State of the art: Cyprus

The worst housing problem ever faced by Cyprus appeared after the invasion of 1974 when 38% of its territory was occupied by Turkish military forces. 36,2% of the housing stock was lost and 200.000 refugees had to be housed in their own country. Until 1986 the Government of Cyprus managed to house nearly 50.000 of these people in various refugee estates carried out by the Town Planning and Housing Department. Out of this number, approximately 30% have been housed in small three-storey family houses. Some thousands of refugees have been housed in multi-storey family houses built by the private sector. Today, due to the specific technical, environmental and seismic conditions in Cyprus, as well as the change of the quality of the available building materials, many of these multi-storey buildings face a variety of problems. The solutions decided vary from complete.