Zohran Mamdani just became mayor of New York with a powerful idea: facilitating access to affordable housing, now a pipe dream. His great promise is to freeze rents at controlled rents in a city where rents of 2,000 dollars (1,800 euros) have been a thing of the past for years – today they are around 3,000 on average – and where the high cost of living affects even families with salaries that in practically any other corner of the West would make them lower their eyes.
Less than a week before the triumph of the left in the cradle of capitalism, a progressive but much more moderate political formation, the D66, emerged in the Netherlands with the same promise: to ease the real estate funnel. “All the pigs in this country have a roof over their heads, but a student or young person can’t even find an affordable broom closet,” future Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten openly said during the campaign. Everything indicates that Geert Wilders and his incendiary xenophobic speech will remain out of the government: the habitability crisis, in short, matters more to voters than immigration.
The housing flag has also just been raised by the newly elected Irish president, Catherine Connolly. With an even more sensational success: 63% of support, more than half a million votes ahead of his closest pursuer and particularly high voting percentages in the younger cohorts, fed up with salaries that are not enough – especially in Dublin – and to which the former head of state never stops winking.
“Housing is the most powerful political and social issue today, both in Europe and throughout the West,” underlines the United Nations special rapporteur on the right to decent housing, Balakrishnan Rajagopal, to EL PAÍS. “This is an extreme crisis of affordability, especially for the working population, who perceive extreme inequality of wealth and class: the wealthier classes seem unaffected and, at the same time, their own governments are failing to address the problem to help those who need it.”
“We’re talking about a broad cost-of-living crisis, in which housing may be the biggest part,” says Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford, UK. Result: “Millions of people cannot afford the standard of living that their parents had at their age, even if they earned much less.”
The numbers are there. Since 2010, the average sales price of houses has increased by 55% in the EU and rents have increased by 27%. In Germany, almost one in three tenants fears not being able to pay the rent on their apartment.
There is more, even at the level of perceptions, as important or more important than reality in the formation of political opinions. The shortage of affordable housing is the main concern of Europeans living in cities: 51% consider it an immediate and urgent problem, according to the latest edition of the Eurobarometer. That’s almost 20 points more than those who put employment at the top of the scale of concerns, or even those who complain about the quality of public services. With a particularly affected segment of the population: young people, especially in the South, where wages are lower.
Until now, the shortage of real estate had given wings – and many profits – to far-right populism, which draws a direct line between the lack of affordable housing and immigration. In France, where Marine Le Pen dominates the polls. In Germany, where the AfD risks overtaking the traditional parties. In Italy, where Giorgia Meloni has swept away and the problems of accessing a roof are still there, with no big signs of a solution on the horizon. Or in Spain, where Vox also supports the issue with proposals such as deregulation, tax reduction and giving priority to national citizens over foreigners.
Social discourse
Based on the latest polling dates, however, something seems to be changing. Mamdani won the position of mayor of the most populous city in the United States (and the third in the West, after Sao Paulo and Mexico City) with an unequivocally social speech, in housing and beyond: free public buses for all and free nursery schools up to the age of five.
“The far right has managed to turn frustration with the housing crisis into an electoral advantage. Now, however, some progressive parties – such as D66 – and the left are starting to address these challenges more directly and focus more on fundamental issues that affect everyday life,” underlines Jacob Nyrup, a professor at the University of Oslo specializing in inequality issues.
Ansell sees, along the same lines, “opportunities” for progressive parties and the classical left to gain support on the issue of high rent prices. “The problem is that this only seems to work for a subset of young people in or near big cities: Sinn Féin in Dublin or Mamdani in New York. Furthermore, many of these young people also aspire to become homeowners, and when they do, their attitude often changes to wanting to protect house prices. So it’s a difficult coalition to hold together.”
The far right links it to immigration
“The latest election campaigns clearly show that people in many Western countries and cities are waking up to the false propaganda of far-right parties,” says Rajagopal. Even in the face of the “apocalyptic scenarios” that it draws around the migratory phenomenon, although the data on arrivals do not differ much from the historical average. Linking the high cost of housing to the arrival of people from abroad, warns the UN rapporteur, “is something very dangerous, which can only harm these societies without solving the real challenge: the crisis of access to housing, which is a consequence of the wrong neoliberal policies applied over the last three decades (or more), and the increase in social inequality.” Even Ansell, who studied the British case in detail, found no evidence to support this alleged link between immigration and high house prices.
“Internal movements (to big cities, especially) and the growing preference for living in urban centers are much more important,” says Martin Vinaes Larsen, a political scientist at Aarhus University (Denmark). “As cities become less accessible, a larger percentage of people feel excluded. And in countries with one or two dominant economic centers, being excluded is a real disadvantage that increasingly affects the middle class.” Solution? “Increase the supply (of housing)”. Build more.
The Dutch laboratory
The case of the Netherlands deserves special attention: Wilders won in 2023 with a campaign that directly linked housing and migration, and two years later voters turned their backs on him. “We are facing the beginning of a new way of doing politics, a new recognition of the reality of housing affordability and other rights as a central issue for a new political reconfiguration based on human rights,” predicts the UN rapporteur. Something that, he says, “we are also seeing in New York”.
That Jetten was the first moderate, pro-European force to defeat the far right with housing policies at the center of its political program is no coincidence at all. In addition to being one of the nations most affected by the surge in house prices, the Netherlands is, together with Austria, one of the main European laboratories of housing policies. While Vienna stands out for its vast stock of public apartments, the largest Dutch city, Amsterdam, has even gone so far as to ban the purchase of apartments for speculative purposes.
“D66 was able to correctly identify the cost of housing as one of the determining issues (of the electoral competition), as happens in many other European countries”, evaluates Jeremy Cliffe, of the ECFR study center, via email. Above all, he appreciates his proposal to build a dozen new cities in which to build enough housing to accommodate the population. The largest of them, IJstad, halfway between Amsterdam and the province of Flevoland (north-central), plans to host up to 60,000 houses which, if they finally see the light, will give shelter to 126,000 people. If it is built, it will be connected by train to the main nervous and economic centers of the country.
