Legal challenges in ensuring regular maintenance and repairs of owner‐occupied apartment blocks
Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to compare different apartment ownership systems and analyze how to enhance the regular maintenance and repair of owner‐occupied apartment buildings. The dwellings themselves are often in fairly good condition, but the common parts (e.g. walls, roofs, stairwells, and technical installations) are often poorly maintained.Design/methodology/approach – Apartment ownership systems in ten European countries (Austria, England, Finland, France, Germany, The Netherlands, Norway, Spain, Sweden and Switzerland) are analyzed, along with Canada, China, Russia, and the USA, and some of the main findings from each country are presented. The material studied is primary legal sources together with the relevant literature.Findings – It seems that there are severe obstacles in the legislation of many countries. Some of these obstacles are: the non‐existence of a proper decision‐making body (e.g. homeowners' association); the wide use of a qualified majority, or even the use of consensu...
Effect of Residents’ Participation in Management Works on Satisfaction in Multi-Storey Housing
Abstract Multi-storey housing projects are a new orientation in Gaza, Palestine resulting from the increase of residents and limitation and high prices of lands. Residents’ participation is essential for implementing maintenance works to prolong the housing structures’ life and to delay the need for new structure redevelopment. Five levels of participation are used in this study begin with a leader who defines objectives and tasks and ends with a nonparticipant resident. This paper aims to investigate the effect of residents’ participation in management and maintenance works on residents’ satisfaction in new multi-storey housing projects in Gaza, Palestine. The data were obtained from random samples of an 80-resident pilot study. The result of the analysis shows a significant relation between the level of the residents’ participation and their satisfaction. Accordingly, recommendations for responsible authorities are to monitor and follow up on the ability of residents to acclimatize.
The Progress and Failure of Comparative Law in the Second Half of the Twentieth Century
The 50th anniversary of the American Journal of Comparative Law, founded at the University of Michigan by Hessel Yntema in 1952, is an appropriate occasion to look back at the development of our discipline, though mainly for reasons that reach beyond this anniversary itself. Most importantly, it was around the time of the American Journal's beginnings five decades ago that comparative law as we know it today began to take shape. In the United States, the early 1950s were the birth-hour of the discipline as a clearly identifiable subject. They were marked not only by the foundation of the Journal but also by the publication of Rudolf Schlesinger^ seminal casebook,1 soon to be followed by Arthur von Mehren's competitor volume2 and by a general rise of interest in comparative and international studies. In Europe, where comparative law was already more broadly established, the field experienced a new start as well after the devastation of the war. Witness, for example, Harold Gutteridge's now classic introduction;3 the emergence of new leaders redefining the field, such as Rene David in France,4 Gino Goria in Italy,5 and