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One-sixth of houses are for vacation use
 Loutsa was once a village, but it has rapidly urbanized into a small seaside town. However, it has grown without planning, infrastructure, good roads or shared public spaces. Within four decades, peaceful green slopes and lovely beaches have been heavily developed and the area has practically suffocated.
There is no study that provides an overall picture of seaside housing development in Greece. The National Statistics Service has made a few fragmentary studies and reports that give some indication of how seaside housing has expanded in the past 40 years. According to the 2001 census, one-sixth of all housing in Greece (925,000 of 5,465,000) was categorized either as holiday houses or secondary residences, most of which were empty (that is, inhabited seasonally). In Attica the 2001 census recorded 38,000 seaside houses in the Athens Prefecture, 89,000 in eastern Attica, 14,000 in western Attica and 39,000 in Piraeus. By far the most weekender homes were in Salamis (16,700), followed by Loutsa (10,000), Markopoulo (9,700), Keratea (7,300), Aegina (6,400), Nea Makri (6,300), Megara (5,700), Kalamos municipality (5,500) and Rafina (4,800). Seaside dream «For years now it has been impossible to find a beach in Attica, Corinthia or Viotia that has not been built up. On most beaches the houses have been built right up to the water's edge,» Technical Chamber of Greece (TEE) general secretary and new president of the Workers' Housing Organization (OEK) Theodoros Dragiotis told Kathimerini. «Superb places and fine beaches have been destroyed, and the situation is irreversible.» The changes took place over many years. «In Greece seaside housing developed over the past four decades and in a different way from how it did in Western European and other Mediterranean countries,» Eliza Panayiotatou, professor at the Architecture School of the National Technical University, told Kathimerini. «Seaside houses not only satisfied the needs of the middle and working classes for holiday accommodation, but were also an investment in land and housing that upper- and lower-middle-class households hoped would ensure a better quality of life.» Anarchic growth without the benefit of planning, infrastructure or perspective was then complemented by some disastrous legislation which drastically downgraded large areas. «Seaside housing was not built along logical lines for the development of those areas but was based on instant easy profit and with predictable results,» said Dragiotis. «For decades the state observed without taking any action. Indeed, during the dictatorship a law on prefabricated housing that allowed subdivision dealt the final blow to many areas. It was then that Salamina and Loutsa, for example, were ruined,» he explained.
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