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0:01 Stories from the construction site. Today, about a big scandal. The enclosed balcony, the great financial coup. I said a few years ago, also in stories from the construction site, that the enclosed balcony is not just a glass and PVC structure. I said it is a process. It was a process of Romanians adapting to petty communist apartment blocks with small spaces and how this balcony was transformed into a pantry, storage for pickles, peppers, and green tomatoes. It was turned into a clothes drying area, a workshop, a kitchen, an extended living room, and perhaps even a shelter for a cigarette, a so-called smoking room. Well, for 30 years, this
0:50 balcony was the last frontier of our private freedom, of our intimacy, of the way we fought against communist pettiness, and we said: my house, my facade, we can enclose the balcony. What does it matter anymore? Well, now in 2026, this process has reached maturity. State authorities took a long look at our facades, but they didn't see the architectural or urban planning chaos. They didn't see the heat losses, nor did they shed a tear for urban aesthetics. No. They saw a gold mine just waiting to be exploited. To squeeze out more money and contribute to a budget already stretched thin,
1:37 they introduced the CATU, the new urban planning code, so that with a series of penalties and sanctions, they could target all enclosed balconies in Romania. This is discouraging. The measure under debate is written in this CATU, called Law 169/2026, which is in effect as of August 25th of this year. It is in effect, but rumors say that a one-year grace period was tacitly accepted so that everyone could come to their senses. So, let me tell you what the measure entails: one, doubled tax, meaning a 100%increase, in the sense
2:23 that apartment owners who enclosed the balcony or joined it with the room it belongs to, living room or bedroom, by tearing down the parapet or wall without a building permit or without following a technical project, risk a significant increase, meaning a doubling of the building tax set by the local administration; two, drastic measures for legal compliance. Besides the enormous fines that can reach tens of thousands of RON, legal authorities based on this law can request the restoration of the space to its original state by demolishing the unauthorized enclosures or walls if the work does not receive a regularization permit or, as we say today, is not legalized. This legalization, as you
3:13 know, is also followed by enrollment, meaning the registration of the new type of living space in local tax and fiscal records. In other words, if you aren't on the rolls, if you aren't compliant with tax and fiscal regulations, the object practically doesn't exist. This brings us to point number three, which is the blocking of sales, meaning any structural or facade modification not registered in the land registry, untitled, and lacking a building permit, complicates or may even block real estate transactions, such as sales through a bank or notary. If you are wealthy and pay with cash,
4:00 you have no problem. If you make a transaction and buy via a bank payment order, you have no problem. But if you want to take out a bank loan and need an appraisal, documents, a building certificate, and regularization, the bank sends its appraiser, and because you haven't brought all your documents up to date, the apartment isn't an asset of interest to them. So you can't buy it. The question is, why did it trigger so many reactions? Well, let's see. First of all, there is an exceptionally large number of people affected in Romania. Of the 900,000 existing apartment buildings, a very large number, a very high percentage, have balconies enclosed by owners since before '90 and in a very large
4:47 proportion after '90. And when I say very large, I mean they were built without official construction permits. That is why the law imposes an obligation to carry out this regularization through a building permit. I invite you to do some site math, the kind you won't find in the law's regularization norms. The norms, you know, they eat away at our souls. In Romania, there are approximately 3.5 million apartments and, correspondingly , about 4 million balconies. If we look realistically out the window, of these 4 million balconies, about 60-70%could
5:34 be enclosed, meaning about 2.5 million enclosed balconies. 2.5 million enclosed balconies would mean about as many apartments, and about as many files. Yes, if we were to line up all these balconies at about 6 linear meters per balcony—that is, a 3.60 m span and a 1.20 m width resulting in 6 meters—we would get a wall, a Great Wall of double-glazing about 15,000 km long. About from here to Australia. Impressive, isn't it? This wall could surround Romania's border about five times. You know, Romania's border is 3,150 km long. This new Chinese wall,
6:21 this Great Wall of double-glazing, has become the Ministry of Finance's favorite target, its new cash cow. Another reason it sparked these controversies is the following: the thermal rehabilitation projects carried out by town halls. Many balconies were enclosed during thermal rehabilitation projects, organized, carried out, and supervised by city halls. For this, tens of thousands of projects were created and authorized for about 300 apartment buildings. Acceptance reports were signed upon completion of the works. A pile of money and a pile of kickbacks were settled, and now we risk sanctions due to bureaucracy and the lack of these documents in the administration's archives. City halls,
7:10 in their efforts for digitalization and updating, should have invited citizens to complete and update their land registry records based on the projects they could have made available. But no, that didn't happen. They hid them, tucked them away, I don't know what they did with them, but in any case, these projects are still not in the hands of the owners, meaning the people with enclosed balconies. Another reason , the third one, is that this procedure for entering into legality is very complicated. It requires technical expertise—I'm referring to structural , fire, acoustic, lighting, and so on, historical monuments—all carried out by technical experts authorized by
7:56 supervisory bodies, a land survey, a project made by a licensed architect, and permits issued by local authorities , namely the city hall, such as the certificate for building completion, all of which can be extremely costly, both financially and in terms of time. The Ministry of Development will be called the Ministry of Balconies. This is the first change that this law brings. One fine morning, you wake up to find that your balcony built around 2003, where you kept your pickles and your bicycle, has meanwhile become a continuous tax offense. Maybe you didn't know that. And then comes the state, which wants to save you and
8:42 bring you into legality. How? Well, let me explain. Through form FAR01 of this law 169/2026 is just the form of your new fiscal freedom and of filling your time with an impossible schedule to distract from the country's great and true problem: corruption. So what are you left to do? What are the procedures like? Let me list them for you. You go and look for some experts. Experts for structure, fire experts, experts for historical monuments, and so on, who come to examine your work to see if what you built there in those 3 square meters will fall down or not. If it
9:29 doesn't fall, you move on to the next stage. In the next stage, you go and find a topographical engineer so they can come and create a 1:50 scale floor plan for you. After that, step number three, you hire an architect because they need to create a project that must be submitted to the city hall for a building permit, along with a technical project for building completion. Step number four: you go to the homeowners ' association and ask for the blessing of everyone who is in the same boat as you , and who is already looking at you with suspicion. And finally, at step number five, you show up at city hall and enter a massive meat grinder. You pay the fines, get your balcony and everything else legalized, stop by the Local Taxes and Fees Department for the new tax regime—increased by about 10 times—and then, with the new tax
10:16 calculated and doubled for the entire area of the apartment, not just for those 3 square meters, you go and register it on the tax roll. Finally, once it's on the tax roll, your apartment can enter the real estate market. In other words, it can be sold, inherited, donated, used as bank collateral, and other operations of this kind. Do you think that after all these grinders at city hall you'll still be able to make it to shore? I doubt it. Why? Because psychologically, you aren't just witnessing this mechanical grinder of the city hall. Okay, it's law, it's procedure, there are departments, employees, fees, taxes , money, and so on. But we are talking about statistical robbery, meaning we
11:02 can roughly calculate how much money is being extracted from your pocket. And I want to speak in cold numbers, because if we speak in cold numbers, you will be able to see the cynicism of the measure, the brilliant cynicism of the measure. Scenario one: entering into legality, the tax on paperwork. For a single 3–4 square meter balcony, the bill for the bureaucracy looks something like this. Structural technical expertise (MLPAT) 2000 RON. Architecture project and D.T.A.C. 2000 RON. Regularization authorization fee at city hall, including the X10 penalty , 1500 RON. Cadastral registration and
11:48 related commissions, another 1500 RON. A total of 7000 RON, which is approximately 1400 €, without even counting historical monuments, fire safety, acoustics, lighting, and who knows what other permits from mice, rats, occupational medicine, or whatever else might be in that apartment. So let's say this total per apartment is 7000 RON, so about 1400 €. If only 20%of Romania's property owners, meaning about 500,000 people, got scared and rushed to city hall to submit the file, 700 million euros would immediately be extracted from the population's pockets. 700 million euros
12:37 . Just think about it: 700 million euros extracted from the pockets of the population will not go into seismic retrofitting. Neither into the rehabilitation of schools, hospitals, or kindergartens, nor into the actual insulation of buildings. No. Those millions of euros will simply go towards fees, taxes, and of course, the bureaucracy with stamps, stamps, stamps , stamps. If theoretically everyone dealing with the closed balcony issue rushed to City Hall, we would be talking about a 3.5 billion euro market . From these 3.5 billion euros, it
13:23 would be enough to extract a 1 billion share for the Romanian justice system so it could also do us a little bit of justice. But pay attention, this part about justice, about the judiciary, comes only after you have built those respective closed balconies. Do you get what I’m talking about? Yes. Scenario two, punishment through doubled taxes. Fiscal absurdity, as Eugen Ionescu would say; if you don’t want to pay the 1,400 euros for the various expenses they’ve signed off for you, what else is there to do? The state says it has the guillotine ready. If you don’t want to pay those, you participate in the doubling of the tax,
14:08 meaning a 100%increase on your apartment tax. But pay attention to the legal nuance. If you extended or enclosed this 3 m² balcony, the state doesn't just double the tax on the 3 meters of the balcony, does it? It doubles the tax on all 70 meters. Of the apartment you own. By a simple estimate, if city halls apply this tax doubling for 500,000 apartments, the first 500,000 that rushed to City Hall, the city hall will collect, for the local budget, a direct increase of 35-40 million euros annually. Hard-earned money, taken from pensions,
14:54 from middle-class salaries, just because someone, I suspect not exactly Mr. Attila, needs to patch up a budget deficit without raising local taxes and fees. In other words, I suspect that not only the PSD, PNL, UDMR government is guilty, but the mayors themselves. They pressured for a new way to collect money to be found without increasing local taxes before the elections. If this story were theoretically applied to all apartments and all balconies in question, whoops, we would reach 1 billion euros again; just look at how the closed balcony will pull Romania out of the crisis. Brilliant. We are
15:40 thus witnessing the schizophrenia of city halls where the accomplice becomes the executioner. What do I mean? In the last 15-20 years, city halls across the country have run these thermal rehabilitation and facade insulation programs with European funds. Who sent Dorel up on the scaffolding to enclose the balconies uniformly and neatly across the whole block so the thermal coefficient would meet the authorized project? The city hall itself, the city hall would come, install the double glazing, cut the ribbon, take pictures, bang, internet, bang, press, election campaign, and leave. Today, the same city hall, after 15-20 years, returns
16:27 and through the Local Tax and Revenue Directorate sends a pink envelope to your home. Dear citizen, you appear in our database with your balcony enclosed . Where is your individual building permit? And if you reply, Mr. Mayor, you enclosed it when you rehabilitated the building, the bureaucratic response comes immediately and it is brilliant. The city hall’s collective project does not replace an individual permit in your name, and we can no longer find the file in the archive. The cow ate it . So, you are liable for payment. Pay up to us. The conclusion from the construction site. What do we do with this wall of double-glazed windows? As an architect, I tell you directly, our
17:12 cities' facades look chaotic and ugly when someone tears down a reinforced concrete balcony parapet or a structural wall to put in a radiator, furniture, a stove, a bathtub, or whatever else they put on that balcony, they enter a zone of real seismic danger. That is where we must intervene , and certainly, technical expertise is needed there, because if we intervene, we will manage to reduce this risk and bring buildings back to their state of seismic safety. But the new urbanism code does not look for cut beams, torn-down walls, or safety coefficients . No. The new law was conceived only as
17:59 a mass financial fishing net. We are the fish. It puts in the same pot both the citizen who mutilated the block's structure and the old lady who installed two sliding windows in 1995 so her pickles wouldn't freeze in the pantry. Instead of creating a simple, free mapping and verification procedure at the level of homeowners ' associations, the state chose the easiest and most convenient path for itself: the X10 fiscal whip and the threat of demolition. Except that the demolition of 2.5 million enclosed balconies is a great fantasy. City halls are not even able to repair what they need to repair, let alone demolish so many balconies. To send jackhammers
18:48 to tear down the balconies on the facades of 900 apartment buildings. So, dear friends from "Tales from the Construction Site," the great 15,000 km wall of double-glazed windows remains in one way or another in its place. Only from today on, every double-glazed window has a fiscal meter. attached. Tsk tsk tsk. I explained an architect's point of view, where, of course, we interfere in legislation, we interfere with construction, with the seismic phenomenon, with seismic safety, with urban regulations, but there is also another facet. This measure exceeds the
19:35 limit of a simple urban or architectural regulation and becomes an abuse of public law which, probably in a future episode, I will manage to explain to you with the help of a lawyer colleague. The Code has many problems. This new urbanism code or this Law 169 of 2024. My colleagues from the OAR are fighting to solve some of these problems, but the balcony is yours. What are you going to do? Will you keep your balcony enclosed or file the FAR01 form? Aren't you tired of being milked for money? Can you join a class-action lawsuit against this corrupt and obtuse state, or will you just take more abuse? I look forward to
20:23 your opinions in the comments. Until then, wishing you the best, and meanwhile, be careful which walls you tear down. Stories from the construction site.
