European Housing Crisis Response Plan

Europe is in a housing crisis: people across the continent are faced with increasingly unaffordable rents, eye-watering house prices, serious supply challenges and poorly insulated rundown housing.

An estimated 125 million people are living in energy poverty and approximately 900,000 people are sleeping rough or in shelters every night. Meanwhile, private investors are making huge money from betting on our housing markets, energy companies are making unprecedented profit from the energy crisis, and neighbourhoods are being transformed into holiday rental cities. Enough is enough.

Rising rents and energy costs are not an inevitable reality. Europe has the tools and resources to make sure that everyone can have a safe, decent and affordable home. The time to act is now.

We are calling for a European Housing Crisis Response Plan and a Commissioner responsible for the right to housing, to deliver this. We have brought this call to all 27 EU housing ministers, and to the European Commission.

This plan addresses five priority areas:

1. Increasing public investment into affordable and social housing: Access to an affordable and decent home is a human right and it is essential to living a good life. We need to ncrease public investment in this area. Rules that act as barriers to this investment, like EU state aid rules, should be changed. The EU should establish a Housing Fund under the next multiannual budget (MFF) from 2027 with dedicated funds to support public investment in affordable and social housing.

2. Boosting renovation and construction: The people most impacted by rising energy bills are those with the lowest incomes and living in the buildings that are wasting the most energy. The EU Housing Fund should help to bring energy bills down by prioritising funding renovations for vulnerable groups, introducing protections against eviciction through renovation (so-called ‘renovictions’), and addressing the rising costs of construction materials.

3. Ending homelessness by 2030: Homelessness is not a fact of life. Member States agreed to end homelessness by 2030, and now they must implement measures to end this most extreme form of poverty. They must reinforce the European Platform on Combatting Homelessness with its own budget and renewed ambition, and ensure that health, equality, migration and poverty policies contribute to ending homelessness.

4. Stricter oversight of short-term rentals: The housing crisis in Europe has been worsened by short-term holiday rental platforms like Airbnb. Private investor profitshould not come before the goal of ensuring that everyone has long-term access to decent,affordable housing. Governments and cities should be able to put in place limits and bans where needed, and the European Commission should support the proportionate measures they introduce. New EU short-term rental rules should be swiftly implemented so that local authorities have the information they need to address this issue.

5. Tackle housing speculation: Homes are for people, not for profit. We must take action at a European level to counter speculation by investment funds, increase transparency of real-estate transactions, and provide smart legislation on banking, capital markets, state aid, budget, taxes, and mortgages to support this goal. The EU must help end financialisation, not enable it.

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This European Housing Crisis Response Plan is supported by:

Ciaran Cuffe, Kim van Sparrentak, Tineke Strik, Bas Eickhout, Mounir Satouri, Kira Peter-Hansen, Rosa D'Amato, Thomas Waitz, Ignazio Corrao, Nicolae Stefanuta, Francisco Guerreiro, Sara Matthieu, Grace O'Sullivan, David Cormand, Saskia Bricmont, Marie Toussaint, Rasmus Andersen, Alexandra Geese, Jordi Solé, Diana Riba i Gener, Petros Kokkalis, Monika Vana, Michael Bloss, Jutta Paulus, Katrin Langensiepen, Francois Alfonsi, Benoît Biteau, Damien Carême, Gwendoline Delbos-Corfield, Karima Delli, Claude Gruffart, Caroline Roose, François Thiollet, Malte Gallee, Terry Reintke, Phillipe Lamberts

Greens/EFA Members of the European Parliament

Download the European Housing Crisis Response Plan as pdf

📷 Photo by Ján Jakub Naništa on Unsplash

European Housing Crisis Response Plan

This plan addresses five priority areas:

Show your support and stay informed!

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This European Housing Crisis Response Plan is supported by:

The Greens/EFA in the European Parliament