An article I read this morning contained a sentence that was difficult to ignore:
‘The homes of tomorrow are already built.’
It comes from Right to Housing! Now and Forever, a new European Citizens’ Initiative calling for affordable, sustainable and fair housing.
Its starting point is persuasive. Europe may not be suffering only from a shortage of buildings, but from a failure to use and distribute what already exists. Vacant homes and offices could be converted, short-term rentals and long-term vacancy could be regulated, and public investment could be directed towards affordable housing rather than speculation.
I understand the appeal of this argument.
Still, one word seemed to be missing from much of the discussion: price.
An empty building is not automatically an available home. It may be in the wrong place, divided among several owners, structurally unsuitable or too expensive to convert. It may require new services, environmental remediation, energy upgrades or years of administrative work.
The building already exists. The affordable home does not.
This distinction matters because affordability is not a physical characteristic of a building. It is a relationship between the final cost of that building and the income of the people expected to live in it.
The European numbers show how far that relationship has moved.
According to Eurostat, house prices in the European Union increased by 5.1% in the first quarter of 2026 compared with the same period a year earlier. Rents rose by 3%.
Looking further back makes the change more visible. Between 2015 and the end of 2025, house prices in the EU increased by almost 65%, while rents rose by around 22%.
There is no single explanation for this.
Housing prices are influenced by demand, but demand itself is not simply a matter of population growth. It is shaped by employment, universities, migration, tourism, smaller households and the concentration of economic activity in a limited number of cities.
Supply is equally complex. Land has a price. Materials, labour and energy have a price. Planning procedures require time, and time becomes a financial cost. Interest rates influence both developers and buyers. Every additional technical requirement may improve the final building, but it can also increase the capital needed to produce it.
None of this means that the market should be left alone to decide who deserves a home.
It does mean that the market cannot simply be ordered to stop functioning without considering what happens next.
If rents are limited without creating new supply, existing tenants may be protected while newcomers find even fewer homes. If buyers receive subsidies in a market where supply cannot respond, part of that support may be absorbed into higher prices. If conversion is made the preferred option regardless of cost, public money may be spent preserving structures that still fail to produce affordable housing.
Even apparently simple measures have second-order effects.
Reducing planning times can encourage construction, but it does not guarantee that the new homes will be affordable. Taxing vacant properties may return some buildings to use, but it will not solve structural problems in areas where people do not want or cannot afford to live. Restricting short-term rentals may help in cities under intense tourist pressure, while producing very different results elsewhere.
This is why I am cautious whenever housing is presented as a problem with one dominant cause and one decisive solution.
The European Citizens’ Initiative is right to focus attention on the existing building stock. Demolition and reconstruction should not be automatic, especially when the environmental cost of replacement is ignored.
But reuse should not become an automatic moral choice either.
The useful question is not whether an old building deserves to survive. It is whether that building can be transformed into something people need, in a place where they need it, at a cost they can actually sustain.
That requires an economic model, not only an architectural proposal.
The European Commission estimates that the gap between current housing investment and what Europe needs is approximately €150 billion per year. This suggests that the problem cannot be solved simply by redistributing the existing stock. Europe also needs capital, construction capacity, faster decisions and forms of cooperation between public and private actors.
The uncomfortable question is who should absorb the difference between the market price of a home and the price that households can afford.
It could be the landowner, through lower land values or long-term leases. It could be the developer, in exchange for lower risk or faster permitting. It could be the financial system, through longer and cheaper funding. It could be the public sector, through investment, guarantees or the provision of land. Higher-value development can sometimes subsidise affordable units within the same project.
There is always a cost. Moving it does not make it disappear.
From a managerial point of view, this is where the discussion becomes more useful. Every housing policy is also a decision about how costs, risks and returns are distributed among residents, owners, developers, banks and taxpayers.
A credible policy should therefore explain more than what outcome it wants.
It should explain who will provide the land, who will finance the work, who will accept the risk, how long implementation will take and how affordability will be protected after the building is completed.
Otherwise, an affordable home may remain affordable only on the day it is announced.
I do not believe Europe can or should stop the housing market. Markets respond to real demand and mobilise resources that public institutions alone cannot provide.
But housing is not an ordinary consumer product either. Where people can live affects employment, education, family formation, mobility and the ability of a city to retain the people who keep it functioning.
That gives public institutions a legitimate role in shaping the conditions under which the market operates.
The objective should not be to suppress price, but to understand and redesign the system that produces it.
That may involve existing buildings, new construction, public housing, private investment and different forms of ownership. The balance will not be identical in Milan, Berlin, Palma, Warsaw or a declining provincial town. Housing markets are local, even when the political debate is European.
‘The homes of tomorrow are already built’ is a powerful invitation to look again at what we have.
But the homes of tomorrow are not simply waiting to be discovered behind closed doors.
They still have to be financed, transformed, managed and made accessible. That is the less poetic part of the housing debate, but probably the part on which its success will depend.
If housing is both a right and a market, where should public policy intervene first: land, finance, permitting, vacancy or household income?