Croatian millennials can't afford to own their own home. The solution: build on their parents' house.

• Many Croatian millennials can no longer afford their living costs in cities like Dubrovnik.

• High real estate prices and limited space inspired us to come up with a very practical solution. BI took the trouble to get to the bottom of the matter.

• Parents add floors to their homes to make room for their adult children and grandchildren.

Bogdan Dascalescu, 37, stands on the balcony of his house and enjoys the view of Mokošica – a suburb of Dubrovnik located just behind a large bridge.

Although property prices here are more affordable than in the picturesque old town, they are still unaffordable for most locals his age.

On this drizzly day in mid-April, he pointed to a number of seemingly unfinished buildings with flat concrete roofs. Some had metal rods sticking out of them, while others had piles of bricks scattered across them.

Dascalescu explained that this usually indicates expansion plans both by families and by the buildings themselves.

While some members of Generation X and Baby Boomers bought land in Mokošica before Croatia's War of Independence in the 1990s or shortly after, when property prices were relatively low, Millennials could hardly afford to buy.

And given the hilly and rocky terrain of Mokošica, horizontal expansion of plots is a challenge. Due to the landscape, there are few affordable plots of land to buy and build on.

Dedicated parents who do not want to abandon their children have come up with a practical solution: they have built additional floors on their existing houses so that their children and grandchildren can live in them.

When Romanian-born Dascalescu moved to Mokošica with his Croatian wife Diana in 2017, buying a house in Dubrovnik was not financially viable for him.

Instead, they moved into Marlais' parents' house, which had already been expanded to accommodate additional family members.

Originally it was a two-story, two-bedroom house, but Marlais' father built two more floors shortly after his eldest son got engaged. Now Dascalescu and Marlais live on their own floor, below their brother and his children, who live below their parents.

Houses like this one in Croatia often have lockable doors for each floor and internal or external staircases connecting the individual rooms inside.

According to a Croatian real estate expert, the popularity of this type of construction is due to the price.

“Expanding a house with an additional floor is currently the cheapest option for young families,” Filip Brkan, a member of the Real Estate Industry Association of the Croatian Chamber of Commerce, told BI.

He pointed out that in Croatia, where average construction costs are about $140 per square foot, a 1,000-square-foot addition this way can cost about $150,000 – making it considerably cheaper than buying a new home.

Brkan said what is happening in Mokošica is happening in suburbs across Croatia and is a reflection of the ongoing housing crisis in which “young people have virtually no place to live”.

Eurostat, the EU's statistical office, points out that property prices in Croatia have risen steadily over the past decade and last year recorded the highest annual increase among the 27 Member States.

Perhaps this is why many Croatian millennials have to live at home until their mid-30s – the highest average age in Europe.

“In Dubrovnik, not only are property prices extremely high, but so are rental prices,” says Brkan. “Young people have no real alternative.”

Additional floors are not always for children

Dubrovnik's Old Town, a UNESCO World Heritage site, has strict conservation regulations, meaning “you can't build sideways, you can't build upwards to reach a fourth floor,” says Ivan Vukovic, a 43-year-old tour guide who has lived in Dubrovnik his entire life.

However, in Mokošica, adding more floors remains a popular solution due to relaxed planning regulations.

However, there are still restrictions on the development of single-family homes in the suburbs, Nenad Lipovac, professor of spatial planning at the University of Zagreb, told BI.

Homeowners must comply with local ordinances, obtain building permits and often consider height restrictions, he said.

Lipovac also noted that flat roofs, iron bars and scattered bricks are not always a sign of plans to accommodate additional family members. They could be due to financial constraints or construction pauses, which are common during the summer months.

Given the lucrative potential of short-term rentals, Croatian homeowners could also build loft apartments for tourists to generate additional income, he added.

But even if the intention behind the flat roofs is to expand the buildings and provide space for younger family members to live, Lipovac says there is no guarantee that millennials will want this or that the additional floors will ever be built.

In fact, flat roofs could become a permanent feature, he said, and the houses would remain “forever unfinished.”

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