A European Parliament hearing on the housing crisis has heard testimony about the scale of homelessness and the lack of affordable homes across the European Union, with one delegate describing a warehouse in Slovakia in which 100 people sleep side by side each night.
The hearing was convened as the housing and homelessness issue gains much higher traction at EU level.
During last month's summit in Brussels, leaders called on the European Commission to come forward with "an ambitious and comprehensive plan for affordable housing".
The commission is expected to adopt its Affordable Housing Plan next month, while an anti-poverty strategy that will focus heavily on homelessness is due to be published next year.
During her State of the European Union speech in September, commission President Ursula von der Leyen described the housing situation as a "social crisis", with house prices up and building permits down since 2015.
"It tears at Europe's social fabric. It weakens our cohesion. And it also threatens our competitiveness.
"Nurses, teachers, and firemen cannot afford to live where they serve. Students drop out because they cannot pay the rent. Young people delay starting families," she said.
According to an internal EU memo, house prices rose by 60.5% between 2015 and 2025.
"As a result, the proportion of household budgets devoted to housing has increased dramatically, especially in urban centres, which house a large part of the EU's population," the memo states.
The affordability gap has been exacerbated by the global pandemic, geopolitical instability, migration and the ongoing energy crisis, according to the memo.
The European Parliament’s committee on the housing crisis is finalising a report on the topic, with 1,600 amendments tabled.
Chief Executive of the homeless charity Depaul Ireland David Carroll - a co-organiser of the event - said: "The EU is beginning to realise that homelessness has potentially an impact on cohesion and communities and could lead to major difficulties going forward, so we are encouraged that the EU affordability plan is now taken both housing as well as homelessness and placed it on a central focus.
"How that then translates into national policy is another question."
He added: "We need the European affordable housing plan to reaffirm housing as a core principle of the European pillar of social rights.
"We need frameworks that move beyond short-term episodic responses and commit to long-term, right-based approaches and housing-led solutions that incorporate health, vocational, social protection and rehabilitative measures."
While the EU does not have explicit competence on housing, there is growing awareness that it has become an indispensable political issue, with the crisis increasingly featuring in - and polarising - European elections.
The European Commission created a Commissioner for Housing - Dan Jørgensen - for the first time last year, and he is steering it and member states towards a housing summit next year.
According to a research note by the European Parliament, the shortage has been exacerbated by structural bottlenecks.
These include low productivity, with output per construction worker stagnating or declining, rising material prices, disrupted supply chains, higher wages and interest rates, labour shortages, as well as limited and expensive urban land.
"National and local rules differ widely, hampering scaling and innovation," said the research note.
"Lengthy permitting and inconsistent standards further discourage investment. These challenges reduce housing supply, drive up construction prices and rents, and overall weaken housing affordability across Europe."
Independent Ireland MEP Ciaran Mullooly, a member of the parliament’s housing crisis committee, and who was standing in for event organiser Aodhán Ó Ríordáin - a Labour MEP - told the meeting: "Homelessness, is rarely a single-issue problem. It connects with employment, health and social inclusion."
He said the so-called Housing First approach, which offers permanent and swift options for homeless people, and harm reduction approaches lead to better and more durable outcomes.
"These models should inform future policy," he said.
According to the internal EU memo, producing a coherent house building strategy across the EU will be challenging, given the variety of underlying causes and diverse systems within member states.
Grzegorz Gajewski, from the European Commission’s housing taskforce, said the bloc was at a "historical moment" in confronting the crisis, despite the lack of a legal basis within the Lisbon Treaty.
However, he said: "Wwe can develop a European, useful way of helping, supporting, enabling, empowering actors in the member states."
The European Commission has received 13,000 submissions through its consultation process ahead of the publication of its Affordable House Plan in December, Mr Gajewski said.
The hearing was told that adapting the EU’s fiscal rules to permit more capital spending by member states level was one approach, while the European Investment Bank (EIB) is expected to increase its lending to countries for home building.
Housing Europe - a federation of public, cooperative and social housing organisations across 31 nations - said that what the EU can contribute to the housing crisis was "a drop in the bucket" compared to what is needed at national level.
"What is more impactful are [EU] debt rules," its Secretary General Sorcha Edwards told the meeting.
"You can see expenditure for public housing being considered as part of the national debt at a time when member states are being asked to realign their national debt with the [EU] Stability and Growth Pact over a certain period.
However, despite the European Commission giving countries and regions the option of doubling the allocation in spending on social housing from cohesion funds that had not been spent, this did not amount to "new" money from the EU’s seven-year budget.
Ms Edwards said the EIB was committed to doubling the amount of lending to social and affordable housing, but member states still needed to spend up to 50% in matching funds.
"There is a commitment to reduce that 50% in co-funding, but the demand for building has to be there and the projects have to be there," she said.
Depaul Ireland's David Carroll said: "Certainly the EU has a major role in the provision of finance, both for health and social programmes such as Housing First, and there appears to be a major recognition that it has that role."
"It also has a key role in the provision of structural funds for governments and actors who are actually constructing and developing housing on the ground.
"Our particular concern is to make sure that those structural funds, from a capital point of view, go towards the social housing sector, rather than being pumped into private development," he said.
Michael Roberts, a board member from Depaul Slovakia, described a night shelter in Bratislava as "a giant warehouse, a thing of wonder".
He told delegates: "It's something that also shocks, because you see on the faces of our clients, the joy, the happiness that they derive from being looked after and cared for, and shock, because although we have managed just half of this warehouse, the other half is a room in which 100 people sleep side-by-side every night.
"100 people ... We're doing everything we can to raise the money to construct this half of the night shelter, but it's an elusive task for us, and we really need help."
