Housing nightmare for youth in Europe

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-09

[00:00:00]and welcome again to the channel. Today we're going to speak about the housing affordability and we are going to focus on Europe this time. We'll also talk about the housing affordability in US in a in a later video. Uh but for now let's uh let's focus on uh Europe.

[00:00:22]Um so in 2026 the housing affordability has reached a really critical tipping point. um evolving from a market challenge to a really profound uh social crisis I would say that impacts the so-called lockdown generation or um the uh young adults aged 18 to 3435.

[00:00:48]So if we um have a look at the numbers and you have here the map of Europe and the housing cost over border rate amongst people at risk of poverty earning less than 60% of the medium income uh you see the the figures look really bad. So for example for for those people you have in uh Great Britain about 40% of their total earnings goes towards housing and then it's even worse in Germany with close to 52% um and even hearing in Greece it's even bigger. So there's there's not a lot of um hope going forward.

[00:01:36]Um I would say that young people face significantly higher barrier than uh the general population.

[00:01:44]So first um I would say overcrowding um 27% of these people aged 18 to 29 live in overcrowded conditions compared to uh maybe 15 17 of the total population based on different statistics.

[00:02:05]Um, and this rises to a big 42% for young people at risk of poverty.

[00:02:14]Uh, then as you also see from the image, over 10% of young Europeans um, uh, up to 30 years old spend more than 40% of their income on housing, uh, far exceeding the affordability benchmark. So it's it's a common sense in financial education that housing should not take more than 25% of your uh total income and um here we see more than 40% in a number of countries.

[00:02:48]Um then we also speak about severe deprivation. Approximately 7% of young people that um suffer from severe housing deprivation. Uh so they live in in poor condition like them or um so yeah this is nearly the double the the rate of the general population if we look only at the young people.

[00:03:14]So obviously how this affects them and um it's not in a good way of course. Um there's a big impact on what we could call life milestones.

[00:03:28]Uh so the inability to secure affordable housing is fundamentally reshaping the life trajectories of European youth. Um if we speak about delayed independence so across the EU um young people leave their parental home at about an average age of 26 and over the years this uh this age has gradually increased. Uh for example in Ireland the share of 25 to 34 year olds living with the parents jumped from 23% to 40% in just 5 years.

[00:04:07]So so huge almost uh doubled.

[00:04:11]Uh then we can talk about postponed life decisions. So the financial strain has forced many to delay starting families um to delay marriages to to to stop maybe pursuing higher education of top universities or relocating for better career opportunities.

[00:04:35]And um last but not least um we can also talk about a mental health crisis um because there is obviously a link between the housing instability and the rising rates of an anxiety and depression among youth which makes sense because um yeah if uh you're not sure on um if you'll afford a place to live um then obviously you'll not be in a good state of fight.

[00:05:06]Uh if we look at the policy interventions and initiatives, um there's a lot of of bragging from new politicians.

[00:05:16]Um a lot of demagogues starting with Ursula and and her um allies and even to the local politicians. So from the top of EU to even the local um governments uh they say they have launched some specific measures to address these challenges and generally mentioning the so-called European affordable housing plan. How affordable it is we will see.

[00:05:48]uh they mentioned about supporting the firsttime buyer by redoing some tax barriers and implementing some reduced VAT taxes for for affordable housing projects. But the problem is there are no um not too many affordable housing projects. Everybody wants to build for rich people or for investors and um they don't really care about making housing affordable.

[00:06:20]Um then they talk about the student and young worker housing um and trying to mobilize investment specifically for this um student housing um and disadvantaged students. But again, this only covers uh the youth that are um students that uh in their in their study years. Uh what happens afterwards, they don't know and probably they don't care.

[00:06:49]Uh then they are trying to do some short-term rental regulations um like new legislative initiatives to limit the expansion of platforms like Airbnb to return housing to the local term residents. But this makes sense maybe in um let's say touristical cities where there are a lot of tourists uh but it doesn't really address the um the problem of the uh affordable housing because um generally Airbnb are close to the city centers to the the areas of night life to the tourist attractions uh but also if you look in the suburbs when the cities are expanding you see that even if the in the suburbs uh the the housing is not affordable at all and um generally there there's not the the impact of Airbnb that much and uh then they are also saying uh there will be a public investment upon European investment platform whatever that will mean um to build maybe some sustainable housing We'll see. Um I mean it it seems like government is shying away of uh uh supporting a public program of just building houses and uh basically uh giving the the middle finger to greedy real estate developers.

[00:08:25]Um if we look just a few um examples uh but of course that doesn't cover everything. Um in Romania for example there's a national agency for housing that operates a program dedicated to building rental housing for young specialists. Uh if you look closer into that, it's pretty much a hoax with very very very few buildings being um built by the public by the public sector by the city halls and even the so-cal social housing is given sporadically and uh without transparency.

[00:09:09]Um, then Portugal recently approved a tax relief measure, including a temporary 6% VAT rate for the construction of permanent residences priced up to uh €600,000.

[00:09:25]So, it's a lot of money if you ask me, but uh yeah, maybe for for some this is just uh spare change.

[00:09:34]Um, then we also have Greece. um which faces the highest burden as you can also see here on the map in bright red um with um I mean if we look at the total um housing uh maybe 17% or even more so they are trying to also find a solution for affordable housing and also trying to to balance the impact from tourist Uh but also tourism is a is a key um part of the Greece economy. So that they're still trying to find a good balance for that.

[00:10:21]And obviously it doesn't um help that most of young people need to live in the big cities uh where they can find u opportunities and jobs. So um if for example for for retired people it would be maybe uh easier to to just leave the big cities but for young people it's definitely harder. So they need to be close to uh to their uh wage places.

[00:10:55]So we'll see if this uh coordinated plan uh will uh produce some results or is just uh yeah dusty the wind. Thank you for your attention.