Common Housing Futures: Reviewing the European Affordable Housing Plan

In the last forty years, the ways people relate to their homes have changed significantly. It has become much harder to afford one, and even if you can, it is likely that you will be faced with punishingly high rent or monthly mortgage payments—coupled with the inflation already eating away at your income. Statistically, however, European households are becoming wealthier year after year. The large majority of this household wealth is held in the market value of a primary home, which has seen a steady growth in value since the late 1970s and the start of the global neoliberal transformation. In that period, the value growth of capital stock (mostly housing) outpaced income growth, meaning that your home, on average, makes more money than you.1  

The increase in value of a primary home has become a feature of individual stability that substituted for what was previously, at least in Europe, provided by a pension. Legal geographer Joanna Kusiak claims that for any political change to work relating to housing, it must become emotionally legitimate.2 Transforming the nature of home from shelter to financial security asset subsumed an intrinsic human need for permanence into the capital of an ever-striving entrepreneurial subject. This has successfully conflated homeownership with wealth accumulation and created a perception of shared interests between homeowners and landlords.3 Thus, the commodity form of a home is emotionally legitimized first as a feature of desired family stability, and second as a good market investment. This is helped by deregulating and stripping away tenants’ rights, turning renters into co-producers of their landlords’ rising passive income.4  

This conflation of interests and the blurring of differences between a home and a financial asset was in large part a consequence of what Raquel Rolnik calls the “privatization tornado” that occurred at the turn of the century, when privatization was a condition for receiving adjustment loans for the so-called “developing” countries and a collateral of the neoliberal austerity policies in the “developed” ones.5 This made it structurally and politically difficult to create a future vision of a housing system that goes beyond exploitation and individualized interests. Supranational institutions such as the World Bank (WB), International Monetary Fund (IMF), and the institutions of the European Union (EU) have therefore played a pivotal role in globalizing the idea of home as an asset and housing as an individual, rather than a social responsibility. 

Rolnik underlines how supranational documents, such as the 1993 World Bank paper Housing: Enabling Markets to Work, represent the neoliberal manifesto that has served as the framework for national policies around the world to facilitate market expansion into every aspect of housing relations.6 The logic was relatively simple: supply-side public intervention into housing does not work, therefore housing should be provided by the market. This resulted in privatizing existing public housing; phasing out public investment in housing supply (object subsidies); favoring demand-side public investment in the form of grants and subsidies to individual households (subject subsidies); socializing credit by opening the mortgage market to low- and middle-income consumers; and favoring a “dualist” housing system provision where public housing is reserved only for the most vulnerable. 

Contrary to the promises of the neoliberal manifesto, the market did not provide for us. Instead, it delivered a never-ending crisis. This prompted the EU Commission to take on the task of creating a pan-European housing strategy, which was released in 2025 as the European Affordable Housing Plan and was structured around four principal pillars: (1) boosting supply; (2) mobilizing investment; (3) enabling immediate support while driving reforms; and (4) supporting the most affected.7 The document begins with a claim that one of the main problems in Europe is a “mismatch between housing supply and demand.” This is not entirely true, however, as can be seen in the case of Spain, where, during the 1990s and early 2000s, the building sector produced a significantly higher number of housing units than there were new households. During this period, which Rolnik calls a “real estate orgy,” houses were often built in so-called “ghost towns.”8 So supply was not lacking, but it was correlated with the demand of the financial sector, rather than with the needs of those living and working in urban centers. The plan does acknowledge the urban characteristics of the crises, yet it immediately jumps to local-level urban planning solutions by proposing densification and land use change coupled with “cutting red tape” for building permits.

Considering the fact that all cities have a significant amount of vacancy—if not of housing, then of other building types—a bulk of supply could come from reusing already built-up areas. The plan addresses this potential in an indirect manner by suggesting that member states should restrain from demolition. The nature of vacancy in European cities substantially differs in its ownership and structural characteristics, and so should the solutions. While in Berlin, Frankfurt, or Vienna, housing vacancy is officially reported to be insubstantial (a disputed claim), there are many underused vacation homes in Southern European tourist cities, as well as speculative real estate (office) vacancies in Northern capitals. And in post-socialist cities such as Zagreb, much vacant housing is held in private, small-scale ownership scattered throughout different buildings, which makes calls for demolition restraint inapplicable. Dealing with housing vacancy in post-socialist cities requires facing the inheritance of privatization, while the rest of Europe needs to reckon with monopolization and the accumulation of property in order to reuse their built environment and prevent unnecessary demolition.  

We should also keep in mind that the previous forty years have contributed to the fact that the majority of housing is owned by individual households, and part of it by so-called “poor owners.” This means that the burden of maintenance of the majority of the built environment is individualized, and as the housing stock ages, many homes are in danger of becoming uninhabitable and/or their owners accruing maintenance debt—which is, to quote Harald Trapp, “nothing less than asset reduction, a part of property is sold.”9 This is in no way helped by the framework of the EU’s commitment to energy renovation, which not only allows placing the financial burden onto renters, but also relies on technology and product placement, rather than architectural design solutions that can offer more locally specific solutions.10 The consequences of energy retrofitting can be challenged by creating a framework that employs creative architectural design solutions instead of relying on particular products of the building industry. This is where architectural schools need to respond with their curricula: How to deal with our overbuilt environment by approaching governance, renovation, and/or reuse through (re)design that focuses on the permanency of a home? What if rather than boosting new construction as well as its speed—as is the credo in many EU countries—there was a “reuse-and re-communalize tornado”? According to Dubravka Sekulić, we should socialize maintenance costs by applying a logic of communal stewardship.11 Instead of public funds being used by landlords as a tool to hike the rent and/or financial institutions claiming part of property rights via debt, they could serve as instruments that require putting vacant apartments in use. This could be coupled with municipal responsibility for the maintenance cost of individually owned homes, and in return pooling individual private ownership into more communal structures that include tenant governance—proven and robust social and ownership structures that can resist crises, both financial and ecological. 

The second pillar of the plan, mobilizing investment, speaks to the biggest change that this plan supports: loosening the rules for public spending and mobilizing €43 billion for housing. Following the release of the plan, the EU established the Pan-European Investment Platform for Affordable and Sustainable Housing, whose task is, according to the plan, to “support collaboration between public authorities and private investors” with the goal of “attracting investment” and enabling public private partnerships (PPPs). However, the experience of the last several decades of urban development has taught us how problematic PPPs can be, which are, more often than not, clever ploys to siphon public money. But in fact, the language of the plan does not determine that the “private” side of the equation needs to be a profit-oriented market actor. Indeed, the plan supports the growth of the cooperative housing sector and other models of civic engagement such as community land trusts (CLT), which offers hope for the proliferation of public-civic partnerships instead. 

According to the plan, EU financial institutions such as the European Investment Bank (EIB) and European Bank for Reconstruction and Development (ERBD) are tasked with helping to direct investments. The success of these institutions should be measured by the ability to calibrate investment distribution equally in relation to regional differences. In some parts of Europe, like in the West and North, cooperative and other forms of social entrepreneurship are already present and are more prepared to take on investments. But it remains to be seen what happens within Central, East, and South-East regions, where for-profit market providers are the only currently existing option.12 In these regions, EIB investment is currently flowing towards a small number of public housing developments, as well as into private consulting fees. Investing into private consultancy seems to be a continuation of a neoliberal lack of confidence in local municipal structures and their ability to properly staff and organize their future housing provision operations, including the development of the non-profit sector. But if the operational structures of the public sector are not augmented with more staff and skill, there will be no capacity to organize such a complex system as affordable housing provision. 

The third pillar of the plan, enabling immediate support while driving reforms, is in many ways derivative of the previous pillars, but it does introduce actions directed at short-term rental platforms (like Airbnb).13 While dealing with these platforms on a European level is crucial for touristified cities, most housing scholars and organizers agree that the fastest and most effective way to provide immediate relief in housing-stressed areas is by instituting a rent cap.14 This is what has historically been done all over Europe in times of crises.15 After World War II, for instance, most of Europe instituted rent caps to a percentage of the pre-war price. More recently, Berlin’s rent cap enabled tenants to apply for their rent to be lowered, but this policy was challenged in Germany’s Federal Constitutional Court by center-right and right-wing members of German parliament who petitioned (same as some landlords) to overturn the state law. The law was overturned on the basis that it was “unconstitutional,” with the court ruling that rent caps fall under a federal, not a state jurisdiction—thus making it clear that profiting from private ownership is still the most powerful game in town. 

Another way to provide immediate support without time-consuming building or renovation is breaking up ownership monopolies. In 2021, the Berlin initiative Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen (DWE) successfully campaigned for a referendum based on Article 15 of the German Constitution, which enables the expropriation—or, more precisely, the socialization—of certain elements of the economy when deemed necessary in the public interest.16 The referendum asked Berlin residents whether they supported the expropriation of landlords owning more than 3,000 housing units. The referendum resulted in 59 percent approval, but other than the opposition party Die Linke, no significant political party was willing to put the decision of the referendum into effect. By omitting the issues of rent caps and property monopolies entirely, the plan makes it clear that tangible, large-scale, immediate support is not coming from the EU either. 

The last pillar of the plan, supporting the most affected, proposes legal and social assistance to vulnerable tenants and programs that target young and aging populations. In addition, it repeats a promise that the EU will end homelessness by 2030, which so far no one realistically believes will happen. But to its credit, the plan does pledge support for Housing First, a highly effective EU program that provides homes to unhoused people as a prerequisite for social reintegration. However, it is important to note that the language and content of the fourth pillar strongly indicates that the EU is maintaining its position that public investment in housing has to stay dualistic—meaning that access to public housing programs is granted only to a certain segment of the population. 

In 2008, in order to widen the scope of market competition when it comes to housing production, the European Commission integrated the public housing policy of member states into the regime of the Services of General Economic Interest (SGEI), which instituted a cap on public housing expenditure of member states to €15 million, except when it comes to housing for vulnerable groups. Urban sociologist and housing activist Andrej Holm cautions that such a dualistic approach to housing systems has already created a social segmentation that results in conflicting interests in society.17 The European Citizens Initiative Housing for All has lobbied since 2019 to exclude housing from SGEI debt caps and otherwise enable unpenalized public investment. The plan was, in fact, presented together with a revision of the SGEI, which kept its cap policy, but stipulated that public housing expenditure can include the low- and middle-income households, and not just the most disadvantaged ones. Widening the scope of public sector responsibility for housing does signal that the EU is, at least partially, reverting from the previous idea of market dogma. 

Looking back at the last hundred years of development of public housing systems in Europe, every distinctive period has its focus and carrier. The focus of housing transformations of the early and mid-twentieth century were the working and middle classes, while the carriers of those transformations were municipal administrations. The privatization tornado of the neoliberal turn focused on making a worker into an entrepreneurial subject and demoted public administration so that the market could become the carrier of the envisioned future. The market has delivered a never-ending crisis by conflating the security and permanence of a home with housing as a vehicle for profit accumulation. Unlike the 1993 World Bank neoliberal manifesto, the European Affordable Housing Plan is not structured as an exclusively top-down strategy, and has incorporated some grassroot demands. Yet it still does not take us out of the conflation of housing with profit accumulation and falls short of outlining new carriers and less unjust future development.

As architects, we can offer a sketch of a better housing future: (1) immediate help provided by rent caps and breaking housing monopolies; (2) sufficiently financed programs to provide permanent housing to people who have been unhoused; and (3) investment channels for municipalities to organize programs directing public funds toward the socialization of maintenance and (re)use of vacancy, with the horizon of transforming individualized ownership into collective governance and communal wealth. We are aware that this requires strong and sustainable collective structures that can challenge capital and build power similar to that of trade unions of the previous century. But in the absence of large-scale organized class solidarity, we can at least hope for incremental change moving us toward the horizon of reuse and re-communalization. Otherwise, we stand to face a kind of housing barbarism.