Infrastructure in Serbia
Until the fall of communism, the state-owned everything. Take my mother-in-law for example. The military built a number of apartment complexes in New Belgrade and gave, depending upon rank and importance to the government, an apartment. So my father-in-law had been an architect for the Air Force was granted a 4th-floor apartment in a brand new apartment building. In Serbia lower are better as you did not know from one day to the next if the elevator would work, so living on the 15th floor which would seem to be the penthouse was devalued because of the walk up and down the stairs.
Throughout the era of communism, everything was taken care of by the government. The grounds around and between the apartments were managed by the government. Repairs to the building were taken care of with a call to a government manager. This went own throughout the country. My wife inherited an apartment in the building built for employees of the National Bank. Two towers one with larger apartments for the executives and one with smaller apartments for the tellers.
Fast forward the fall of communism and people were granted ownership of the property they were in at the time. So now you own an apartment but what of the building the grounds the infrastructure that supports the apartment. When we bought our condo in Boston part of the agreement was that we would become part of the condo association of our building. We paid a monthly fee that would include certain essential services. It also included a provision that if some major issue occurred such as a failure of the roof, that the association could place an assessment on each condo to cover the cost of this repair.
So imagine Serbia and the owners now of the apartments. They are use to the government providing everything suddenly with no safety net to take care of these issues. Only recently have there started to have management groups to deal with issues. Still, big repairs are a problem. It is one thing for a large apartment complex to pay the equivalent of five dollars a month per apartment for general maintenance and another thing for large expenditures for big repairs. Most of the people in these apartments at the fall of communism were just entering of long into retirement. They are resentful that they have to pay at all. They make what is five hundred dollars a month in retirement pay which is enough to live day to day on, but pay some additional fee to fix a stairway on the other side of the apartment that they never use.
There are still questions even with new buildings. Loose rules apply and there is little way to enforce. For example, there are two businesses in our apartment building on the first floor. As we try and start collecting monies from each apartment for elevator maintenance they resist because they say they will never use the elevator. You hear the same story from other apartments about collecting money for roof repair, “well that is the problem of the people on the top, not me I am on the third floor.”
Next time Malta Part 2