For more than a year, the Special Committee to address the housing crisis in the European Union has been meeting. In today’s session, for the first time, robust facts on housing developments took center stage. It became clear that, despite an EU-wide increase of around 30 million housing units since 2010, demand continues to rise, among other reasons due to demographic change and a growing number of households. At the same time, EU institutions acknowledged that reliable data is lacking on key questions, such as the actual number of vacant homes.
Volker Schnurrbusch, a Member of the European Parliament for the ESN Group and a substitute member of the HOUS committee, comments:
“The last meeting laid bare, without any gloss, how detached from reality the EU’s housing policy has become. Brussels wants to tackle the housing crisis, yet it does not even know how many homes are actually standing empty and would truly be available.
That is political self-deception. Instead of addressing the causes of the crisis, uncontrolled migration, exploding energy prices, and ever more regulations for builders, landlords, and tenants, left-wing groups retreat into ideological fantasies of coercive measures, rent caps, and holiday-home quotas. Yet even their own data shows that short-term rentals are not the problem, and many supposedly ‘empty’ homes are either only used temporarily or not marketable at all. Making policy without facts only makes the crisis worse. This special committee mainly delivers one thing: more talk instead of more homes, another reason to finally dissolve it.”
