Housing crisis, local authorities and EU Parliament call for more funds from the Commission

Brussels – Local authorities want a European plan against the housing crisis. The Committee of the Regions (CoR), meeting in plenary session at the EU Parliament in Brussels, lobbies the European Commission and calls for more resources for social housing to be released immediately, but also, structurally, through the revision of the multi-year EU budget.

The message addressed today (May 14) to the EU executive by the CoR is clear: there is a need for Brussels to take charge of guaranteeing “quality affordable housing” for citizens by providing local levels of government with the necessary support. On the one hand, local authorities say, a housing priority should be included in the next multi-year budget, which will cover the period 2028–2034 and whose negotiations will open in the second part of this year. On the other hand, adequate resources must be found immediately to cope with the emergency today.

The CoR opinion, drafted by Barcelona Mayor Jaume Collboni Cuadrado, urges the EU executive to present an ambitious and very concrete action plan to work together with regions, provinces, and municipalities in tackling the housing crisis gripping the Old Continent (average increases of 48 per cent in house prices and 22 per cent in rental costs between 2010 and 2023). “Housing access has become the main factor of inequality in Europe,” he points out.

By what means? It is not enough to redirect cohesion funds for this purpose, say local governments, but new and abundant resources are needed to address what is a real social emergency throughout the Twenty-Seven. The priority is to increase the supply of housing.

Chancelleries are encouraged “to reallocate unclaimed resources from their respective NRRPs toward financial instruments aimed at the “construction of affordable housing units in partnership with local authorities,” reads the opinion adopted by the CoR. Another goal is to mobilise private funds in cooperation with the European Investment Bank (EIB) and similar institutions at the national and regional levels.

Collboni presented his report to the special committee of the EU Parliament dedicated precisely to Housing (HOUS), chaired by Dem Irene Tinagli. For the MEP, it is necessary “to look at the short term but also and above all at the medium and long term” and to develop a strategy that brings into play “not only financial resources but also regulatory and legislative resources.”

Housing, she explains, is “an affordability crisis that is becoming truly worrisome because it no longer impacts only the traditionally most fragile and most in need of aid but more and more the middle class who can no longer live in the cities where they work, where they study.” But municipalities and territories do not have the tools to respond.

Mayor of Rome Roberto Gualtieri, a member of the CoR, is also along the same lines. “A real emergency that affects both social cohesion and labour mobility,” he observes, suggesting that additional money obtained (for example) from auction rebates be “given to municipalities that decide to buy social housing on the market, because you can build it, but you can also buy it, perhaps with European co-financing.” At stake, he warns, is the European social model itself.

Also in agreement is the first citizen of Milan, Beppe Sala, who is pushing for the funds left unused by central governments to be given to municipalities, which, he affirms, “have committed 98 per cent of the NRRP funds” precisely to buy social housing on the market. Sala specified that a request to this effect has already been made to the Commission’s executive vice president in charge of Cohesion, Raffaele Fitto.

The CoR opinion also talks about “addressing the existing bottlenecks in EU regulations that fuel speculation in the housing markets,” as well as calls for the establishment of a registry for transparency in the housing sector, and regulation of rents at the local level. The Berlaymont plans to present a housing plan in early 2026.