Zohran Mamdani just became mayor of New York with a powerful central message: facilitating access to affordable housing, a pipe dream these days. His main promise is to freeze the rent of rent-stabilized apartments, in a city where rents of $2,000 a month (1,800 euros) are now a thing of the past – today they hover around $3,000 – and where the high cost of living affects even families with salaries that would make mouths water in virtually any other part of the West.
Less than a week before the left’s victory in the cradle of capitalism, a progressive but much more moderate political party, D66, won elections in the Netherlands with the same promise: to relieve the real estate bottleneck. “Every pig in this country has a roof over their head, but a student or young person can’t even find an affordable broom closet,” future Dutch Prime Minister Rob Jetten graphically stated during the campaign. Everything seems to indicate that Geert Wilders and his incendiary xenophobic rhetoric will be excluded from the government: the real estate crisis, in short, matters more to voters than immigration.
The housing issue was also recently supported by the newly elected Irish president, Catherine Connolly, whose success was even more sensational: she collected 63% of the votes, more than half a million votes compared to her closest rival, and with a particularly high turnout among the younger generations, tired of insufficient wages – especially in Dublin – and to whom the new head of state has constantly appealed.
“Housing is the most powerful political and social issue today, both in Europe and throughout the West,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal, UN special rapporteur on the right to adequate housing, told 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 issue to help those in need.”
“We’re talking about a broad cost-of-living crisis, in which housing may be the most significant component,” says Ben Ansell, professor of comparative democratic institutions at the University of Oxford. The result: “Millions of people cannot afford the standard of living their parents enjoyed at their age, even though they may have earned much less.”
The figures speak for themselves. Since 2010, the average sales price of houses has skyrocketed by 55% in the EU, while rent has increased by 27%. In Germany, almost one in three tenants fears not being able to pay the rent.
There is more, even in the field of perceptions, which are as important, if not more, than reality in forming 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 Eurobarometer survey. This is almost 20 points higher than those who put employment at the top of their list of concerns, or even those who complain about the quality of public services. A segment of the population is particularly affected: young people, especially in southern countries, where wages are lower.
Until now, the housing crisis had fueled – and greatly benefited – far-right populism, which draws a direct line between the lack of affordable housing and immigration. This is evident in France, where Marine Le Pen is leading in the polls; in Germany, where the AfD risks overtaking the traditional parties; in Italy, where Giorgia Meloni swept the elections and the real estate crisis persists with no solution in sight; and in Spain, where Vox has also made this issue central with proposals such as deregulation, tax cuts and the priority of nationals over foreigners.
Social messages
Judging by the latest elections, however, something seems to be changing. Mamdani won the race for mayor of the most populous city in the United States (and the third most populous in the Western world after Sao Paulo and Mexico City) with an unequivocally social message, focusing on housing and more: free public buses for all and free care for children up to five years old.
“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 left-wing parties 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.
Along the same lines, Ansell sees “opportunities” for progressive parties and the traditional left to gain support on the issue of high rents. “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 property owners, and when they succeed, their attitudes often shift towards protecting 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. They are also realizing the “apocalyptic scenarios” painted around the migratory phenomenon, even if 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 Special Rapporteur, “is very dangerous and can only harm these societies without addressing the real challenge: the housing crisis, which is a consequence of the misguided neoliberal policies implemented 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 migration (to larger cities, in particular) and the growing preference for living in urban centers are much more significant,” says Martin Vinaes Larsen, a political scientist at Aarhus University in Denmark. “As cities become less accessible, a greater percentage of people feel excluded. And in countries with one or two dominant economic centers, being excluded represents a real disadvantage that increasingly affects the middle class.” The 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 witnessing 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 Special Rapporteur. Something that, he says, “we are also seeing in New York”.
That Jetten’s party was the first moderate, pro-European force to defeat the far right with housing policies at the center of its political platform is far from a coincidence. In addition to being one of the nations most affected by the surge in real estate prices, the Netherlands, together with Austria, is one of the main European laboratories for housing policy. While Vienna is known for its vast offering of public housing, Amsterdam, the largest Dutch city, has gone as far as banning the purchase of apartments for speculative purposes.
“D66 correctly identified the cost of housing as one of the defining issues (of the election), as is the case in many other European countries,” Jeremy Cliffe of the ECFR think tank noted in an email. He especially likes their proposal to build a dozen new cities with enough housing to accommodate their population. The largest of these, IJstad, located halfway between Amsterdam and the province of Flevoland (north-central), plans to have up to 60,000 homes which, if eventually built, will house 126,000 people. If it is built, it will be connected by train to the main economic and commercial centers of the country.
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