In 2023, housing had barely made the record of the highest 10 priorities for mayors surveyed by the community. Its present standing as one of many main issues for the bloc’s native leaders underscores the impression of the house affordability disaster on cities throughout the continent right this moment.
In lots of Europe’s city facilities, mayors are going through mass protests in opposition to rising rental and residential costs. In response, they’ve tried measures like hire caps, banned vacationer leases or launched main constructing initiatives. However these collaborating within the survey mentioned they desperately want EU steerage to provide you with a coordinated response to the disaster.
Though housing is just not, formally, an EU competence, European Fee President Ursula von der Leyen vowed to sort out the problem final yr, and created the function of the bloc’s first devoted Housing Commissioner, who’s tasked with presenting a plan to extend Europe’s reasonably priced housing inventory in 2026. For the primary time ever, the European Parliament now additionally has a Housing Committee, which is analyzing how prices will be lowered throughout the bloc.
The surveyed mayors have loads of recommendations for a way this might be accomplished. Greater than half say extra EU cash ought to be allotted for home-building by way of packages just like the signature Cohesion Coverage, which was lately tweaked to permit member international locations to make use of as much as €15 billion in regional funds to handle the disaster.
Native leaders are additionally calling for a revision of competitors and state support guidelines, in order that extra public money will be allotted to constructing social and reasonably priced housing. And so they’re asking for complete EU laws to rein within the short-term leases they are saying are exacerbating the issue.
Belief points
The mayors polled by Eurocities say funds constraints stay a significant impediment to delivering on their priorities.
