Have you ever wondered where the bus driver who takes you to work every day lives? Or the teacher who educates your children at school? Where does the nurse who treated you in the middle of the night at the emergency department live? Probably far away: in another area, because rent near the hospital consumes half of their salary; or in another municipality, because there are no affordable homes available and at a price within reach an hour from the school.
It is contradictory, but the essential workers who help sustain the city are the ones who cannot afford to live in it because, economically speaking, they are effectively barred.
“We are facing the first serious attempt by the Union’s institutions to answer the question that matters most to European citizens”
We are talking about the real situation of millions of Europeans who have, for years, run up against the housing wall when trying to progress in their life plans. For them, the European Parliament has just approved for the first time in its history a report dedicated specifically to this problem.
Today, we are facing the first serious attempt by the Union’s institutions to answer the question that concerns European citizens the most according to all polls: why can’t I find a home that I can afford without sacrificing my entire well-being?
The answer is uncomfortable for those who have spent years rowing in the opposite direction: Europe does not have a problem with prices; it has a problem with homes, or rather with their absence.
For decades, the political debate about housing has revolved around prices, and consequently the solutions too. Think about it: rents rise, so we must cap them; mortgages become costlier, so we must regulate banks; short-term tourist lets proliferate, so we must restrict them.
Always the same logic, always the same instrument, and always the same result: prices keep rising and homes continue to be scarce. Europe has spent decades imposing caps on prices instead of building caps to slow prices.
The numbers are telling and demonstrate that regulatory patches by various governments have worsened the crisis. Since 2010, purchase prices have risen by 60% in the European Union and rents by almost 30%, while residential building permits have fallen by more than 20% and the overall deficit is estimated at ten million homes.
Ten million homes we need now and do not exist.
“While the debate points to investors and large holders, the real brake is ignored in the chambers: the slow State”
No price regulation imposed in recent years has produced a single one of those homes and no cap on rents has built a building. The report, approved by a broad right-to-left majority, assumes that it is not prices that fail, but a shortage of housing.
And there is only one way for there to be fewer missing homes: build them.
The problem is that building in Europe has become a hurdle race in which the referee is the very administration. While the debate points to investors and large holders, the true brake is ignored in the stands: the Slow State.
We are not talking about weeks or months. A construction project in Europe can take ten years to complete all the procedures required to start lifting a building. Put it in context: in that time a child learns to read, finishes primary school and is about to enter secondary school, but the housing their family needed when they were born still does not exist. Moreover, each year of waiting carries a real financial cost that the developer inevitably passes on to the final price.
Bureaucracy is not a minor technical problem: it is a silent lever of price increases spread across dozens of counters, reports and appeals that no one resolves. That is why the report proposes that construction permits be granted within a maximum of sixty days, the same urgency we apply to defense projects. Where the administration does not resolve on time, silence is interpreted as approval.
“Every home that disappears from the rental market due to fear of legal insecurity is one less home for those who need it”
To that problem we add European rules which, despite their good intentions, have ended up worsening the shortage. The Energy Performance of Buildings Directive, for example, has imposed technical requirements that raise construction costs to the point of making viable projects unaffordable. We do not abandon sustainability, but the policies we design cannot turn energy efficiency into a luxury that makes what it seeks to improve more expensive.
And then there is legal certainty, or rather its absence. When a property owner has no reasonable guarantees of recovering their home if something goes wrong, their rational response is not to rent and they withdraw the property from the market.
Illegal occupancy is not only a public-order issue; it is a direct cause of shortage that hits hardest those who most need a home. Every home that disappears from the rental market due to fear of legal insecurity is one less home for those who need it.
It is essential to remember that nearly 70% of the rental stock in Europe belongs to small landlords—families renting a second flat or individuals investing their savings in real estate. Without their trust in the system, the market tightens and, inevitably, shortage increases, prices rise and the most vulnerable are left out.
A Generation That Cannot Wait
While all this unfolds, an entire generation bears the cost. 49.1% of European youths aged 18 to 34 still live with their parents; in Spain, the average age of leaving home has risen to 30, and young people must devote 92% of their salary to paying rent on their own, according to the Emancipation Observatory of the Youth Council.
It is unfairly said that young people simply delay their independence in exchange for travel or platform subscriptions. Nothing could be further from the truth. When a generation that has studied, works, and met all society’s expectations cannot access decent housing, it loses not only a roof but also faith that the system has something to offer and it surrenders to political apathy, the fertile ground for those on both the left and the right who do not seek to resolve the crisis because they simply feed off it politically.
Housing has ceased to be merely a social or economic policy and has become the principal democratic policy of this legislature.
Europe has concrete tools to act and this report points them out. Let us be clear: we can remove regulatory barriers that hinder construction; we can reform the VAT Directive to apply super-reduced rates of between 2% and 5% to the construction and rehabilitation of affordable housing; we can mobilize the European Investment Bank and better use existing European funds to finance projects that the private market would not undertake alone; we can promote industrialization, innovation and digitalization of the sector, and attract the talent needed to build faster and cheaper; and we can generate comparable data across countries to design evidence-based policies rather than relying on instincts.
“Europe can and must act as a catalyst by being able to open pathways, mobilize resources and give certainty to those who build”
Of course, housing competencies will remain at national, regional and local levelsbecause there is no single European real estate market: there are twenty-seven markets with very different realities, constraints and needs. But Europe can and must act as a catalyst by being able to open pathways, mobilize resources and give certainty to those who build.
For far too long, European governments have preferred to manage scarcity rather than solve it. It is the policy of the person who makes you wait in line rather than opening more service windows, and a policy of resignation that accepts the problem as given and merely manages it.
There is another way. The answer to scarcity is not to regulate it, but to eliminate it, and Europe finally has the instruments and the political will to do so.
The bus driver, the teacher, the nurse at 3 a.m. Nobody wants more regulation or more promises: they want a home. Now it is time to give it to them, now it is time to build.
