on behalf of Joves PV
Access to decent housing has become the defining barrier preventing young people across Europe from building an independent life. In the Valencian Country, rental prices have risen by 40% over five years while youth wages have grown less than 10% in the same period, forcing many young people to spend over 60% of their income on rent. The Spanish state registers the latest average age of emancipation in the entire European Union — over 30 years old — and the situation is no different across many of our nations and regions. This is not a matter of individual failure. It is the direct consequence of a political model that has treated housing as a financial commodity rather than a fundamental social right.
We cannot speak of this crisis without naming one of its most egregious local expressions: the social housing scandal in Alacant, where public VPO (officially protected housing) units — built with public money and intended for vulnerable families and young people on waiting lists — were irregularly allocated to individuals connected to the ruling People's Party (PP). This is not mismanagement; it is institutional betrayal. Thousands of young people were denied access to affordable housing so that a party's clientelist network could benefit. We call for full accountability, political and legal, and we demand that no social housing waiting list is ever again manipulated for partisan gain.
The housing crisis is not inevitable. Working models already exist within our own European family, and EFAY must champion them loudly. Vienna's Wiener Wohnen manages over 220,000 municipal housing units, ensuring that 60% of the city's population lives in affordable public or cooperative housing, with rents consistently below 30% of household net income. Amsterdam and Copenhagen have scaled up Community Land Trust (CLT) and use-right cooperative models, where land remains in public hands and housing is permanently shielded from speculation. These are not utopias — they are decades-long public policies that Spain and many other EU member states have chosen not to replicate.
The European Union has both the mandate and the instruments to change this. The European Pillar of Social Rights explicitly recognises the right to housing, yet without binding mechanisms it remains a declaration without teeth. EFA Youth calls on the European institutions to move from principles to legislation: we demand a binding European Affordable Housing Directive that sets minimum thresholds of social housing stock for all member states, using Vienna as a benchmark. Furthermore, EU cohesion funds — including future structural funds beyond the NextGenerationEU framework — must be reoriented to prioritise the construction and renovation of social housing, rather than continuing to subsidise infrastructure that primarily serves private capital interests.
At the state level, we call on progressive governments to reform land laws to increase the mandatory public land contribution for protected housing, to effectively regulate tourist rental platforms in high-pressure urban areas, and to introduce a progressive tax on empty properties held by large landlords, with the revenue channelled directly into social housing funds. For young people specifically, we propose guaranteed affordable rental programmes for people aged 18 to 35, with rent capped at a relatively low percentage of net income and co-financed by national governments and EU funds.
The General Assembly of EFA Youth hereby endorses the principles set out in this resolution and calls on all member organisations to defend housing as an unconditional political priority in every institutional arena — local, regional, national and European. We commit to coordinating our advocacy before the European Parliament and the European Commission to push for binding housing legislation, to sharing the successful models of our regions and nations, and to standing together against the speculation, corruption and political negligence. Housing is not a commodity, it is our right.