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by ddorian43 3 days ago
Yes. The whole bought media, party in-power, the opposition are against the protests and are trying to downplay them.

Source: I live there. It's very easy to tell if you do.

2 comments

Is the project more of a private residence or something that would bring tourism to the local economy?
There are 2 projects here. And there is a lot of missing details from both.

But what has happened before is that:

The government gives free/cheap/exclusive public land to someone to build apartments/villas. They sell these to whoever wants to buy before starting construction. At the end of construction, with the profits, they build nice hotels at the frontline and keep for themselves without investing any of their own money in anything.

So they will most likely build apartments in Narta, sell them to the populace, and keep Sazan for themselves as luxury resort.

Something worse than this has started happening for high rises too, where they start selling before getting the permit even. So they don't invest their own money even to get the initial permit to start building.

So... it's like a kickstarter for real estate!
It's worse. Most/All of the development is done by subcontractors who also get apartments/villas instead of plain cash for their work. So you will do plumbing on 10 villas and for your work get 20% cash + 1 apartment that you have to sell it yourself. This for all subcontractors except steel.
In NYC, Trump did something similar. He built condos, then sold them way above market to Russian oligarchs, who then immediately resold them at market value to people that were not laundering money.

Same grift, different marks.

I'll take your word for it! But I reflexively add "... at this price" to such statements.
Very hard for the general public to gain things though.

It's too luxury, most likely will pay no taxes for years, you can import workers from elsewhere, etc etc.

It's not the first time this kind of thing happens in Albania and we've already seen results.

Normal people will just never be able to go there again. People in power will either get millions or 1+ free apartment/villa, or heavily discounted price (depends on how much power you have).

I was literally kitesurfing when they came and added fences to the road to block access to the beach.

People really don't get the idea of intangible cultural heritage and irreplaceable wetlands, do they? Not everything and everyone is for sale.
This isn't the Albanian people's first rodeo...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1997_Albanian_civil_unrest

What do the locals have from a higher price?
Stop the financialisation of everything.

(Or if you prefer because you are unable to compute that, the price is upfront $70,000 trillion (2025 prices) - cash only)

Protests by the masses and business negotiations are very different.