These last few weeks we architects have been summoned to take a position. The Constitutional Convention has addressed the Right to Housing as a relevant issue.
One is master of his silence and slave of his words. This aphorism generally has a positive connotation. Above all, today with the instantaneity of giving opinions on social networks and making judgments about anything, with or without knowledge.
However, silence is also complicit.
A couple of years ago, from the College of Architects, the thesis on an ambiguous concept, “legal certainty”, has been installed. A national director of the Association in a column of a national newspaper, defended that: “third parties should not be affected by a bad technical decision.” In allusion to a Directorate of Works of the Central Station commune, which granted building permits for the construction of some thirty towers in a medium-rise sector, called “vertical ghettos”.
Third parties should not be affected by a bad decision by the DOM, but who are these third parties? People who in good faith buy green projects, without the permits or final receipts of the apartments or houses. A minimum recommendation that banks make when they lend money for the purchase of a “mortgageable” good is that it has “legal certainty”, that it has the permits, receipts, registrations, without mortgages or liens.
A parenthesis, the mortgage on real estate, is the way that financial capital has to demand the repayment of a loan, for this the mortgaged property has to be alienable, salable or auctioned, I close parenthesis.
In short, a person very few times in his life has the opportunity to buy real estate, so one can assume that these people rely on public faith and that real estate agents act with “legal certainty.” And that, if the real estate of a real estate agency is for sale, it complies with all applicable regulations.
Violating urban regulations destroys public faith. That a public official acts against the regulations affects not only private interests, but also affects the entire society. Public faith is built through the correct application of “applicable regulations” and “legal certainty”.
Unfortunately, for some architects individual interests prevail over the common good and public faith.
Affecting the prestige of the office and public faith are totally reprehensible behaviors. Twist the laws seeking interpretations of clear regulations, only to favor economic power and real estate speculation in a lack of the ethical values of the College of Architects.
To say that “a project cannot enter an Environmental Assessment, because the environment has already been intervened with streets and pavement, and that going back will not return the protected area to its initial condition. It is completely antithetical.”
These architects interpret that in the face of fait accomplis one cannot go back, because that action breaks “legal certainty”. Affecting public faith through real estate speculation, which affects third parties who buy projects in good faith, at least “questioned”, is an ethical offense that borders on a crime.
“Legal certainty” and “public faith” are not antagonistic, as some architects try to make it clear, both concepts are part of the construction of the public and the common good.
opinion
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