The EU report highlights the critical issue of unaffordable housing, leading to homelessness and financial strain. It emphasizes the importance of housing support, such as social housing and rent subsidies, in enhancing resilience. Policymakers must address inequalities in housing policies and consider vulnerable groups. Successful Housing First initiatives should be scaled up, and funds for energy efficiency improvements must target low-income households to mitigate future energy costs and maintain adequate living conditions.
2023
Abstract of the EU Report:
Unaffordable housing is a matter of great concern in the EU. It leads to homelessness, housing insecurity, financial strain and inadequate housing. It also prevents young people from leaving their family home. These problems affect people’s health and well-being, embody unequal living conditions and opportunities, and result in healthcare costs, reduced productivity and environmental damage. Private tenants have faced particularly large housing cost increases, and owners with mortgages are vulnerable to interest rate increases. In addition, many owners without mortgages, especially in post-communist and southern European countries, experience poverty and housing inadequacy. The cost-of-living crisis affects people in all tenancies. Social housing and rent subsidies support many, but capacity differs across and within countries, and these measures exclude certain groups in vulnerable situations and fail to reach everyone who is entitled to them. Three quarters of Member States have Housing First initiatives – providing housing for homeless people – but these mostly operate on a small scale. This report maps housing problems in the EU and the policies that address them, drawing on Eurofound’s Living, working and COVID-19 e-survey, European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions and input from the Network of Eurofound Correspondents.
Key findings
- Housing support, such as social housing and rent subsidies, is contributing to greater resilience and social protection for many people in the EU. It is crucial that policymakers consider the contribution of such support when shaping benefit reforms as housing benefits can provide immediate protection in emerging crises when determined by real housing costs, including energy costs and income.
- It is critical that housing policies aimed at improving housing affordability do not inadvertently exacerbate inequalities. Policies to increase housing affordability can have complex impacts that may not always improve access to housing and enhance quality of life. For example, housing benefits may drive up rent and purchase prices, and ownership support often benefits people with higher income more than those with lower incomes, often encouraging borrowers to take on mortgages they cannot pay back.
- It is essential for policymakers to consider groups in vulnerable situations in all tenures. For example, findings show that 46% of private rental market tenants feel at risk of leaving their home in the next three months because they can no longer afford it and in most of the countries where over half the population are homeowners without a mortgage, around one quarter are still at risk of poverty.
- Housing First policies are largely successful in keeping people out of homelessness and need to be scaled up across the EU. It is critical that such housing be independent, stable and truly unconditional on engagement with support services to ensure that access to housing is guaranteed.
- Funds to improve the energy efficiency of homes need to reach low-income groups, protecting them from future energy price increases. Findings show that 28% of people in the EU anticipated facing difficulties paying utility bills and this jumped to 36% for social tenants and homeowners without a mortgage in the bottom half of the income distribution – where many cannot maintain their homes at adequate temperature – underlining how current and future needs of inhabitants must be considered when improving housing adequacy.