Public Building Maintenance and Rehabilitation

The public buildings such as high schools, kindergartens, nurseries, universities, dormitories and buildings in their service used by the general public are valuable assets, normally built with substantial investment in a long period of time. These assets are not always managed with the care that they require. As a result, depreciation and destruction in time reducing the ability of these buildings to fulfil their functions by reducing the time of use, durability. General usage costs will also be higher because of the buildings require costly renovations or replacements of materials frequently than might be necessary if they are maintained regularly. Limited funds are often considered as a reason for inadequate maintenance. Enough funds are needed, but very good results can be achieved with very limited budgets, if maintenance work is done in a systematic way with well-defined priorities. The paper tries to answer the question if the maintenance and rehabilitation of the existing public buildings is the most effective way for the improvement of their contemporary standards. In the first part after the background a theoretical description of the building performance management, maintenance and rehabilitation issue. A brief description of the building deterioration and depreciation is done. In the second part the performance the public buildings situation in Albania is given throw analyses of a big number of key studies. Analyses of the cons and pros of rehabilitation are followed by the analyses of costs and the feasibility. In the end is given the answer to the question: to rehabilitate or build.