Announcement of changes to zoning regulations

Piotr Uscinski, deputy minister for development and technology, said that the idea is to avoid a situation where after a decade an investor would retrieve outdated conditions from a drawer and apply for a construction permit based on them. The possibility of applying development conditions should be limited. They will be issued for three or five years, not indefinitely as at present. Moreover, according to the law.pl, current studies are to replace general plans.

The ministry recommends that the study be replaced with a general plan, covering the entire commune and having the status of a local legal act. It will be able to approve local plans and issue land development conditions based on them. The said broad strategy will be a much less complicated document than the present study. There will be no instructive information in it, which will have no direct impact on the municipality’s spatial policy. Local administrations will have until 2026 to draw up these documents. Local plans, on the other hand, will continue to exist and those currently in force will remain valid.

However, investors, developers and local governments are skeptical that the pandemic is the perfect time for change. They fear not only legal troubles, but also rise in property prices. According to Przemysław Dziga, legal advisor at the Polish Association of Real Estate Development Companies, quoted by money.pl, the changes may have a significant negative impact on housing supply, which is already shrinking. There is a chance that they will halt investments.