Housing crisis, 15 European mayors call on Brussels for 300 billion per year housing fund

Brussels – A €300 billion per year fund is needed to resolve Europe’s increasingly dramatic housing crisis. Mayors of 15 European metropolises and big cities are knocking on Brussels’ door with a hefty bill to pay: “Our cities need about €80 billion until 2030,” said Roberto Gualtieri, first citizen of Rome, who leads the alliance along with his Barcelona counterpart, Jaume Collboni.

Receiving them in the EU capital were the Commission’s executive vice-president, Teresa Ribera, and the commissioner in charge of drafting the EU housing plan, Denmark’s Dan Jørgensen. The 15 also met with the executive vice president in charge of Cohesion, Raffaele Fitto. The plan promised by Ursula von der Leyen (particularly to the Socialist family that supported her re-election), initially scheduled for 2025, was rescheduled to next year. In the meantime, in addition to Jørgensen, MEPs of the special committee for the Housing Crisis set up ad hoc in the European Parliament, led by Dem Irene Tinagli, are hard at work. And, indeed, local authorities at the forefront of addressing the emergency that, according to Collboni, is “currently the main source of inequality in European cities.”

The alliance of first citizens, formed on 20 February with 12 members, now consists of the mayors of Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Bologna, Budapest, Florence, Ghent, Lyon, Leipzig, Lisbon, Milan, Paris, Rome, Warsaw, and Zagreb. Fifteen cities that are home to some 18 million European citizens and in which “in the last 10 years housing prices have increased by 78 per cent,” Collboni reported.

The mayor of Barcelona explained that the figure of 300 billion a year corresponds to the financing gap gripping cities identified by the European Investment Bank. The mayors have outlined short-, medium- and long-term measures to the European Commission. There is a need for “an emergency funding stream to enable cities to rapidly develop affordable social housing projects,” is Roberto Gualtieri’s appeal. But resources are needed for the most vulnerable as well as for young people, students, and the middle class.

Three interventions listed by the mayor of Rome are the revision of state aid rules “to allow for more public investment” and the possibility of activation of the national safeguard clause of the Stability and Growth Pact for housing projects. “Currently, it has been requested by 16 member states for defence spending; it should be extended for housing spending as well,” stressed the mayor of Rome. In addition, the 15 local governments suggest the establishment of “an indicator of housing market stress” and insist on the full implementation of the European regulations imposing data-sharing obligations on short rental platforms.

“We believe that in addition to the reallocation of Cohesion resources, unused resources from the Next Generation EU program should also be allocated to this fund” for housing, Gualtieri added.

The shopping list presented by the mayors is long and ambitious. “Skilled contributions, concrete advice, almost demands,” Jørgensen called them. He will have to manage such requests and dovetail them with Brussels’s other priorities for the coming years. “It is too early to say how many of them we will be able to accomplish,” the Danish socialist cautioned, assuring, however, that solving the housing crisis “is a key priority for this Commission,” because “it is unacceptable” that “people with normal but very important jobs for society, such as policemen, nurses or teachers, cannot afford to live in the cities they serve.”