Prague Land Ownership Mapping — Unearthing the Foundations of Affordability Crisis
Charting a Course for Equitable Urban Development through Data Transparency
This blog post on urban land ownership in Prague is the 3rd article in the series. The collaboration between Dark Matter Labs and the Institute of Human Rights and Business (IHRB) resulted previously in mapping of Copenhagen and aims to continue its investigation further in Athens and Lisbon.
Through findings in this blog, we aim to question the importance of ownership data protection rules in the context of Europe’s rising costs of living crisis. The difficulty of access paralyses the research arena and informed public discourse on distribution of wealth and social responsibility (incl. involvement of journalists, academics, city administrations, etc.) further jeopardizing spatial justice. Ultimately, this hinders facilitation of adequate policy, law enforcement and action against exploitative practices such as property flipping, foreign investments, tax avoidance, money laundering and future responses to climate impacts.
Introduction
Across Czechia, housing prices rose by more than 130% between 2015–2021 (Czech Statistical Office) and continue to do so. The average gross income, on the other hand, only grew by 40%. Today, an average Prague resident needs ca 14.3 average gross annual salaries to buy a 70 m2 new dwelling, making Prague one of the least affordable housing markets in the EU. These numbers are even more stark if net annual salaries are considered (see: Prices, Gross Incomes, Net Incomes) or if one looks at the actual current prices. Even when earning high salaries, Prague residents who do not own property have been priced out from access to housing, not to mention the more vulnerable groups.
Ownership mapping in Prague started with a conversation with the Cities for Rent: Investigating Corporate Landlords Across Europe project. This initiative, coordinated by the Arena for journalism in Europe, “marked the first step towards more cross-border collaborative research into the crisis of housing affordability and how it affects people’s lives”. Gaby Khazalová, winner of the European Press prize, investigated several issues including land ownership, data transparency, housing policy flaws, sale of municipal land or The hidden empire of the Tykač family which controls over ca 350 short-term rental apartments in the centre of Prague and has linkages with tax havens (Cyprus, Bahamas and the Panama papers case). In her article, the author rightly points out that while the majority of attention in housing crisis debates focuses on the lack of apartments on the market for purchase or rent, “what lies beneath” is the fundamental factor shaping our cities: i.e. land ownership. This hypothesis was also a starting point for the objectives of IHRB’s Building for Today and the future project.
Blog structure
In Prague, as in other cities, land ownership is foundational to this state of affairs, and issues around it guide the structure of this blog:
- Data Access & Transparency Review
- Prague’s largest land owners
- Why is housing in Prague unaffordable?
- A pledge for data transparency
- Necessary Alliances
- Method — getting the data
Data Access & Transparency Review
The State Administration of Surveying and Cadastre is the key source for Prague’s real estate data. The application makes it possible to obtain selected data on plots, buildings, units (apartments or non-residential premises) and building rights, registered in the real estate cadastre, as well as information on the status of proceedings for the purposes of registering ownership and other rights of authorised entities to real estate in Czechia, or for the purpose of confirming geometric plans.
Ownership data can be viewed for free plot by plot (CAPTCHA)
Viewing the real estate cadastre (CN) does not require any registration and is free. The application is intended exclusively for data viewing (plot by plot), as any acquisition or extraction of data by automated means is not allowed.
Core institutions have limited access
Our investigation revealed that the Institute of Planning and Development of the Capital City Prague (IPR Praha) — Prague’s main policy-making unit for urban architecture, planning, development, design, and administration — as well as the City of Prague itself only has partial access to the cadastral registry of land ownership.
This is because the cadastre aims to disseminate data for smaller areas, a common demand. Public entities have the privilege of accessing cadastral data pertaining to their administrative area at no cost, but its use is limited to public administration purposes and cannot be redistributed to third parties (IPR).
All about money?
We were informed by the cadastre office that the range and condition for CN data provision are ruled by the Decree Nr 358/2013 Coll. Large quantities of data can be acquired, with pricing per plot ranging between 50 Kč to 100 Kč (2–4 euro depending on level of information provided). For a dataset covering the entire city of Prague, we were quoted a figure of 931 928 Kč (ca. 38.200 EUR), a figure prohibitive for this project, but also for many researchers, journalists, and the general public.
Prevention against automated data harvesting methods is in place
As the State Administration of Surveying and Cadastre prohibits any form of automated data scraping we chose not to engage with this method. We, however, performed a test to what extent such an option would be technically possible. Our test revealed that data is hard to access this way, but that it is possible to check plot ownership one by one through this website. Example:
- Katastrální území Název/kód katastrálního území: 73012, and then
- Parcelní číslo: 2415/1
After solving CAPTCHA which aims to prevent scraping, a list of owners should appear — in the example above we chose a site of Bubny Development.
We attempted to utilize the cadaster office’s API, developing a script with the Puppeteer JavaScript library. This script was designed to navigate the necessary webpage, complete the form, and interact with buttons. However, our progress was impeded once more due to the CAPTCHA. Even when attempting to use a headless browser to circumvent this challenge, the website failed to load without JavaScript enabled. In essence, it appears that intentional measures have been implemented to make accessing the data difficult.
With current machine learning methods, it is possible to overcome captcha, however, this method would enter clearly (dark) grey zone legal grounds.
Prague’s largest landowners
Revealing Prague’s largest landowners is not an easy task. We leveraged a mix of GIS analysis, a manual check of the data register, literature review and interviews. As obtaining a whole data set for Prague is beyond the budget of the project, we were only able to scratch the surface and point to major actors in the city who are widely known to local researchers and journalists. This list includes the main developers of large-scale sites, particularly:
- Bubny Zatory — CPI, EPH
- Zizkov Freight Station (Central Group, Penta, Sekyra)
- Letiště Letňany (PPF)
- Smichov City (Sekyra Group)
- Kyje-Hute (City of Prague)
- Vysocany (Prague 9 + private developer)
- Letňany (Sekyra Group)
- Rohan City (Sekyra Group)
- Palmovka (PDS — a company launched by the city three years ago to restart the development of municipal housing)
- Tesla Hloubětín (Central Group)
This map reveals further major urban developments.
Our investigation revealed that Prague’s largest type of landowners are:
This distribution shows that the City of Prague as well as the state still own substantial assets that, coupled with adequate policies, can be leveraged against the developments of the last decades which led to increasing unaffordability.
How much and what kind of land the city has with potential for the construction of residential housing is still not fully mapped. The contribution organization Pražská developerská společnost, which is supposed to register vacant city plots and plan their development, has a certain overview. According to its representative Martin Červinka, unlike many cities in the west, Prague has relatively enough land for the next few decades.
The Prague development company currently has land with the potential for the construction of six to eight thousand apartments. According to Červinka, however, it can be estimated that the city may still have land for approximately another ten to twelve thousand apartments.
— Denik Referendum, (Gaby Khazal — Urban Journalism Network)
→ Explore the data above in HERE
You can filter it based on the type of owner, plot size and land use type. Some of the most interesting compositions are e.g. plots larger than 5000 sqm & owned by “Remaining domestic legal entities” — this means companies. Several large parcels of land in this category are owned by real estate companies.
By hovering over a parcel you can then check who is the owner through this website (see also the Data Access and Methodology sections below).
Why is housing in Prague unaffordable?
The Institute of Planning and Development of the Capital City of Prague (IPR) estimates that the city needs 9,000 new apartments per year to fill the housing gap and accommodate the growing urban population, while another estimation calls for 20,000 to return prices to reasonable levels. However, the lack of supply and increased demand only tell part of the story.
As cheap mortgages were available for years, housing became a popular investment product resulting, for example, in ca 220,000 investment flats in Prague, mostly in the historical centre. Furthermore, some of the following factors helped push homes out of reach for many:
- years of housing policy which has deregulated the market, leading to an increase in privatisation and commodification, coupled with recent attempts for its renewal
- little incentive to create accessible, coherent datasets that might reveal uncomfortable truths e.g. about the concentration of wealth
- slow bureaucracy (e.g. slow construction permitting) resulting in stretched planning across political cycles,
- low property taxation that does not reflect the value of land (flat tax per district, i.e. in the same district tax on the most fashionable street can be the same as on the peripheral areas), as well as lack of preventative measures such as e.g. dynamic property taxation for owners that leave investment apartments empty or developers that leave land banks fallow,
- little land-value capture (LVC) utilisation (OECD classifies the developer obligations, land readjustment and strategic land management instruments of the LVC as “used rarely” in Czechia), with only the recent introduction of limited developer contributions in forms of cash, schools, parks or other public amenities (see: Bubny-Zatory or Zizkov Freight Station brownfield developments).
- years of continuous sale of municipal land (albeit we can also a see positive signs of declaring a halt to those practices)
These policies have reinforced the emerging global narrative which depicts city authorities as powerless in the face of developers, but this myth can be debunked through recognition of a new set of capabilities within administrations.
Municipalities can recognize the power of ownership data and its usage as tools for regaining agency in city development.
As European real estate prices keep rising under the prevailing economic, taxation and housing policy regimes, many urban problems call for reforms around land ownership, its leverage power, and data transparency at the EU, national and city levels.
Pledge for data transparency
Lack of easily accessible ownership datasets of land ownership, human-business networks and real estate transactions creates a condition where speculation can happen behind the scenes, away from the civic eyes and sense-making capabilities. In an attempt to protect individuals, GDPR data protection rules end up hiding exploitative behaviours, for example by making it impossible to reveal linkages to tax havens, uneven accumulation of wealth through the ownership multiple apartments or land sites, shell companies, and more. As a consequence, the right to land, and housing are further undermined.
Unfortunately, the European Court of Justice recently declared that the public access of registers containing information about beneficial owners of businesses breaches the right to privacy. Consequently, not just Luxembourg but also the Netherlands has restricted access to the registry of real owners following the verdict. This further sets a precedent for other member states despite having been highlighted by Denik Referendum, journalists and experts as a significant regression in endeavours to enhance transparency and uncover unjust financial transactions.
In the Prague context, wide transparency and ease of access for all to land, real estate ownership, transaction and business register data would entail:
- ease of access for download of whole-city datasets for city administration, politicians, journalists, researchers, and eventually the general public.
- ability to search through the register by owner’s name
- ability to link and visualise individuals and their connections to companies and owned land (historical and present)
- ability to show transactions.
Current land registry systems are predominantly centralized with data maintained by the govenrmnet or a central authority making the system vulnerable to corruption, hacking, fraud, registration gaps. An update through a transformation of land registry to a blockchain database could alter the data governance framework and render beneficial effects. While benefits and dangers should be taken into consideration this idea has already numerous examples in practice (initiatives undertaken by governments in Republic of Georgia, Sweden, Ukraine, as well as Ghana, Brazil, Honduras, India and Japan).
All of this could play a key role in improving housing affordability by unlocking:
- measures to capture real estate value uplifts due to e.g. public investments, through spatial taxation (see: Smart Commons)
- progressive taxation on the among of land owned,
- taxation of empty housing stock or multi-apartment ownership (hindering speculative behaviours)
- real estate developer contributions (large and small) in exchange for usage or plugging in to the municipal assets such as heavier usage of roads, electricity grid, parking space, pressures on the water systems and infrastructure, urban green etc.
- greater possibility of building affordable housing thanks to better overview of municipal assets and their relation to other city landowners
- expansion of multiplicity of actors able to research, analyse and engage with the data (e.g. urban heat islands and climate adaptation of streets — researchers could develop models which include mostly affected citizens, owners, and tenants to inform and organize collectively towards climate adaptation, as well as whole-city retrofit, and more)
Necessary alliances
In this context, the current continuation of the aforementioned Cities for Rent initiative — the Urban Journalism Network and its project Ground Control aims to gather investigative journalists from around Europe to address land ownership issues. These include, for now (links contain relevant articles) actors from:
- (Germany) Tagesspiegel | (France) Mediapart | (Belgium) Apache (Article 1, 2, 3)| (Poland) BIQdata.pl / Gazeta Wyborcza | (Hungary) Telex |(Slovakia) The Investigative Center of Jan Kuciak | (Norway) iTromsø | (Italy) IrpiMedia, (Austria) ORF | (Czech Republic) Deník Referendum
Furthermore, the Institute of Human Rights and Business as well as Dark Matter Labs continue its missions around special justice and alternative modes of governance and ownership.
We hope that this growing network can not only spread awareness around issues of land ownership, spatial justice, and data transparency but also contribute to city, government and EU and policy change. Any kind of paradigm shift allowing for a halt to rising costs of living requires strengthening of these networks through collaboration, funding, increased capacities as well as engagement, creativity and recognition of agency by the city and state authorities.
Method — getting the data
First, through spatial data analysis process our team manged to obtain a map which allows for more targeted search via the Cadaster platform.
- Basic cadaster ArcGIS map: Through a RUIAN plugin we first obtained the basic cadaster map
- Then we focused on 3 variables
- Cadastral Territories (KatastralniUzemi): We then composed a list of Cadastral Territories specific for Prague — a clean list of numbers and names is needed to perform data joins in GIS software
- Type of Land Code Codes (DruhPozemkuKod) define type of property
- The Method of land use (Způsob využití pozemku) is another, more detailed categorization of land use — in red — marked filtered out areas (although we do realize that some of these like “green” or “infertile land” could be potentially used for housing development
3. Through ArcGIS REST API servers from an alternative source:
- Land ownership and management classification data (klasifikace_vlastniku) our team managed to get data on the types of plots which after a series of spatial joins gave us the following classification.
- There is a further database with plots owned by the city of Prague — detailed ownership classification (Majatek).
Contact:
Aleksander Nowak aleks@darkmatterlabs.org
Annabel Short annabel.short@ihrb.org
Giulio Ferrini giulio.ferrini@ihrb.org
