The third large die-off of Athens houses

"What can I say, son? It looks like people just hate the soil," says Mrs Ourania as she sweeps the yard at what is one of the last surviving detached houses in the Athens suburb of Nea Smyrni. I ask how she feels about the transformation of her tiny street, which has seen apartment blocks replace the older houses - most pre-war - with increasing rapidity in the past couple of years, and she says it reminds her of the 1990s. "We lost hundreds of houses with small gardens and yards; it was madness," she says of the big construction boom of that era.

Nea Smyrni, like fellow suburbs Dafni, Elliniko, Alimos, Voula and Glyfada, but also Halandri, Psychiko and Papagou further north, are right on the front line of what may be called the third wave of Athens' suburban expansion.

The first big urbanization boom took place in the 1970s - when thousands of houses and their plots...