Presentation on social and political implications of housing shortages in Europe

‘Adequate Housing is a Human Right, not a privilege’, according to the United Nations Human Rights conventions.  Across many capital and large cities, house prices and residential rents have been increasing in recent years. This is the result of complex factors involving chronic shortages of housing stocks, strict planning regulations, continuous urbanisation, increasing gentrification, speculative property investment, shortages of construction workforce, and a reduction of affordable social housing, coupled with gradual ballooning of the private real estate sector. The EU’s official policy response is the recently published European Affordable Housing Plan, based on four pillars: boosting housing supply; mobilising public and private investment; enabling immediate support mechanisms; and protecting the most vulnerable groups by improving their access to housing. However, by framing housing shortages as a temporary imbalance that can be corrected by building more ‘affordable houses’, by treating housing as a commodity for ‘investment’ and by targeting very few sociodemographic groups (in this case, young people and homeless), the plan is overlooking the deep structural forces that have produced and continue reinforcing the current situation. 

Seraphim Alvanides discussed at the 2026 EUROGEO Conference evidence on the various factors leading to housing shortages, such as planning regulations restricting urban development, the older generations holding on to their family houses, the not-in-my-backyard (NIMBY) attitudes of certain socio-economic groups, the treatment of housing stocks as speculative investments and as retirement funds. Following a pan-European overview on spatial and social inequalities resulting from lack of adequate housing and how these factors are leading to social unrest and certain voting behaviours, the contribution concluded with a critical assessment of the EU’s policy response. Housing has always been (and remains) the responsibility of individual member states, and their local and regional governments. Nevertheless, the lack of affordable housing is becoming a socioeconomic and political emergency across the EU, threatening its own cohesion, as evidenced by the increasing housing costs and the public sentiment. Whether the EU’s Affordable Housing Plan is seriously adopted by the member states and implemented on the ground, given the vested interests at all levels, remains to be seen. Unfortunately, there is limited time for experimentation, as the electoral expansion of populist parties demonstrates in many EU regions and countries.

Acknowledgement: this EUROGEO conference contribution was partly inspired by discussions with TU Dortmund University’s MSc Raumplanung and MSc Spatial Planning students during the seminar ‘The social and political implications of housing shortages’.