments are to follow a mix of 30% social, 40% affordable and 30% market homes. A National Housing Fund will pool the developer levy, and the schemes are due to open in November 2026. The programme builds on Law 22/2018 Për strehimin social (On Social Housing), whose six programmes run from social rental housing and low-cost homes to temporary shelters. The government's priority policies for 2026–2028 set aside €15.5 million and target decent, affordable housing for 35,000 households by 2030. A 2026 amendment adds a state guarantee of up to 30% of a home's value for buyers who qualify.

The levers are split between the capital and the town hall. The ministry writes the law and funds the programmes; the municipality selects beneficiaries, pays the rent bonus and owns the social flats. The UNECE profile counts 358 families housed in Shkozë in 2023, 2,169 families given rent subsidies since 2016 and 3,651 households helped with mortgage interest. Its main local instrument is the developer contribution. Any residential building over 2,000 m² must hand 3% of its floor area to the city for social rent. In September 2026 the municipality took delivery of new social flats under that contribution. The city's finances pull the other way. A Tirana Times investigation found that the infrastructure impact tax on new permits and the property tax are expected to supply 56% of the municipality's own revenue in 2026. Leadership is unsettled as well. Mayor Erion Veliaj was arrested by SPAK, the special anti-corruption prosecutor, in February 2025. He was later reinstated by the Constitutional Court, but the Supreme Court upheld his detention in September 2026, and Reporter.al found it unclear who exercises the mayor's powers.

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Dirty money in the skyline: Albania's tower boom and the laundering of criminal wealth

Tirana’s boom saw 9.9 million sqm permits, 107 towers, many vacant—funded largely by organized crime.

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No dedicated support exists for cooperatives yet. The instruments that could carry them are the developer floor-area contribution, public land that municipalities must now identify for the national programme, and the planned National Housing Fund. None is ring-fenced for member-owned homes. Law 22/2018 also runs annual calls to convert disused public buildings, such as old factories and offices, into social housing, the closest thing to a reuse pipeline.

On vacancy the response is indirect. Albania has no empty-homes tax. A draft law would tax property on its market value at low rates, with a discount for a main home. Much of the empty stock is tied to where the money comes from. Albania sat on the FATF grey list, the international watchlist for weak anti-money-laundering controls, from February 2020 until October 2023. The US State Department still reports that criminals launder proceeds through real estate purchases and construction projects. Meanwhile the State Cadastre Agency issued a record 26,101 legalisation decisions for informal buildings in 2025.

Sustainability rules exist mostly on paper. The 2016 energy-performance law was, in the words of consultant Kristi Bashmili, “a good omen” that institutions did not have the will to move forward. Parliament has since passed a new law on the energy performance of buildings, and a draft rule would require solar energy on all new buildings from 2026. Tirana's 2030 masterplan by Stefano Boeri promised an Orbital Forest of trees to stop sprawl onto farmland, but by 2023 the city had planted 60,987 of the promised two million. EU accession, aimed at full membership by 2030, now pulls building standards towards EU rules. The country's public and social rental homes remain too few to lead that shift.

The Shkozë estate is the city's one working model of public rent. It came out of a national programme with the Council of Europe Development Bank (CEB). That programme built 1,138 rental flats in eight cities, backed by a €15 million CEB loan. The municipalities put in land and management. In Tirana the site was a brownfield, and Tsenkova and Andoni's review of the programme notes that its clean-up added a premium to the cost. When then-mayor Erion Veliaj handed keys to the first 30 families in 2015 he called it “Tirana's most beautiful postcard”. In 2019 the municipality readied Shkozë flats for families displaced by the Ring Road, so the small public stock doubles as an emergency buffer.

Enti Kombëtar i Banesave has housed more than 15,000 families since 1993 without owning a single rental flat. Its model is simple: the mayor provides a plot, EKB builds, and income-tested households buy at cost. Recycling the sales into the next project has kept the agency independent of the budget. The 2026 reform asks it to become a landlord as well, which would make it the first national body in Albania to hold homes for rent.

Bathore is where Tirana's self-help tradition met planning. Co-PLAN chose it and Breglumas for Albania's first combined social and physical upgrading projects. A study in Housing Studies by Dorina Pojani later described the successful upgrading of Bathore, an informal settlement on government land where squatters had built durable, often multi-storey houses. Roads, water and titles came after the homes. The lesson for a cooperative future is that Tirana's residents have long organised to build; what they lacked was a legal form for owning together.

Tirana Riverside is the largest new neighbourhood of the post-earthquake years. Stefano Boeri Architetti designed it for the municipality as a 29-hectare district for 12,000 people on the Tirana river. Voxeurop's report from the 5 Maji neighbourhood records a plan for 3,500 flats and the demolition of 400 existing houses. Architect Astrit Seranaj called the earthquake “a golden opportunity” that the authorities exploited. Four years after the demolitions, residents told Voxeurop the rubble was still there. The project shows the scale the city can mobilise, and how slowly it reaches the people who were already living on the site.

From our library

Tirana Riverside: demolitions at 5 Maji and the post-earthquake new neighbourhood

The demolitions at 5 Maji and the new post-earthquake neighbourhood on the river.

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The Kombinat reconstruction shows the slower side of the same effort. Five years after the 2019 earthquake the national programme had handed over 6,139 new apartments across the affected region. In Kombinat, the former textile-mill district of Tirana, about 230 of roughly 1,000 affected families had received flats by December 2025, and the work is due to close in 2028.

Qyteti Studenti, the student city, offers a smaller template for shared living. The municipality rebuilt dormitories 9 and 10, giving 600 students 200 renovated rooms. It is the city's clearest case of an old building refitted for people who need a home for a few years rather than a lifetime. The POLIS University housing centre next door trains the planners who will decide whether that model grows. What Tirana has, in short, is land, empty flats, a public builder and a people used to building for themselves. What it does not yet have is a way for them to own and run homes together.