Everyone deserves a place to call home.

Our Greens/EFA top 5 priorities on housing

Everyone deserves a place to call home. But people across Europe are faced with increasingly unaffordable rents, eye-watering house prices, and low quality housing. More than 1 million people are homeless, and an estimated 125 million people are afraid to turn on the heating because they might not be able to pay their energy bills.

Against this backdrop the European Union has appointed a Housing Commissioner and the European Parliament has put in place a special committee focused on the housing crisis.

But are they able to deliver to the needs of the European citizens?

It is our job as policy makers to work hard to make sure people have a good and affordable place to live with access to essential services. We want Europe to build towards a solution.

Here are the five priorities we want to work on:

1. Increasing public investment in decent, sustainable and affordable housing

Access to an affordable and decent home is a human right and it is essential to living a good life. We need to increase public investment in decent, sustainable and affordable 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. We need to prioritise funding renovations for marginalised communities.

3. Ending homelessness by 2030

Homelessness is not a fact of life. We know how to solve it, so we need to live up to the objective of ending the most extreme and continuously increasing form of poverty.

4. Stop the negative impact of short-term rentals

The housing crisis in Europe has been worsened by short-term holiday rental platforms like Airbnb and Booking.com. Private investor profit should not come before the goal of ensuring that everyone has long-term access to decent, sustainable and affordable housing.

5. Tackle housing speculation

Homes are for people, not for profit. Tax breaks for second homes or buy-to-let properties exacerbate inequality and limit housing availability for those in need.

This initiative is supported by:

Jaume Asens 🇪🇸, Rasmus Andresen 🇩🇪, Gordan Bosanac 🇭🇷, Vicent Marzà 🇪🇸, Maria Ohisalo 🇫🇮, Vladimir Prebilič 🇸🇮, Diana Riba i Giner 🇪🇸, Nela Riehl 🇩🇪, Mounir Satouri 🇫🇷, Benedetta Scuderi 🇮🇹, Kim van Sparrentak 🇳🇱, Marie Toussaint 🇫🇷

Greens/EFA Members of the European Parliament

📷 Photo by Ján Jakub Naništa on Unsplash