Law 3741/1929 established horizontal ownership, allowing one plot to be split into separately owned flats over a compulsory co-ownership of the land and common parts. Under antiparochi a landowner handed the plot to a small contractor, who financed and built a polykatoikia and paid the owner in finished flats rather than cash. The 1955 General Building Regulation raised permissible plot exploitation and fixed the building coefficient, making the exchange profitable on ordinary small urban lots. No bank credit, public land assembly or state subsidy was needed, and the transaction was almost untaxed for the landowner, so the city was rebuilt through thousands of one-off private deals, plot by plot. Roughly nine in ten Athenian polykatoikies were produced this way.
Antiparochi rebuilt postwar Athens and Thessaloniki through private micro-development — the mirror image of the Northern European welfare-state model of public land, mortgage finance and master planning. It delivered a dense, owner-occupied, socially mixed central city at high speed, at the cost of the pre-war fabric, courtyards and almost all open space.
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