Buying an apartment in Prague now costs 15 years of average salary. A handful of MPs pushed through a bill gutting environmental and public-interest protections to speed up construction, betting it will bring that down. Those closest to the system say the evidence suggests otherwise.

by FANI APOSPORI

PRAGUE, Czech Republic — Ondřej, a 31-year-old lawyer in Czech public administration, is weighing whether to leave his job for a bank, work he doesn’t even like, or leave the country altogether, just to afford an apartment in Prague. Buying one now would cost him more than half his salary.

He is not alone. Prague is already the third least affordable major city in Europe to buy an apartment in, requiring 15 years of average gross salary, according to Deloitte’s 2025 Property Index. Only Amsterdam and Athens rank worse. Apartments in the city now sell for roughly 131,520 crowns ($5,700) per square meter, according to the Czech Statistical Office, against an average net salary in the capital of about 52,000 crowns a month.

The radical amendment to the Czech Building Act that is supposed to fix the problem passed the Chamber of Deputies on July 10, 2026, and now awaits a vote in the Senate. Introduced in December 2025 by ten — Babiš-led — MPs from three right-wing coalition parties rather than the government itself, it promises to bring prices down by fast-tracking building permits and stripping away much of the review process that slows construction. But it does not stop at building rules: it also rewrites 50 other laws, from nature protection to heritage preservation.

FACT BOX — What the bill does

• Creates one national centralntral auauthhorityrity to to approve big building projects, replacing today’s local building offices
• Takes away people’s right to a second review of a rejected objection to a project; the only option left is suing in court, at their own expense
• Allows more construction near national parks than before
• Protects historic buildings themselves, but no longer the areas around them
• Limits archaeological digs to seven months, even if something important is found

The bill skipped standard public consultation and arrived in committee as a nearly 1,000-page package, with lawmakers given a week to review it, according to reporting by Ekolist.cz and Deník Referendum. Anna Vinklárková, an architect with the environmental group Arnika, calls it “the largest change to Czech public administration since the fall of communism.” Critics have nicknamed it “Lex Developer.”

The red tape problem the bill claims to solve is real. Verek Machuta, a Prague developer, knows it firsthand. His own residential project began in 2008. He got the building permit in 2013, was then tied up in court for three more years, and eventually sold the project rather than keep fighting, worn down, he said, by neighbours who had come to fear the development. The buyer only got permission to open the first phase this year, 18 years after the project began. Nationally, Czechia builds roughly 32,000 apartments a year against a demand of 40,000 to 50,000, according to market analysts, a gap that has pushed prices up for years.

The government’s fix is to remove much of the review that produces delays like the one that cost Machuta his project and to move all local offices under one central authority. “One process, one office, one stamp,” Regional Development Minister Zuzana Mrázová, whose ministry is responsible for the bill, has said, describing it as moving Czech building law “into the 21st century.” Deputy Prime Minister Karel Havlíček has said the law “for the first time balances the interests of those who build against those who tear down.”

Even so, Machuta is not convinced the bill is the fix. He calls it “a very bad idea,” and says the lawyers he consulted believe it violates constitutional rights to appeal. “It’s good for the democracy that people can exercise their rights,” he says. “If they will have a feeling that they can’t, it’s not good for the society, and it will also stall the process more because of protests against it”. The old law, he adds, “was not bad at all.”

Critics say that the bill’s sidestepping of environmental protections and the opening of the door to corruption and conflicts of interest are linked to well-known practices of people and parties in the government. Ondrej particularly points to a vow from the Motorists, the right-wing junior partner in Babiš’s coalition, to gut measures tied to the European Union’s Green Deal by “spilling green blood” once in charge of the Environment Ministry. The Ministry for Regional Development and the Ministry of Environment did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

At the same time Babiš himself has drawn scrutiny, through his ownership of Hartenberg Holding, a real estate company worth about 10.6 billion crowns a year. One of Hartenberg’s own Prague projects, according to the opposition Green Party, matches exactly the size threshold the bill exempts from appeal. The European Commission is now looking into the arrangement as a possible conflict of interest.

The appeals process is another key part of the bill where critics focus the hardest. As Eva Tylová, a former deputy environment minister and Prague city councillor, explains, a rejected objection can currently be escalated to a higher administrative authority. For the largest projects, the bill removes that step entirely; the only option left is a lawsuit, which the objecting citizen must pay for. Tylova calls the loss of that appeal step “one of the worst things, from the point of view of democracy.”

But the bill as it stands now might not go far. Legal challenges are on the horizon, as people debate in what way the Constitutional Court will intervene. Ondřej expects the Court to eventually strike down at least parts of the law, including the seven-month archaeological cap, for conflicting with the Aarhus Convention, an international treaty that guarantees the public and environmental groups a say before land is developed.

He is not alone in that expectation: Senator Jan Sobotka, of the opposition STAN party, has said he is building support among Senate colleagues for a Constitutional Court challenge if the bill survives a Senate rejection and returns from the Chamber unchanged.

None of the bill’s critics oppose fixing the permitting system, only this version of the fix. Upon asking what fixes would be more preferable, Veronika Kovářová, an architect and opposition MP, says she would require developers to include a share of affordable units, something the current version drops entirely. Machuta wants enforceable deadlines instead: a real penalty for people who file repeated, unsuccessful appeals just to stall a project. Ondřej points to Vienna, where the city itself builds and owns a much larger share of the housing stock than Prague does, then rents it out specifically to workers the city needs, teachers, police officers, at below-market rates.

Right next door, Poland tried the experiment but failed. A very similar law was passed in 2018, letting developers bypass local zoning to speed up housing construction. It reversed course this year after a government-commissioned study found the law had barely moved affordability while damaging local planning. Warsaw’s own fast-track authority had to suspend new applications after being overwhelmed by demand, according to Warsaw Business Journal.

Ondřej is still deciding what he’ll do. Prague’s population passed 1.4 million this year, growing by roughly 27,000 people, mostly through migration, according to the Czech Statistical Office. He is one of the ones who might leave.