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Publish date: February 20, 2024
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To assess the state of the housing situation of a particular area (be it a country or a city), several metrics can be considered to understand the availability, affordability, quality, and accessibility of housing. Commonly used metrics include:
The situation in the EU
1. Housing affordability
In the EU in 2021, 10.4 % of the population in cities lived in a household where total housing costs represented more than 40 % of disposable income. In 2022, the housing cost overburden rate amounted to 8.7 % for the whole EU population [1].
In 2021, on average 18.9 % of disposable income of people in the EU was dedicated to housing costs [2]. For people having a disposable income of below 60 % of the national median income, i.e. people who could be considered as at risk of poverty, the share of housing in disposable income was 37.7 % on average [2]. All the while residential property prices and rents have been continuously rising – between 2010 and the second quarter of 2023, house prices increased by 46% and rents by 21% [3].
2. Housing availability
The average number of dwellings per thousand inhabitants in EU in 2020 was 495 [4]. In the same year, the vacancy rate reached almost 40% in some EU countries [5]. Simultaneously, European office vacancy rates increased by an average of 60 bps from 7.7% to 8.3% during the past twelve months [6]. This indicates that the real number of unoccupied buildings is even greater than previously identified, as the existing data on vacancy rate only considers buildings dedicated for housing and overlooks the number of empty buildings with different assigned purposes. Therefore, in order to address the housing crisis, there is a need to consider the sufficiency approach, which includes repurposing empty buildings, promoting shared spaces, just space allocation and using existing empty (renovated) buildings more efficiently.
3. Housing tenure: Renting and owning
Eurostat’s numbers show that 69.1% of the EU population lived in owner-occupied dwellings, while 30.9% resided in rented accommodation [7]. Another important consideration in this respect is social rental housing, which refers to the stock of residential rental accommodation provided at submarket prices which is allocated according to specific rules rather than market mechanism. The houses and flats are owned by local government or by other organisations that do not make a profit out of it, and that are rented to people with low income. Social housing accounts on average for 7% of the total housing stock in the OECD but there is still a huge unmet demand for social housing in Europe [8].
4. Housing quality
In 2022, 16.8 % of the EU population lived in an overcrowded household, with some countries having the overcrowding rate higher than 40% [7].
In 2022 9.3 % of the EU population could not afford to keep their home adequately warm, a percentage which had rose by 2.4 percentage points from 2021 [7]. Whether it is possible to keep a home adequately warm depends on several factors, including the condition of the building, the temperatures outside and the cost of energy. The latter links back to energy efficiency, as the poorer is the energy efficiency of a building the more energy (and money) will go to waste for the consumers.
85% of EU buildings were built before 2000 and amongst those, 75% have a poor energy performance [9]. Acting on the energy efficiency of buildings is therefore key to saving energy and achieving a zero-emission and fully decarbonised building stock by 2050. However, in 2017, over 97% of the building stock needed to be upgraded to comply with the 2050 decarbonisation goal of the European Union [10].
In upcoming publications, we will review the latest EU legislation and how it interplays with these factors.
References:
[1] Eurostat. 2020. Housing in Europe. European Commission. Accessed on the 19th of February 2024. Available at Housing-DigitalPublication-2020_en.pdf (europa.eu)Other sources that have informed this article:
Housing Europe. 2023. The state of housing in Europe 2023. Accessed 13th of February 2024. Available at https://www.stateofhousing.eu/The_State_of_Housing_in_Europe_2023.pdf
Eurocities. 2020. Access to affordable and social housing and support to homeless people. Eurocities. Accessed 15th of February 2024. Available at Housing and homelessness – Eurocities
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