Special committee on the Housing Crisis in the European Union Ordinary meeting
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HOUS European Parliament
Follow its sittingsManuel Aalbers
Next slide, please. So here are a few key concepts from our study. First, we make a distinction between listed funds on the one hand and unlisted funds on the other hand. With listed funds, we refer to funds that are listed on the stock exchange, so a company from which you can buy a stock on a stock exchange. So this includes real estate investment trusts.
They are the most typical form you would find for a real estate firm to be listed on a stock exchange, but there are other forms. On the other hand, there are unlisted funds. They are not publicly traded, so you cannot just buy stocks in them. So they're not on the stock exchange, but they're privately organized, you could say. Together, these two landlords are known as corporate landlords in the academic literature.
And sometimes they're referred to as institutional investors, but in fact, it would be more correct to say that they're backed by institutional investors, because typically for each of these types of landlords, whether they're listed or unlisted, for these funds, the most capital comes from institutional investors. What do we mean with institutional investors? I put it on the slide briefly as well.
This is not an exhaustive list, but the main two groups here are pension funds and insurance companies.
Manuel Aalbers
Of course. Yeah, I will. Then there's the other term that's important, that's the term financialization. This is about the increasing role of financial actors and motives. So this is about treating housing as if it is just another asset class, that is, as if housing is any investment like any other.
Next slide, please. So this is a little bit of context before we get to the issue of speculation itself. What we see here is a shift that has to do not so much with the rental market that we were asked to look at, but much more with the home ownership and the mortgage market parts of things. So this is an average for the EU member states. And what you see here is that since the 1980s, we traced property prices, so housing prices, and household credit, and household credit, most of that is mortgage debt, so mortgage loans.
And what you see for a long period, those lines go up together. As property prices rise, mortgage markets become bigger. And very often the reasoning is that because the housing prices go up, people need bigger mortgages.
In fact, it's a little bit of a chicken and egg, but I would say the main part here, the main driver here is actually the mortgages. Because people get bigger mortgages, they can buy bigger houses. So that's why those lines go up together. And then you see around 2014, 2015, those lines don't go up together anymore. So there we say is a breaking point.
And you can clearly see this is not just something that happens for a few years where the lines depart, that happens earlier as well. What we actually see here, the property prices keep going up. They actually go up more than they did before. You can see how steep that top line goes up. Whereas the bottom line levels off a little bit, even goes down a little bit.
That means that people don't get bigger mortgages, but the prices of housing still go up. Why is that happening? Well, there's many reasons for it, but one of it is that it's no longer just people buying houses with mortgages. It is on the one hand rich people coming in and buying up additional properties, typically to rent them out, sometimes to keep them vacant, but that's actually a very small number, the vacancies. And, and that's the topic of today, the big funds coming up and buying up portfolios of housing, typically of already existing housing, so not adding units to the housing market, but thereby driving up the prices whereas the mortgages are not more widely available.
What we're talking about rental housing, so why is this important, this story about home ownership and mortgages? On the one hand because if the housing prices go up, the rents are also likely to go up, right? This is a correlation between those two. But also, if households are priced out of home ownership, if they can no longer buy a house, what do they need to do? They still need to live somewhere, so they're more likely to want to rent a house, right?
So this is another reason why you see rental markets increasing in many countries, also the demand for housing, but also the rental prices going up because these are more and more people who now need to rent a house because they can no longer buy. Next slide please. So now we go into the listed funds, so the funds that own rental housing throughout EU member states. And what we see here that if we look at how much these firms are valued at, and we start at 2004, it is just about 5 billion. And then it goes up a lot, in the last few years you see it goes down a little bit then stabilizes, and now we're around 200 billion.
So in 20 years' time, there is a 40-fold increase of how much these funds are valued for.
This doesn't just mean that the funds themselves are valued for more and more, a lot of these funds simply didn't exist in 2004, right? So a lot of it is new funds coming into being in the last 20 years and the existing ones becoming bigger and bigger. What is striking here, this is a global story, yes, these funds are becoming bigger and grow in number across the world, but nowhere in the world is this growth as spectacular as in the EU member states. If we for instance would compare to North America, we would see a growth as well, but we see much earlier stabilization and in relative terms, we don't see this 40-time, 40-fold increase. So this is a little bit to show like how much more importance these funds are now than 10 years ago or 20 years ago.
Next slide, please. So then we talk about types of speculation. You asked us to do this study on speculation and we started to think how can we look at speculation. So the first thing we thought of looking at is investment in the existing housing stock rather than newly constructed dwellings. This means that actual investment is not contributing to supply expansion.
It turned out this is actually surprisingly hard to research. For many funds, we don't know all of what they do.
For the funds we know what they do, a lot of them tend to invest in existing housing, so driving up the prices of that housing rather than adding housing stock to the number of housing units. Secondly, we wanted to look at short-term investment strategies that is sometimes known as buying low and selling high. That means you buy a portfolio for a low price, you sell it for a high price, also known as flipping. Actually, this is also quite hard to do, and it's partially because you want to know what the intention is at the time of purchase, but actually you don't know that until it's sold. And therefore we don't know if the investment initially is short-term, mid-term, or long-term.
What we were able to do were two other things that are actually related to these first two, but they are different ways of measuring speculation. So the third one that we call valuation gains, and this has to do with how much the value of a property, so how much it's valued for instance at the stock exchange, is how much that value is going up compared to the rent. So I will show you some evidence of that on the next slide because I can imagine it's a bit abstract now, but it will hopefully become clearer on the next two slides. And fourthly, you also asked us to look at abusive practices. So we said abusive practices are also a form of speculation by landlords that undermine tenants' rights and housing security.
So here we see this type three speculation in the EU at work. So what we show here are all listed funds, so all funds active in the EU member states that do residential real estate, so own housing units. So we have all of them because that's the nice thing if companies are on the stock exchange, you have all the data. You can find everything because it's publicly available. So that makes it a bit easier for us to actually say something about all the funds rather than just the ones that have the data available.
Next slide, please.
And what we show here, and you see that to the top right, we show here the business models that rely primarily on valuation gains rather than income generated through the productive use of housing assets. And what does that mean? Well, the easiest is to look at the graph. We see the rent go up and the rental income goes up almost 20 times in this period of 20 years. So that's a lot, but this is not just the rent of each unit increasing 20-fold.
This is also a result of many more units being rented out. So this is the total sum of rents that all these funds combined have, and that goes up almost 20-fold.
Then if we look at the asset value, so for how much these funds are considered to be worth on the stock exchange, in their books, then we see that this is more than 40 times. So this suggests that the valuations of these companies increases more than twice as fast as the rising rents. So some of us might find rising rents a problem, and I think it can be, but there is a problem on top of that, that is not just the rents are going up, but on top of it the valuation of the company goes up. And you see this growing apart, this yellow arrow, this suggests speculation. And this is either a bubble, the valuation goes up too much and is out of reach with the rents, because you would say the rents need to support the valuation of the company, or this is a bet of investors of the future rents going up, and then we should be even more worried about how much the rents go up.
This also, these numbers are higher in the EU than in other parts of the world. That means that EU-listed funds are more speculative on average, say, than American funds or even Asian funds. Next slide, please. Thank you. And here we did the same for unlisted funds.
There's a big disclaimer here: whereas for listed funds we have the data for each single listed company, for the unlisted funds it's only for the companies, about 50 of them, that are members of INREV, and INREV allowed us to use their data to show from their members what they do. So there's here just an indication of what these funds are doing.
And our assumption was maybe the unlisted funds, since they're not on the stock exchange, they will actually have less of this speculative behavior, but you see basically the same picture here, the asset values and the rents growing apart. Next slide please. Then we have type three speculation one more time, but here a summary. What we try to show here, I won't explain in detail what limit asset intensity exactly is, but I'll show very briefly what it means sort of through the example that you see here in front of you. So for the listed funds, you see that to the left here, from 2004 to 2024, it more than doubles.
So what does this mean? And you see that below the graph, for every euro of annual rental income, listed residential funds hold more than 5 euros in housing assets in 2004 and more than 11 euros in 2024. So this is comparing again to the rental income and the valuation of the company basically doubles. It shows the same as on the last graph, but in a slightly easier and easier to compare format.
Then to the right you see the same for the listed for the unlisted funds, again not all of them because there's only data for 50 or so. And one thing to mind here is that for the for the unlisted funds the data starts only from 2014. So this is in a shorter period of time that this more than doubles as well. So this shows that an even higher and even faster increase for the unlisted funds that suggests there may be even more speculative speculative activity there, although we don't know to what extent we can generalize it for all the listed funds, sorry for all the unlisted funds. Next slide please.
Type four speculation we show here. This is about the abusive practices that you asked us to investigate. So we look here into forced displacement. We look into no-fault evictions. A no-fault eviction is where someone is evicted without ever having missed a rental payment.
There's a more formal definition in the report but this is what it is for short. Tenant harassment is another one, undermaintenance of the property is another one, and then renovictions, which is being that people are being evicted in order to renovate a property rather than keeping the people in or moving them back into the property after it's renovated. So the evidence we present here comes from countries typically with big funds such as Germany and Sweden, but we also have more limited evidence from other countries in the EU.
Next slide, please. And then if we summarize all this evidence, and this is not on a statistical study like we showed you for type three speculation, this is mostly based on a literature study we collected as many studies as possible from as many EU member states as possible. And it shows three different things, or at least we summarize them in three points. First, the evidence links financialization to higher rents, affordability pressures, tenant displacement, and reduced security of tenure. These impacts are bigger in tight housing markets where alternative housing options are limited.
And corporate landlords exploit legal loopholes, differences in rent regulation, renovation rules, taxation, and tenancy law to increase returns. Again, we're not saying this is true for every single fund, but on average, this is more the case for these funds than for other landlords. Next slide, please. Of course, there's big differences within the EU. If you look at the report, we discuss particularly what is the case in which country and what is not.
We try to make this a little bit more systematic on this slide, and we do this also in chapter four of the report. And what we see there is that there's three different ways in which these institutional landlords, in which these corporate investors, become active in EU member states. The first is public and non-profit housing portfolios being privatized. These are the countries where these funds are most active.
Germany and Sweden are the best examples here. The second is countries hit by a crisis, typically particularly hit by the last global financial crisis 2008-2009. So Ireland, Spain, Greece also to a lesser extent, Hungary in a different way is here as well. And then the third one we see institutional investors becoming active in niche asset markets. What are niche assets markets?
For instance student housing, co-living, very big in Brussels, elderly and care homes, but also short-term rentals and also build-to-rent. So sort of other types of units than sort of the main rental housing market. And this is something that is still very small in most EU countries but it has a very rapid growth. So this is something also where for some of the EU member states where the first two factors aren't very important, we see that the third one is becoming more important. And most of the studies on this topics are just from the last few years or people are saying when we asked experts in different countries, we're working on it now but the study isn't here yet, but this is starting to happen here as well.
So bottom line here, this explains why some housing systems have become major targets for institutional investments while others remain comparatively resistant, but that is we think only for the time being. Next slide please. And we're starting to round up.
I see the time, we're running out. So, the European Affordable Housing Plan, we were asked to respond specifically to what the plan says about addressing speculation. So that is action seven of the plan, and we shortened it here a little bit, so this is not the exact text of action seven, I made it a bit shorter. The plan asks to present an analysis on house price dynamics. As academics, we can only agree.
They suggest to promote greater transparency. I think many people would agree as well. Then they say number three, but it's actually two things going on there: facilitate investments in non-profit and limited-profit housing providers by identifying technical and legislative barriers. Okay, that's something we can also support. And then they say to develop a market-led investment framework for social and affordable housing.
And then if you actually look in the details of it, it's suggested in the text, but that might be my misreading, that the Commission is asking the market to define what affordable housing is, where we would say the market can provide affordable housing, but it should be governments, maybe not the EU, but maybe member states, that should define what affordable housing is and then how they could facilitate that market. Then, fourthly, the plan suggests to facilitate peer learning and innovation. Well, we can also agree with that. So in conclusion, we say that the plan is not sufficiently ambitious in addressing structural causes of financialization.
Easier access to finance does not automatically lead to produce affordable housing. And one key takeaway from our report is that institutional investors primarily acquire existing housing rather than build new homes. So if you want more new homes, you need to put the incentives to building more new homes, ideally more affordable new homes. Next slide, please. I won't go through all the single recommendations.
I assume many of you have seen them in the executive summary. In the end of the report, they're all a bit longer, they're all one paragraph each, so in the executive summary, they're just one or two lines each, but they fall in four different categories. So we would say the first category is about treating housing first and foremost as an essential social and economic infrastructure rather than primarily as an investment asset. This is about acknowledging housing as a human right first. So these are recommendations one to seven.
Then we have two very specific recommendations, eight and fifteen, about stronger EU-level coordination alongside national and local measures. The details are in the last chapter. Then there's three recommendations specifically about regulating speculative practices, including things like renoviction.
And then there's three more recommendations specifically about strengthening social, public, and cooperative and other non-financialized forms of housing provision. That is about providing an alternative to a financialized speculative housing model. So the next two slides have these recommendations, so we can look at them also during the Q&A maybe, but those are my last slides. Thank you very much for your attention and sorry for going over time.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, Dr. Albers, for this really insightful presentation here. And I will now open the floor to the coordinators or group representatives for really two-minute questions, and then this will be followed by a reply from our expert and our experts here. So, do I have anyone for EPP? Otherwise, I will... Do you want to take the floor?
Okay, then we start with S&D and Andreas Schieder.
Andreas Schieder
Good afternoon everybody. I want to thank the authors for giving us this very comprehensive overview on the study, which I think the long version bears a lot of additional information for our future work, and probably maybe we have to come back even on the study again. For the moment now, as far as I understood your presentation, it says that investors, and maybe my first question would be, what is the difference between investor and speculator, or what it is? But let's say this kind of group does not contribute on new asset, mainly building new houses and speculating with them, but mainly buying assets and trying to rise prices. So if I have understood this, and then my question would be, who are the big investors?
So who are the let's say the big five in this game? And maybe we should ask later on also the Commission to look a little bit more deeper on this. And then you're saying transparency is one of the answer, understanding the price dynamics. So maybe you can evaluate a little bit on these price dynamics. Then I would have two additional questions.
What means the tax system in this context? Because I have also the feeling that this value-added chain let's say is lower taxed than any other of other kind of income taxes.
So probably this is also a driving force. And do you see any role of non-profit housing association in the market? So probably as they are non-profit and lower price, do they have a lowering effect on the overall speculative market or does it mean there is let's say two segregated market, the the non-profit one and then this speculative one? Until now just so far my my questions. Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you, Andreas Schieder. And if I look at the room, I think the next coordinator would be for the Greens, Gordan Bosanac.
Gordan Bosanac
Thank you, Chair, and thank the authors for really, really interesting study. And I have to, I mean, I don't know, regret or express my disappointment that in our report we didn't unfortunately highlighted how speculation and financialization is one of the key reasons of the increase of the prices. But I'm glad that now you are confirming that this is really actually the case. But this is something we have we will have to deal with.
But to go to concrete questions. The first slide you showed, and you mentioned this year 2014, 2015, when something is happening. And we see actually that, you know, that the prices, property price index goes up when the credit index is not increasing with the same, with the same dynamics. Can we connect this also to the fact that the new investors, investors came in the market? Or that, you know, these pension funds, security funds suddenly stopped to invest, I don't know, in fossil fuels or in something else, and they shifted to the housing market?
Was this the trend which can be globally seen, that from these years on suddenly the housing market became very interested investment for, for the big players? And also the, the another, the second graph on the, where we see the rent and the amount how the worth are those company, the listed funds. For me, this is the most amazing one, which actually is telling us there is a like financial bubble happening in the market. And then do you think that if we will have strong messages as European Union, as a Commission, as a Parliament, towards the housing market, that this can actually lower this bubble?
I mean and make it make the evaluation of those company more realistic because we know how the evaluation of the company goes. But if there will be stronger measures coming from our side, even talking about the rent cap, maybe this will also then reflect on the evaluation of those big players that they will not be estimated on in such a disproportionate way to be much, much higher. And my last question, when you are talking about big investors or companies, I think you are referring mostly to those who have a stock for for long-term rental. But are there included also the new ones players in the market who are buying the stocks for short-term rental exclusively? Are they also part of this analysis and do you see the increase of those investors and company?
Thank you very much.
Speaker 8
So, I will give you the floor for answering and then we go into the next round.
Manuel Aalbers
Okay, thank you very much for these questions. So let's start with S&D. Let's see. Investment or speculation, well that's a very tricky one, right? I say sometimes speculation is what you call something when you don't like it, investment is what you call when you do like something.
But in fact I would say speculation is a subcategory of investment. All all speculation in a way is a form of investment. The question is what do you invest in?
If you invest in something by creating new housing, I would say that's a productive investment, also aligning with sort of the Draghi report of productive investment in the in the EU. If you invest in something that already exists, that can be in different ways. You can say we buy properties and we renovate them, that's a way of investment, you add value. But if you actually buy properties, you don't do a lot of maintenance and you drive up the rents, that would be speculation. So we're not saying the listed funds and unlisted funds that we look at only do speculation.
What we're saying is they're more likely to engage in speculative activities than other landlords because they rely so heavily on these valuation gains. So this explains the rising rents to some extent, but as we could see not completely because the valuation of these companies goes up even more than the rents. So the big five, I wrote down four for now: Vonovia, Heimstaden, Blackstone, Vesteda. Those are some of the big ones. The first two, well one of them listed, the other three non-listed, and one of them actually a complicated combination of listed and non-listed.
Price dynamics, were you referring to price dynamics then within the rental market or also related to homeownership?
Both.
Manuel Aalbers
Both. Okay. So I would say these are almost like communicating vessels, right? If the rents go up, then likely the prices are to go up, also because people look for alternatives.
What can I afford with my income? That's why I was showing earlier the developments in the mortgage market and in homeownership to show if homeownership is no longer affordable, then people are more likely to want to rent something. So this is not just about a lack of properties overall, it's also a shift between one type of property to another type of property. The taxing system, is it okay to leave that to you next? You know more about tax.
Then the role of nonprofits, they could lower the speculative market overall, but I would say they mostly exist side by side. And yes, the nonprofits are less likely by their very nature to have speculative behavior, although there are exceptions where nonprofits also take big risks and speculate. But by their very nature, yes, they're less likely to be speculative. So if they are relatively large nonprofits active within a specific market, a city or a country say, then it's likely to have a big effect on the overall market. If these are very marginal players, obviously they have a relatively marginal effect on the overall market.
And then to the questions of the Greens, let me see. Yes, new investment came into the market 2014, 2015. This is a global development.
The timing of it is a little bit different in different continents. So one thing that happens was before the global financial crisis, a lot of money from these investors was going into securitization of mortgages. So the reselling of mortgages in secondary markets. That market still exists. It's not that much smaller but it doesn't grow so much anymore because this was you could say at the root of the global financial crisis especially in the US but then had an effect on EU member states as well.
This market has continued to grow in the meantime but not so much to keep up with institutional capital. So one important thing here and this is also why pension funds are so important. The global capital of all pension funds in the world because the pension funds active in Europe are not just European funds, they come from anywhere in the world and the European pension funds are active also anywhere in the world. So this is a global market active partially in the EU and partially somewhere else. The amount of money these funds have grows much faster than the global economy grows.
This is good news if you're part of a pension fund. It's good news if you're already retired. But in a way it means that there's more and more money looking for investments but the economy doesn't grow enough to keep up with this money. And pension funds and insurance companies together make up such a big part.
We always talk about rich people, and rich people, yes, obviously they have a lot of money, otherwise they wouldn't be rich, but most capital is not with rich people, most capital in the world is with pension funds and insurance companies. So this is good news, but the problem with it is they're constantly looking for new investments that aren't there because the global economy doesn't grow enough. Which also means this is one reason that they invest in existing assets, whether it's housing or something else, but housing is the biggest one. Housing is the very biggest thing you can invest in. Any other sector of the economy is smaller on its own than housing.
So this is why housing is very popular. It's been popular for many, for many years for this reason. But one thing that changed was the global financial crisis. Another important thing is quantitative easing, so the ECB in a way printing a lot of extra money, which means that money is relatively cheap, easily accessible, and therefore it also means that borrowing money is cheap and buying up properties becomes relatively affordable because you don't need to pay a lot of interest on the money you borrow. So this makes it easier for these actors to buy up housing.
Housing is also very popular because it's considered a very secure investment because, well, someone has to pay rent. If someone doesn't pay rent, you can still sell the house. So you can, there's always two ways of making money, and there's not so many things. Try to do that with computers.
Once you take them out, or with cars, once you take them out of the shop, the next day they've already dropped 10, 20% in value. So housing is quite unique in that sense as well, and therefore very much of interest to pension funds and insurance companies who don't like too much risk, and they also, they like to invest long-term because of the nature of their company. So, listed funds, financial bubble, yes, I think this is, this is indeed the problem. Rent caps, yes, they could help for the overall problem of speculation. I'm not sure if they would necessarily lower the valuation of these companies because, in fact, where many of these companies are active, countries like Sweden and Germany that are overrepresented in a way, not in our sample, just in where these funds are most active, there is already quite a bit of rental regulation, more than in many other EU member states.
So this doesn't stop the valuation of the companies going up, ironically enough. So rent regulation helps to control the rent, it doesn't necessarily help to control the valuation of the companies. Final question, long-term rental versus short-term rental. The short answer is most of the companies that we think of corporate landlords are not active, are not very active on the short-term rental market, but this is beginning to change a little bit with these niche rental markets. And a lot of them are not the very biggest players who are active there.
It's typically niche players. Some of them started in the last five, six years. They didn't exist before that and they grow really rapidly. But relative compared to these companies like Vonovia, Blackstone, most of them are still tiny, but their growth rates are much higher in terms of how much properties they buy up.
Felix Böhmer
Yeah, thank you. Just to add on a few smaller points. I think first it's also important to understand that our argument towards speculation is that this is less about particular actors acting in malicious ways, right? Sort of wanting to speculate with their housing. What we talk about is mostly the effects of a wider business model, particularly this divergence between rents and valuation gains.
Of course, tax system difference plays into that and there are different ways in which different member states try to approach the housing markets. For a long time, many member states pushed more towards policies that further these business models, for example, by legislating in REITs, real estate investment trusts, which are active in quite a few European countries. But also, for example, in the German case, there was also an attempt to link this legislation to investments in new constructions leading to companies mostly not taking on the REIT legal form.
So there were also some differences in sort of how well they worked. One of the main influences here are accounting standards and sort of the standardization of accounting standards throughout the EU, which are also pushed as part of like single market procedures and the standardization of accounting practices. In many countries, there is a double system of accounting where there is both the IFRS accounting and local systems of accounting, where the sort of more international systems of accounting allow for these increasing valuation gains much easier than other types of accounting standards. So there, there's also the need to look at the influence of different ways of accounting housing. Finally, regarding the question of how to lower the bubble or sort of what could be an answer, there is quite a lot of plans obviously currently at the EU level, particularly from the Commission coming from the Affordable Housing Plan, but also obviously in different institutions as we can see here.
And particularly a push towards more funding towards housing with the need for affordable housing. One of our main recommendations there is to condition that funding and to link that funding itself to conditions, not just trying to fund particular organizations, but to link the funding itself to conditions of affordability and long-term affordability to avoid simply giving more funding for this spread between valuation gains and rents. Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you, and thank you also for respecting the time. The next speaker is from the Left, Leila Chaibi, and then we will have also five-minute answers by our guests.
Leila Chaibi
Thank you, Chair, I will speak in French. Merci beaucoup pour la présentation de votre étude. Ça fait du bien d'entendre vos recommandations, d'entendre vos analyses et franchement, c'est un autre son de cloche par rapport au rapport qui a été produit par cette commission logement. Donc j'en profite puisque le mandat de notre commission provisoire a été prolongé de six mois. Je regrette que le PPE soit absent aujourd'hui.
Je regrette que le rapporteur du rapport, Monsieur Jiménez, soit absent, que l'ensemble du PPE ne soit plus là. Et en fait, pardon, oui, le PPE est représenté.
Mais bon, je crois que la partie gauche de notre commission, voilà, est un peu plus surreprésentée que les autres, le PPE mais aussi les autres groupes de droite. Et je crois qu'il faut faire attention parce que c'est pas la première fois qu'on a des auditions très intéressantes, des études qui sont produites par le Policy Department qui sont très intéressantes, qui produisent des analyses très pertinentes ici et qui vont à l'inverse de ce qu'on produit en termes de production législative, en termes de production réglementaire parlementaire en fait. Donc attention parce que l'utilité de notre commission, c'est pas seulement de discuter entre nous, mais de se, c'est de produire de la législation. Et si c'est juste pour parler entre nous, en fait, ça sert à pas grand-chose. Je veux dire, on est des législateurs, on n'est pas une bande, on n'est pas des étudiants à l'université ou voilà, on n'est pas dans un colloque universitaire.
Donc ceci étant dit, merci pour vos recommandations, merci pour vos préconisations qui rejoignent celles de mon groupe et pas uniquement.
Et pas uniquement, je pense que ça rejoint beaucoup de points défendus par le S&D et par les Verts sur le fait que la spéculation sur le logement, la financiarisation du logement a un impact sur la crise du logement et un impact négatif sur les personnes qui ont besoin de se loger, qui ont besoin d'un logement parce que ça augmente les loyers et il y a une déconnexion totale entre ce que les gens ont besoin d'avoir sur leur tête et ce qu'ils gagnent et ce qui est produit. Il y a une déconnexion totale entre l'offre et la demande de loyer et la demande de logement et un niveau du prix des logements qui ne dépend plus pour le coup du niveau de la demande. Donc bon, vous l'avez très bien dit mieux que moi, donc merci beaucoup. Et donc pour en revenir au législatif, on est ici dans le cadre d'un plan européen pour le logement qui a été présenté par la Commission européenne, le plan d'action sur le logement et nous aussi, nous aussi nous sommes très déçus du manque d'ambition de ce plan d'action pour le logement. Et donc ma première question d'abord c'est si l'Union européenne met en place un plan massif de construction de logement comme elle a dit qu'elle le ferait, ce plan massif de construction de logement en soi, en tant que tel, est-ce que ça risque pas de favoriser la mainmise de certains fonds d'investissement, ce que vous avez cité, est-ce que ça risque pas d'encourager cette dynamique de spéculation si on se focalise sur la construction ?
Première question. J'avais une question sur l'encadrement des loyers qui a été posée par mon collègue des Verts. Une autre question aussi sur les logements vacants peut-être dans tous les dispositifs pour contrôler la spéculation et limiter la financiarisation. On sait qu'il y a beaucoup de logements qui sont vacants.
Est-ce que vous préconisez des mesures pour s'attaquer aux logements vacants ? Je parle pas de l'expropriation, hein, rassurez-vous, mais ne serait-ce que par exemple taxer davantage les logements vacants ou les réquisitionner, ce qui signifie forcer le propriétaire à le louer et à toucher un loyer. Et dernière chose, donc est-ce que vous pouvez développer un peu sur les le nouveau secteur de spéculation qui est la niche, donc par exemple le logement étudiant, je pense au co-living, je pense à tous les logements dans les centres-villes où on y fait de la colocation pour étudiants, ce qui permet d'augmenter les profits, d'augmenter les bénéfices qu'on en retire. J'ai l'impression que dans un certain nombre de villes, c'est un peu la phase d'après Airbnb sur comment retirer, faire en sorte de maximiser les profits qu'on retire du logement. Est-ce que vous pouvez nous donner des pistes pour contrer ce processus ?
Merci.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you, Madame Chaibi. It's extending the number of questions and speaking time, and I don't know who of the two experts wants to answer the questions. I leave it to you.
Manuel Aalbers
Okay, I'll start again and if I miss something, Felix will add something. So thank you very much for the questions. If the EU starts a house building plan, will it encourage certain investment funds? Yes. So it's about where you put the incentives, right?
So many of our recommendations suggest that it would be good to incentivize housing production in the sense of housing construction rather than simply buying up existing housing. So I think that's one risk with a lot of the current measures, also at many member states themselves, is that it encourages so-called investment in housing but doesn't specify if that's new investment in new construction or if that's simply buying up existing housing. So we say it would be good that if you give tax advantages, subsidies, loans, whatever you would do, either at the EU level or the member state level, it would be good to target it on the one hand primarily on new construction and then more specifically on the construction of the kind of housing that's needed. So in a broad term that's affordable housing. What is affordable may not be the same in France as it may be in Croatia or in Ireland.
So that might be an issue of member states to see what they need. But if we put incentives, government incentives on whatever level of government, it would be good to actually look at that productive investment, again aligning with the Draghi report, and to look at investments that go in the type of housing that's actually needed rather than the type of housing that's the most attractive to investors. Vacant housing, yes. We don't talk much about vacant housing.
Sometimes vacant housing is seen as a form of speculation, but I would say most forms of vacant housing are not a form of speculation because most people don't make any money on it. A lot of vacant housing is run down. So it would first need to be renovated. So if there's vacant housing in an area where there's also a housing shortage, it could help to have programs to activate, you could say, that kind of vacant housing. That could absolutely help.
Also, some of those are not big landlords, a lot of them is families who inherited the property, don't know what to do with it. So there it's about facilitating in a way small investment, a lot of it also. Taxing them could be one thing you would do with the type of vacancy you find, for instance, in big cities where there are people who own multiple properties and don't live in one of those properties a large part of the year. I mean, there's reports on London, especially in rich neighborhoods, there's a lot of empty properties. And even in a rich neighborhood, the shops don't survive anymore because there's not enough people living there.
Then you could think about taxing those properties, but you would also need more work then on tax evasion because a lot of those properties, we did this study almost ten years ago where we looked specifically at London and New York and we found a lot of those properties are owned through tax havens. So we often don't even know who the real owners are, which makes it even harder to tax them.
So that would be another problem you would have to force first. So forcing owners to rent out, I think that might be hard with property rights, but in some countries there are some rules about what you can do with your property and what you cannot do. Sometimes you need some sort of permits if you want to, if you want to live there yourself, you need to have a connection, otherwise you may not be able to buy up the property. So some member states have experience with that. So again, that would be something I think probably hard for the EU to solve, but potentially at a lower level there could be something that maybe the EU could investigate the options there or support them.
Then about new speculative co-living, student housing, shared housing. So this is these niche asset classes that we had as a third entry point. So this is definitely a fast-growing market, but still very small. So this is where we see a lot of the new actors present that didn't even exist a few years ago. A lot of that is with money coming through the city of London.
So it's channeled through big investment markets and a lot of them have backed up money to invest a lot of money to expand really fast. Also, if you look at student housing, a lot of those organizations are active throughout many member states, whereas a lot of the other corporate landlords we looked at, many of them are active in one or two countries and only a few of them are active in five, six, seven countries.
With the student housing, some organizations are really very internationally active and have a business model to grow fast. So this is typically not through Airbnb, but in a way is this whole market that is not purely short-term, it's not like holiday lets, but it's anywhere between a month and maybe a year. In Brussels, that's a huge market now. I'm sure some of the young people in this room probably live in co-living and in those kind of properties because Brussels is one of the biggest markets for it. But we see these markets growing throughout Europe, also in Central and Eastern Europe, also in Southern Europe.
Thank you.
Felix Böhmer
Yeah, just a very short addition to keep in time. But regarding the first question particularly on how to encourage or, sorry, not to encourage speculation with new EU funding, I think there the main point is to understand housing as infrastructure first and foremost and to understand it in a similar way in which we fund infrastructure, meaning that there is a need to tie strict requirements to investment and to guide credit, especially where it flows through the EIB, towards affordable housing that is affordable for a long time, that might even be conditioned with capped returns or that might be tied to a cost-rental model.
So to understand that the funding and the way in which the funding is directed very much influences markets. There's also the other side, apart from sort of things that the EU level can do, there's also things that the EU level can not do, for example, further the securitization markets, which some proposals are currently underway as far as I understand, to broaden securitization of mortgages again, which obviously would sort of further speculation in the systemic sense.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much. And I propose that we move to the catch-the-eye session, and I would really encourage members who wish to intervene here to keep their statements to one minute each, and I will group them all together and then we'll go into a final round with the two experts. So the first speaker I have here on my list is Georgina Teodorescu.
Georgiana Teodorescu
Thank you, Chair. I will speak in Romanian, if it's possible.
Thank you so much. Cred că ar trebui să profităm de această ocazie când avem atâția experți prezenți astăzi în sală și să încercăm să aflăm răspunsul la o întrebare vitală. Cum putem la nivel european să facem cât mai funcțională această cooperare între stat și privați în așa fel încât sectorul caselor să profite, să fie avantajat și nu dezavantajat, adică să putem să vorbim realmente de sustenabilitate și să putem să vorbim de case ieftine.
Să nu avantajăm interesele privaților care ar fi tentați să construiască la prețuri cât mai mari pentru a obține un profit cât mai mare. Deci să putem să menținem prețurile la un nivel avantajos pentru toți cetățenii, inclusiv locuințe sociale, inclusiv locuințe pentru studenți, dar cel mai mult și mai mult să ne gândim la această categorie a familiilor, a tinerilor care se află la început de drum și care de multe ori nu își permit o locuință pentru a-și lua viața în propriile mâini și pentru a se muta din casa părinților. Vă mulțumesc.
Maria Ohisalo
Thank you very much, Chair, and thank you very much to the researchers for your excellent report and looking forward to really being able to dive deep into the report and read it. As my colleague Gordon here already mentioned, we had the Parliament's report coming out and unfortunately the discussion around the speculation there is mainly about harmful speculation. So I would like to ask you, do you see that there is only speculation that is nearly always harmful, or is there like, can you divide it into, if you get my question? And can you give me examples of maybe EU countries that could show that maybe this speculation has not gone that far yet? I come from Finland and I used to be the housing minister also and I think that our housing model and the mix has actually been quite good.
And I don't know if you have here comparisons between the countries, but maybe you can give some examples of different countries. And then, yeah, maybe a third question from your point of view, because what I saw was a problem with the Parliament's report was that we did not understand, or some in the report did not understand the underlying reasons of the housing crisis. One being not enough affordable housing around Europe, proliferation of the short-term rentals, and then also this speculation in general. So would you say that if you would list five biggest reasons for the housing crisis, is speculation one of the biggest reasons for the housing crisis at the time being? Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you. And I also have Irene Montero on my list. Anyone else should raise their hands.
Irene Montero
Thank you, President. I will speak in Spanish if it's possible. La derecha hoy, como pone speculation en el título, ha cerrado el informe, lo mismo hay que volver a enviárselo. Pero a pesar de lo que dice el informe, por ejemplo, Vox ha publicado recientemente un cartel diciendo que los precios de la vivienda suben porque llegan muchos inmigrantes y hay más demanda.
Entonces mi pregunta hoy es: ¿qué inmigrantes suben los precios? Adela Vázquez vive en una habitación con su marido y cuatro hijos. En una habitación con dos colchones. Johanna Pereda es una limpiadora y madre soltera que vive en una habitación en Vallecas con sus hijos. ¿Son ellos los que suben los precios o el precio lo están subiendo especuladores que encierran a la gente, a familias enteras, en una habitación por el mismo precio que antes te alquilabas una casa entera?
Y los especuladores sí que son extranjeros: Airbnb, Blackstone y fondos buitre que en España solo tienen más de doscientas mil viviendas con las que hacen negocio. Aquí muy patriotas, pero a esos no tienen narices de gritarles "send them back". Yo lo que pienso, Presidenta, es que deberíamos meter a cualquiera de los líderes de la derecha o la extrema derecha, por ejemplo Abascal, a vivir en una habitación con su familia un par de meses nada más, a ver si le parece que eso es lo que sube los precios o si echar a los fondos buitre es la única reinmigración que necesita Europa y que se vayan a robar y a especular a otro sitio.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you, and I give back the floor to our two experts. Who wants to start?
Manuel Aalbers
Thank you. So, thank you for these questions. I'll start with the question from Romania. Let me see. Student and affordable housing, social housing, family.
Well, I would agree that, yes, a lot of investment would be needed in social housing, in housing for families and young people. Two of the recommendations that we put side by side is on the one hand to really invest in social, cooperative, non-profit housing in countries where these models are well developed. But also the second one, to think of the countries where these models are not well developed or where they used to have those models but most housing was privatized, Romania being one of the second case. And there's a lot of calls also from people active in housing movements in Central and Eastern Europe but also in Southern Europe that say we don't just need extra money to build housing, we need the institutional capacity to build up social housing, to build up affordable housing. And then, yes, I think it makes sense to have target groups there in mind as well.
And, yeah, to if you want to have affordable housing to put your money there where the affordable housing is going to be produced. That doesn't mean it should only be social and cooperative housing, but then if you invest in subsidizing, in giving tax breaks to the private sector, then they should go to where the private sector is providing new homes rather than just buying up existing homes and where it's providing also affordable homes. So a combination of those two things. Then the question from Finland. I would say by its very definition speculation is harmful.
If it wasn't harmful, it wouldn't be speculation.
So that's one way I think to think of it. So if we think of speculation type four, well we were asked to look into abusive practices, well abuse already has it in it, that's a strong form of something being harmful, so that's easy. The valuation gains of course is a little bit more complex. Valuation gains is a more technical term, but I would say if there's a bubble, and either that bubble can explode because the valuation gains are unreasonable, that is harmful because that's not good for the market to explode, so that's bad for the market. The other option is that the rents will have to rise a lot.
That's not good for the people, so it's harmful in different ways. And there's a very good study that we cite from the European Central Bank on this, that also thinks of this as a systemic risk. So we were very happy also to see that study because it really aligns with what we show. They use different data than than we do, but they come up with very similar conclusions about the risk posed by these speculative housing models. Yes, I would say speculation is one of the biggest five reasons for housing prices going up and for rents going up.
So yeah, this also in a way answers your questions already partially. I would say it's not the migrants who are to blame. Speculation is one of them, it's not the only one. But the interesting thing is, yes, in some places there's a lot of migrants and that means more demand for housing.
But even in places where the demand for housing doesn't increase, housing prices go up. So if we look at this particular country, we have 10 or 11 regions. In all except one, the number of housing units has increased faster than the number of households. And yet in all those regions, the housing prices went up too. The only exception is Brussels where there is indeed a faster increase of households than of housing units.
But so in a way Brussels is the exception where you could say, well, that makes sense if there's not enough housing units the prices go up. But everywhere in Belgium the prices have been going up and yet the other parts of Belgium have produced more housing than the growth of households. And this is a picture we see in many places. Yes, housing prices and rents go up more when there's a shortage, but they also go up in all kinds of other places. And it's partially because not the right housing is being built.
So if housing is being built, it's not the type of housing that's very often needed, very often because the incentives are not there to build the kind of housing that we need.
So, our first set of recommendations is all about putting the incentives in the right direction to not to invest in speculative housing, but to guide the money in the right direction for the private sector to provide the kind of housing that's needed. And then later on, there's recommendations about how the public, the non-profit sector could also help you.
Felix Böhmer
Yeah, thank you. Just a few small additions in regarding the first two members of Parliament with their questions. I would also add that when we think of sort of the wider market and people even outside of, for example, just the rental sector needing housing, these valuation increase cycles that we describe do not stay just within this segment of the market, right? They influence the whole market. The ECB working paper that we cite, we cite it as Bandoni et al., they find statistical evidence of increased house prices just by the presence of corporate landlords and institutional investors, meaning that their presence and their business model drives up house prices in the entire market, not just in their own segment, right?
So, the influence stretches further than just their own housing stock.
And just to add to the question from the Spanish member of parliament, Spain obviously is one of the main examples of what we describe as entry through crisis, right, where a bunch of mortgages, non-performing mortgages were bought up, leading to the creation of a private rental sector that is very much unregulated, driving up the housing price, which mostly can be traced back to the financial crisis and sort of what was happening before and after the financial crisis in Spain. Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
We have one more question catch the eye last minute and I will give Mr. Avtias the floor.
Georgios Aftias
Dear colleagues, I will talk to Greek. Θέλω να μ' ακούσετε με προσοχή, ίσως λίγο παραπάνω από ένα λεπτό. Άκουσα με προσοχή τον κύριο καθηγητή, τις εξαιρετικές τοποθετήσεις των συναδέλφων μου, αλλά οι γόρδιοι δεσμοί δεν λύνονται, κόβονται. Στην Ελλάδα λοιπόν, κυρία Πρόεδρε, βρήκαμε 127 περιπτώσεις αισχροκέρδειας επί των ακινήτων. Και ποιες ήταν αυτές;
Αυτές οι 127 εδράζονταν πάνω σε συγκεκριμένες περιπτώσεις. Πρώτον, Airbnb. Απαγορεύσαμε στην Ελλάδα πάνω από τρεις μήνες να ισχύει το Airbnb. Τέλος. Δεύτερον, μερικοί έπαιρναν επιδότηση από το κράτος, ανακαίνιζαν ένα παλιό σπίτι και αύξαναν το ενοίκιο 300%.
Αυτό σταμάτησε με νόμο αμέσως. Το τρίτο και πολύ πολύ σημαντικό. Δεν υπήρξε ούτε ένα ευρώ αύξηση λόγω της μετανάστευσης. Και σας το λέω γιατί το νησί που η ιδιαίτερη πατρίδα μου η Σάμος έχει 7.000 κατοίκους και ήταν 8.000 οι μετανάστες. Εκεί δεν αυξήθηκαν τα ενοίκια γιατί γιατί οι ίδιοι οι κάτοικοι προάσπισαν το ιερό δικαίωμα της κατοικίας.
Το τρίτο, όπου υπάρχει φοιτητικός κόσμος αυξάνονται τα ενοίκια. Εκεί τι έκανε το κράτος; Είπε, δίνω το 60% του ενοικίου εγώ ως επιδότηση, αλλά για να πάρεις επιδότηση δεν θα αυξήσεις το ενοίκιο. Θα σας κουράσω αν σας αναφέρω όλες αυτές τις περιπτώσεις. Τις έχω καταθέσει και να ξέρετε κάτι, 34 ολόκληρα χρόνια ως δημοσιογράφος στη μεγαλύτερη εκπομπή της ελληνικής τηλεόρασης, απ' τα πρώτα ρεπορτάζ είχα ασχοληθεί με το θέμα της κατοικίας.
Επαναλαμβάνω κύριε καθηγητά, οι σκληροί νόμοι για την κατοικία και κύριοι συνάδελφοι θα φέρουν και τη λύση. Και η Ελλάδα έλαβε σκληρά μέτρα για αυτές τις 127 περιπτώσεις.
Και κάτι άλλο τελευταίο. Κάναμε μια έρευνα με τι τιμή νοικιάζουν τα ακίνητα. Ξέρετε τι κάνουνε; Φιλοξενώ εγώ την κυρία πρόεδρο και δεν είμαστε συγγενείς για να μην πληρώνει ενοίκιο και το υπόλοιπο ήταν μαύρα, δηλαδή αφορολόγητα. Σταμάτησε αυτό.
Ακούστε επινόηση, να είμαι εγώ συγγενής με την κυρία πρόεδρο που να μην την ξέρω καθόλου, να έρχεται να νοικιάζει και να μου δίνει αντί για 1000 ευρώ 800 και να είναι μαύρα και να λέω είναι συγγενής μου και δεν υπήρχε καμία συγγένεια. Άρα λοιπόν λύσεις. Προτείνω το εξής: όλοι οι συνάδελφοι που έχουν συγκεκριμένες λύσεις για τη λύση της αισχροκέρδειας στις χώρες τους να τις καταθέσουν. Ευχαριστώ πολύ.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, maybe one or two minutes as a short answer. Thank you.
Manuel Aalbers
Thank you. Um, so yeah, I very much agree if there's state funds going into renovating houses, then the rent shouldn't be increased or it should be taken into account at least for how much the state funds contribute to how much investment is taking place. So yeah, we have some recommendations on that also to prevent renovictions, to restrict renovation-driven rent increases.
So this is again very much about targeting the money. I think money is needed for the sustainability challenges that are there. Housing is one big thing in which we can make changes. So yes, money is going in there from the EU, from member states, but then there should be conditions if either the rents cannot be increased at all or very limitedly so. Of course, if there's energy, more energy efficiency and people's prices go down, a slightly higher rent might be in place, but that should also take into account how much already these landlords have benefited from subsidies.
So there should be a fair balance there indeed. So yeah, it's good to hear a confirmation that yes, it's also possible when the rents are set by someone else, even with migrants or other new people coming in, that doesn't lead to new rent increases. Yes, I research into the private rental sector needed. Yes, no rent being charged. We see that in some countries in the statistics no rent is being charged and that can indeed be under the table, black market money, or it can be someone's child, someone's nephew, etc., etc.
So there can be different reasons for this.
And of course as academics we would always encourage more transparency of data which would allow us to do these kind of studies much better.
Felix Böhmer
Just to add to that, Greece definitely has rigorous rules on speculation, but it is also an example of ways in which companies find ways around that. In Greece institutional investors enter mostly through the acquisition of debt servicing companies or through banks holding non-performing loans, so they are less active as housing companies per se, but they acquire companies that service mortgage debt, which is one of the reasons why we recommend not just sort of looking at the legal entities and legal entity structure, but to put the conditions on the funding itself and to condition the funding directly and not just in a way hope that the correct legal entity that is regulated in the intended ways will then use the funding. Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much and with this we reach the end of the presentation of the study on housing speculation in the European Union. Thank you for being here and presenting and answering all the questions. But I now would like to give the floor to the Commission for some feedback and comments.
And Mr. Baldwin, a warm welcome here and you have the floor.
Matthew Baldwin
Thank you, dear Madam Bischoff, Madam Chair. Lovely to be back in the Commission this afternoon and I can be very short, which is good news for the committee because we very much welcome the report. Congratulations to you, Professor Alberts and your colleagues. We are only just beginning our analysis of what is a very rich report, lots and lots of interesting things to look at, but greatly enjoyed listening to the discussion today. Open invitation from our task force team to engage with you.
We'll probably have questions because you correctly described, I think for the most part, what we are doing ourselves, working on a report to dig down into the pricing dynamics as well and your report will be very useful for that. I think there's just one thing I should usefully clarify and I don't blame you, I think perhaps our report omitted a couple of key words when we described the market-led investment framework. What we're looking at there is trying to help define, for the want of a better word, what we might call socially sustainable investments from the private sector. And simply what we're trying to do here is avoid having a top-down Commission or some other public institution-led set of definitions for what that is.
And we want to involve the private sector investors in that definition, hence the phrase market-led. And indeed, I think that rather goes in the same direction, at least in the heading of your recommendation 6.2, where you describe from mobilizing capital to steering it. And so I think that then very much fits with the other things I think you've generally assessed what we're trying to do very fairly and rightly. And if I may add, just thank you for being very specific in your recommendations. That is also very useful to us in terms of taking our work forward.
And as I look to the team to the right of me, we're hard at work and we're hoping to be back and indeed to report as well back to the Parliament on this issue towards the end of the year or early next year, depending on how quickly we can move forward. Thank you very much indeed, Manager.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, and I would really like to express my gratitude to our speakers here. I think we got a lot of input, questions answered here, and also because we want to dive deeper into it and are exchanging also with the Commission on how to respond at policy level to this.
So thank you very much to the members here also participating very active and the Commission for their presence. And I would like to proceed to our second part of this committee meeting and so I'm welcoming very much our guest speakers. Good afternoon here. It's really my great pleasure to follow up on today's public hearing on delivering affordable and quality housing in Europe, cooperative models, non-profit frameworks and simplification without a reduction in standards. An important topic here because we are convinced here, we know a home is more than a shelter.
It's really the foundation of which families, communities and life plans are built here. So and we see across Europe that this foundation is cracking. Since 2010, rents have risen by 28.8% and house prices by more than 60%.
So, cooperative, non-profit, and limited-profit models are really central to rebuilding affordable housing. So, what we can see is that building permits fell from 1.99 million in 2021 to 1.5 million in 2024, and planning procedures often take longer than over a decade. So, we are pushing also that simplification therefore is not deregulation, but that we need to cut red tape and shorten permitting while preserving at the same time the safety, also our environmental and social standards, because these define the housing quality in Europe. So, today's discussion examines how to turn ambition here into delivery.
And this is why I'm pleased to welcome José Telles as head of strategic communication, political advocacy and new projects, and he will speak on behalf of Sostre Cívic. I'm very happy also to welcome Aleksandra Krukle as deputy head of the department of urban renewal at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development in Poland, and she's at the same time board member of the Polish National Federation for Solving Homelessness. Warm welcome also to Alexandru Panisoara, I hope I pronounce your name well, founder Asociatia pentru Dreptul Urbanismului, that's the Association for Urban Planning Law in Romania, also here in the room, and Dr. Friederike Mechel, Director General for Housing from Hamburg's Authority for Urban Development and Housing.
So, as mentioned, all these experts will bring perspectives from across the housing sector and illustrating how cooperative, non-profit and limited-profit models deliver a long-term affordability in practice, and but also to highlight what stands in their way. The discussion today will focus on how these models can be scaled up, how the new state aid flexibility can be put to work for social and affordable housing, and how permitting can be made faster and simpler without lowering the standards that define quality housing in Europe. And with that, I think we are ready to begin our discussion here. And I give the floor to our first speaker, José Téllez. And Mr. Téllez, you have five to six minutes.
José Téllez
Thank you, chair. I will speak in Spanish. Bien, muchas gracias a especialmente al diputado Vicent Marzà por proponernos en esta comisión, y lo hago extensivo tanto a la presidencia de la mesa como a los resto de eurodiputados y eurodiputadas por aceptarnos esta propuesta. Para nosotros es una para para mí y para la cooperativa que represento, Sostre Cívic, es una es muy importante la oportunidad que tenemos de poder explicar nuestro modelo de vivienda cooperativa que creemos que es un modelo que es extensivo a con sus particularidades locales al resto de de estados de de la Unión Europea. Tengo una presentación, no sé si la podemos ver en pantalla.
We can see the presentation in the screen. Thank you. It works? I don't know. Don't works.
I will say next, okay. Bueno, this don't works, but no problem. I will say it next slide, no problem, okay. Bien, la vivienda cooperativa en España, nosotros el modelo que os voy a presentar hoy y que os voy a explicar es el modelo de vivienda cooperativa en cesión de uso. Le ponemos este apellido, si queréis, de cesión de uso para diferenciarnos del modelo de vivienda cooperativa de propiedad, ¿no?, que propone que cooperativiza la fase de promoción y no la gestión de toda la vida útil de la vivienda.
Es un modelo que, como veis, se está creciendo mucho en los últimos años, ya no estamos hablando de una anécdota ni de una fase de proyectos pioneros. Next slide, please. Sino que vamos a concretaros un poco dónde nosotros estamos, donde yo y mi cooperativa estamos trabajando, que es en la región de Cataluña. Next slide.
Que en Cataluña actualmente se están desarrollando el 56% de los proyectos de vivienda cooperativa en cesión de uso en España. Next slide, no problem. Como os explicaba, en Cataluña se están desarrollando, está siendo la punta de lanza de este modelo como se está pero se está replicando en el resto de comunidades del Estado. Next slide. Es que lo voy a decir mucho, eh, next slide.
I'm sure I'll repeat it. Sí, porque actualmente representa el 3% de la de la stock de vivienda social en Cataluña, que puede parecer que no es mucho, pero next slide. Pero todo este crecimiento se ha dado desde el 2016, desde que empiezan a haber un movimiento cooperativo fuerte y unas políticas públicas que desarrollaban este modelo, ¿no? Next slide. Actualmente el crecimiento ha sido de un 53% anual desde el 2016 y el 48% de todos estos proyectos los los está gestionando mi cooperativa Sostre Cívic.
Por tanto este crecimiento no ha sido casual sino ha estado causado también en parte por la búsqueda de soluciones por la crisis de la vivienda que es algo común desgraciadamente como hemos visto en el informe anterior en diferentes estados de la Unión pero que se han dado dos ingredientes importantes para que esto escale, ¿no? que es una cooperativa fuerte con voluntad de escalar el modelo que es Sostre Cívic y también unas políticas públicas concretas. Next slide. Os explicaré brevemente cómo funciona mi cooperativa si queréis tener más información os he dejado una serie de dossiers que tenéis en la puerta en inglés para que tengáis toda la información pero básicamente Sostre Cívic funciona como una cooperativa que aglutina diferentes diferentes proyectos en una sola organización, ¿no? con la voluntad de poder escalar precisamente el modelo de hacerlo más replicable acumulando conocimiento acumulando un equipo técnico y aplicando economía de escala. Next slide. Sobre la propiedad como os decía nuestro modelo es diferente a las cooperativas de promoción tradicional que tradicionalmente se habían desarrollado en España es la cooperativa la que tiene la propiedad de su patrimonio de su patrimonio inmobiliario y se cede el uso a los vecinos que a la vez son miembros de la cooperativa, ¿no? por tanto es un modelo liderado por la comunidad community-led como le decimos y que preserva las viviendas fuera del mercado, ¿no? porque de las lógicas del mercado, ¿no? si los vecinos quisieran vender sus viviendas al mercado tendrían que decidirlo colectivamente y en este caso lo tendrían que decidir colectivamente con todos los miembros de la cooperativa Sostre Cívic, ¿no? por tanto es una manera también como funcionan las Community Land Trust en aquí en Bruselas y en otros países de de la Unión Europea para preservar la vivienda fuera del mercado.
Por tanto es una manera también como funcionan las Community Land Trust en aquí en Bruselas y en otros países de la Unión Europea para preservar las viviendas de lógicas especulativas, ¿no? Next slide. Sobre cómo nos financiamos, evidentemente estamos somos una non-profit organization, quiere decir sin ánimo de lucro, basado en costes, por tanto los los costes son básicamente los costes de materiales y salarios, por tanto no hay nadie lucrándose por por la promoción de viviendas de viviendas cooperativas. Y la la financiación proviene de un multisistema, ¿no?, de viene de diferentes fondos, ¿no?, básicamente de créditos hipotecarios que en el dossier podréis ver quién da actualmente estos créditos, pero son básicamente créditos públicos, tanto catalanes como españoles como también de la del Consejo de Europa. Subvenciones públicas, ¿no?, especialmente ha sido importante también para el impulso de este modelo los fondos Next Generation, ¿no?, que la vivienda cooperativa en cesión de uso en Cataluña está utilizando bastante estos fondos.
Una vez en la en funcionamiento la vivienda se paga una cuota mensual que al final lo acaba equiparando este modelo a modelos muy parecidos de alquiler asequible donde donde básicamente el coste es devolver el crédito no Por tanto eso quiere decir que a partir del año 30 no la mayoría de nuestros créditos funcionan a 30 años como sabéis pues estas cuotas pueden bajar o se pueden reinvertir los posibles excedentes en hacer más vivienda cooperativa más vivienda asequible no
Por tanto, esta es la lógica de no lucro que es interesante, que creemos que es interesante para la política pública porque esta capacidad de poder reinvertir los fondos en hacer más vivienda asequible o en bajar precisamente las cuotas mensuales lo hace mucho más competitivo que otros modelos de de privados con lucro que proveen que proveen vivienda pública social. Next slide. Por tanto, os decía que es muy importante que hay cooperativas con estructura, con organización como la que yo represento que tiene esta capacidad de escalar el modelo, pero también ha sido muy importante las políticas públicas, ¿no? Y aquí os os pongo tres principales mecanismos de de colaboración pública. Ya hemos comentado algunos como la financiación, pero también ha sido muy importante la transferencia de suelo, de suelo público condicionado temporal, por tanto que siempre permanece la propiedad en lo público, pero que esa transferencia gratuita de suelo permite a las cooperativas rebajar bastante los costes y también compras conjuntas, ¿no?
También ha habido una serie de políticas de comprar más más limitadas si queréis, pero que también son interesantes de mencionar de movilizar patrimonio privado. Evidentemente, next slide, todas estas políticas públicas son condicionadas a un retorno social, muchas veces en reinvertir los beneficios como comentaba antes, en buscar que los usuarios finales, aunque tengan que ser socios de la cooperativa, sean colectivos específicos, ¿no?, como jóvenes, familias monoparentales, gente mayor, personas con discapacidad.
Por tanto, también hay cierto elemento de innovación social. Siguiente diapositiva. Y evidentemente también una serie de valores, ¿no? Somos una cooperativa sin ánimo de lucro que funcionamos básicamente en la autogestión de las personas socias en el modelo cooperativo. Por tanto, son personas que están organizadas utilizando la fórmula empresarial de la cooperativa para gestionar sus propias viviendas. Esto tiene una serie de beneficios que no me podré alargar hoy aquí, pero que son muy interesantes.
Evidentemente la sostenibilidad ambiental, como sabéis, seguramente habéis discutido en esta comisión diferentes veces, pues la vivienda tiene, es una de las industrias, ¿no?, más contaminantes y que generan más emisiones. Por tanto, también es muy importante que asumamos nosotros estos valores, ¿no?, más allá de la replicabilidad en la economía social. En todos los proveedores que nosotros contratamos mayoritariamente son de la economía social, por tanto somos también motores de otro tipo de manera de entender la economía y buscar la asequibilidad en la vivienda, ¿no?, que en los estudios que tenemos de impacto pueden comprobar que los precios de las viviendas cooperativas están entre un 30 y un 40 por ciento por debajo de los precios de mercado. Siguiente diapositiva. Es un sector que pese a ser joven ya está bastante organizado.
A nivel español se está organizando en la Red de Vivienda Cooperativa.
A nivel europeo desde hace un año formamos parte de Housing Europe. Y os voy a presentar ahora ya para terminar, dejadme si la presidencia me deja un minuto más, de presentar algunos proyectos porque os he enseñado muchos números, muchos gráficos, pero me gustaría que vierais alguno de nuestras viviendas. Bueno, aquí algunos datos de la cooperativa, mencionar que nuestro modelo ha sido premiado a nivel mundial por los premios World Habitat y las Naciones Unidas, por la Federación de Economía Social y especialmente también por Housing Europe en Dublín. Y aprovecho para para agradecer a Matthew Baldin, ¿no?, porque el último premio en Dublín lo recibimos de su mano de miembro de la como miembro de la Comisión Europea. La Balma, este es un proyecto de vivienda cooperativa en Barcelona, ya lleva más de 5 años en funcionamiento.
Es una vivienda plurifamiliar construida en en madera. Bueno, voy un poco más rápido, aquí hay un vídeo si después se comparte se comparte la la presentación con los con los diputados pues pues podrán ver la vivienda en funcionamiento.
Pero es una vivienda que a nivel de arquitectura pues está diseñada también para que sean puntos de encuentro, para que haya espacios comunes, para fortalecer la comunidad. Next slide. Next slide. No, it doesn't matter the video.
Gabriele Bischoff
Sorry, we have to finish. We have no time, but I'm sure you can see that on the website or we can send the link around. Yes.
José Téllez
Can I explain the last slide? 30 seconds. 30 seconds. We can go to the last slide. Aquí.
Next, next, three times. Sorry. Bueno, y la última. Next. Next and again.
Here. Ya para acabar, vale, porque sí me he alargado un poquito. Nuestra invitación, aprovechando la oportunidad de que estamos aquí, es que el Parlamento Europeo se emplace a poner la vivienda cooperativa, la vivienda sin ánimo de lucro liderada por la comunidad, en el centro de la estrategia de vivienda asequible para la Unión Europea. Y eso quiere decir reconocimiento político, financiación y crear marcos regulatorios que ayuden a los estados, especialmente al estado español, pero también a otros que están intentando replicar este modelo, para que sea más asequible, más fácil a nivel regulatorio y que haya sobre todo financiación. Y este era el mensaje final que quería enviar y disculpar por haberme extendido.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much for your very clear presentation and also the recommendation at the end. I give the floor now to Aleksandra Krucli from Poland. You have the floor for the same around six to seven minutes.
Aleksandra Królik
Thank you very much. I will speak in English. Thank you for the invitation and today I would like to speak about very special housing intermediation institutions, social rental agencies, because housing policy is not only about land, money or construction, it is also about institutions that can connect what exists with those who need it. According to the OECD, at least 10 EU countries report some form of social rental intermediation. France has mobilized around 93,000 dwellings, Belgium around 30,000 dwellings through 96 social rental agencies, Malta signed over 200 new agreements with private owners in 2024 only, and in Poland, my country, our recent research with my institute analyzed 15 pioneering social rental agencies.
Next slide, please. Now let me explain the idea very simply.
Imagine a private owner who has a dwelling but is afraid of rent arrears, damage, legal uncertainty, or difficult management. And now imagine the other side, a household that needs a secure and affordable home but cannot enter the private rental market because the rent or deposit are too high, or the income is too unstable, or the household itself is simply considered as or perceived as too risky. So the dwellings exist, the need exists, but between them very often there is no trusted institution. And this is where social rental agencies come in. Next slide, please.
A social rental agency is a public interest intermediary. It stands between the owner, the household, and the public authority. For the owner, it reduces risk, for the household, it creates access to a more secure and affordable tenancy, and for the public authority, it creates a way to use existing homes for public goals. Next slide, please. How does it work in practice?
The agency checks the dwelling, it negotiates or controls the rent, it selects eligible households, manages or guarantees payments, coordinates repairs, mediates conflicts, and when needed, it also connects the tenant with social support.
So, a social rental agency is not only a broker. It is a risk manager, a quality gatekeeper, and when necessary, a bridge to social support. Next slide, please. And across Europe, these tools do not all look the same. That is not a weakness of the model, but I would say it's a strength of it.
For example, in Belgium, France, and Luxembourg, we see more classic social or non-profit agency models, often with approved operators, rent guarantees, social support, and incentives for owners. In Ireland, Malta, Slovenia, public authorities play a stronger role through a public leasing or public intermediation. In Czechia, Slovakia, or Poland, similar tools are emerging where public rental stock is limited and municipalities need new operational capacities, and here non-profit organizations as operators play crucial role. And in the Basque Country, in Spain, in Greece, or in Luxembourg, the model is also linked to vacant homes, light renovation, and bringing unused dwellings back into long-term residential use.
So the European lesson is not to copy the legal template, but to support the function. And the function is clear: public interest intermediation between existing housing and social need. Next slide, please. Social rental agencies serve four major public missions. First, affordability.
They can offer below-market or controlled rents for households squeezed between residual social housing and the private market. Vacancy reduction, because vacant homes do not become affordable by themselves. They need guarantees, renovation support, management, and public purpose. Three, housing-led support. Very important: social rental agencies can provide scattered-site housing for people living homelessness, institutional care, or temporary accommodation, but only if support is provided alongside the dwelling.
And finally, market access. They can reduce discrimination and entry barriers for single parents, older people, people with disabilities, migrants, refugees, young people, and others who are often screened out by the private rental market. But let me be very clear: social rental agencies are not magic. They can fail.
They can fail, for example, if they are used as an excuse not to build permanent public and non-profit housing. They can fail if poor quality dwellings are mobilized without renovation, if tenants receive only weak or temporary status, or if operators are expected to manage public risk without public tools. This is why safeguards decide everything. Social rental agencies must be a bridge, not an alibi. Next slide, please.
And it's important to mention that the Housing Advisory Board was very clear on social rental agencies and their role. It recommended strengthening social rental agencies through an EU framework, but also stated clearly that SRAs are not an alternative to public social housing, but an important complement. In our recent work at the Institute of Urban and Regional Development, we analyzed thoroughly the first years of social rental agencies in Poland, and the Polish experience actually confirms a broader European lesson. The legal model alone is not enough. What matters is the ecosystem: the operator, the public authority, the owner, the tenant, the guarantee, the standards, and the support.
But let me end with a wider point.
Europe does not suffer only from a shortage of homes, but also a shortage of working connections between policies, institutions, and people. Too often, one part of the system knows the need, yet another part holds the asset, yet at the same time another part controls the funding, and another part carries the risk. And the person who needs a home is left waiting between them. Social rental agencies are maybe modest in scale, but radical in logic. They do not wait for every part of the system to be rebuilt before they start connecting it.
They show that housing policy can be practical, local, and human, while still being strategic. They remind us that a home is not truly delivered when a unit is counted. It is delivered when someone can enter it, afford it, feel secure in it, and keep it. And the last slide, please. Thank you.
So perhaps the question for Europe is not only how many homes can we build, it is also how many doors can we open with the homes, institutions, and responsibilities we already have.
Social rental agencies are one way of opening those doors. A bridge, not an alibi. A practical instrument, not a miracle. A small mechanism with a very European promise that existing homes can serve public responsibility if we build the trust to make it happen. Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much for your presentation and I'll hand over to Mr. Alexandru Panisoara. You have also six to seven minutes.
Alexandru Panisoara
Thank you very much. Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. Thank you, Giorgiana Teodorescu, for the opportunity to be here today. I will read because I need to stay on track. There are many things to say and the time is very short.
So, the housing crisis is no longer merely a question of how many homes are being built. It's a question of genuine affordability, housing quality and the capacity of the member states to create functional communities. In Romania, housing has become increasingly expensive. Home that may still appear affordable are often built on the outskirts of cities or in the neighboring municipalities.
Speaker 20
Just to inform you to slow down a little bit. The interpreters... yes, thank you.
Alexandru Panisoara
Sorry.
In Romania, housing has become increasingly expensive. Homes that may still appear affordable are often built on the outskirts of cities or in the neighboring municipalities, in areas with insufficient infrastructure, inadequate public transport and limited access to education, healthcare and public services. Furthermore, a home that is inexpensive to purchase may become very expensive to live in if it has a poor energy performance, high maintenance costs or force families to spend considerable time and money commuting every day. Therefore, the first point I would like to emphasize is a simple one: affordable housing must not mean cheap housing. Affordability must be assessed on the basis of the total cost of living: the purchase price or rent, energy consumption, maintenance, transport and access to essential services.
In member states such as Romania, the difficulty of delivering affordable housing is compounded by several overlapping institutional problems.
Public assets have not been fully inventoried, some land remains subject to litigation, urban planning regulations are often unclear and the administrative capacity of local authorities varies significantly. A state that does not know precisely what land it owns, what its legal status is and whether it can be used cannot develop a serious housing policy. However, identifying the land and financing the building are not enough. Housing also requires water and sewerage networks, energy infrastructure, mobility, school, nursery, healthcare service, public spaces and recreational areas. The European Union must therefore consider the entire housing ecosystem, not merely the cost of constructing the buildings themselves.
The second point, and from my point of view this is the most important one because it's under my expertise field, I would like to address to the simplification of procedure without lowering quality standards. In many member states, the proposed answer to administrative delays is simply to shorten the deadlines for issuing permits. However, shortened deadlines alone cannot solve the problem when public authorities lack qualified professionals, complete data and clear regulation. On the contrary, they may result in formal rejection, superficial assessment, litigation and lower construction quality.
I believe that we need to fundamentally reconsider the role of the public administration. Public authorities should conduct fewer detailed technical checks before construction begins, but they should exercise much stronger control over compliance with the law and over the final result. The state must establish clear, comprehensive and predictable rules: what may be built, where it may be built, under what condition and which standard must be respected. The design of the building and the demonstration of the technical compliance should be entrusted, sorry, to licensed professionals who possess the necessary expertise and who must bear genuine professional responsibility. A relevant example is the system gradually introduced in Netherlands through the Quality Assurance for Building Act.
The public authority retains its supervisory power and may intervene whenever risk or non-compliance are identified. I am not suggesting that this system should simply be copied and applied mechanically in every Member State. I am suggesting that we should adopt its fundamental principle.
The administration establish the rules and controls compliance, while professionals assume responsibility for the project and are held accountable for what they certify. Public authorities should not make subjective assessment of opportunity, architectural taste, or personal preference when the applicable legislation and planning documentation have already established the parameters of the project. When a building complies with its permit use, planning indicators, technical standards, and infrastructure requirements, the role of the administration should be to establish compliance, not to reinvent the rules for every individual applicant. However, in such a system, private professionals must not merely be formally licensed. Clear safeguards are required: independent technical reviewers, mandatory professional liability insurance, effective civil and disciplinary liability, complete digital project documentation, risk-based and random controls, and the possibility to suspending or withdrawing the right of practice.
Simplification must not mean allowing designers to assess their own work while the state abandon its supervisory role. Responsibilities must remain clearly separated and independent verification must continue to apply to essential requirements such as safety, fire safety, public health, accessibility, and energy efficiency.
The state must not disappear. It must become more competent and more effective in fulfilling its essential responsibilities: regulation, supervision, enforcement and sanctions. The final issue is how to preserve the affordability status of homes developed with public support. Regardless of whether these homes are delivered directly by the state, through public-private partnership, housing cooperatives or non-profit organizations, several questions must be answered from the outset. Who will retain ownership?
Who will be eligible to benefit from the housing? What happens when the property is resold? Most importantly, how do we ensure that the home remains affordable in 20 or 30 years from now? It is not sufficient for an organization simply to describe itself as a cooperative or a non-profit entity. We must examine the legal status of the assets, the use of any financial surplus, transactions with affiliate companies and the long-term preservation of the housing's intended purpose.
My conclusion is that Europe should not be forced to choose between speed and quality. We can build more quickly when the rules are clear, procedures are digitalized and qualified professionals assume responsibility.
But this freedom must be accompanied by accountability, independent oversight, and effective sanctions. Public authorities should not formally verify everything while ultimately accepting responsibility for nothing. Professionals should not be allowed to design and deliver projects without being held accountable. Each actor must perform the role for which they have the necessary competence. The public benefit must remain attached to the home in the long term, rather than being captured by the developer or the first beneficiary.
Thank you.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, Mr. Panisoara. And I think we continue directly with Dr. Friederike Mechel here, also for six to seven minutes, also to dive a bit deeper into this subject. You have the floor, Friederike.
Friederike Mechel
Okay, thank you very much, Mrs. Buschhoff, thank you for inviting me. I'm very happy to have the opportunity to be here for the second time. But the last time I had only three minutes, so today I'm going to dive a little bit deeper in the subject I already presented the last time, which is the Hamburg standard on cost-efficient construction. I'll try. No, it doesn't.
It doesn't work. The background to the initiative. Germany is the EU member state with the highest construction costs by far. It exceeds 147% above the EU average. And in Hamburg in 2024, we assessed the building costs and it was over 4,500 Euro per square meter of living space.
Next slide, please.
That was a rise of 68% since 2016. At the same time, we had a dramatic decline in planning permission applications in the years 2023 and 24. And the situation posed a significant threat to the aim of providing affordable housing for broad sections of the Hamburg population.
And against this background, in 2024, the initiative for cost-effective construction was launched. And the aims were to reduce building costs by one third with a cost target of 3,000 euro per square meter of living space for the privately funded buildings in the new building sector. Next slide, please. As already mentioned, the initiative was launched in 2024 by the Senator for Urban Development and Housing, Mrs. Pein. She gathered together more than 200 professionals from the whole range of the building sector, public administration, construction firms, architects, and everybody involved in the building process.
And the result of one year of thorough work and assessment and discussions and scientific research was that it is indeed possible to reduce construction costs by up to 2,000 euro gross per square meter of living space, and interesting, while maintaining healthy and good quality housing standards. Next slide, please.
In short the aims of the initiative, it was initiated a dialogue and to establish an informal network with the key players in Hamburg's construction and housing sectors. The aim was to jointly identify starting points and measures for cost-effective construction. We developed and published the Hamburg standard on cost-effective construction in the beginning of 2025 and we also aim and already live it that we want a long-term establishment of a supportive network or framework for cost-effective construction. Next slide please. We identified potential savings in three areas of action.
First is cost-reducing building standards, second is simplicity and low-tech and the third area of action is optimized processes and planning and acceleration of procedures. And in all these areas of action there's a total savings potential of up to 2000 euro as already mentioned per square meter of living space in new-built properties. Next slide please.
I'll show you a bit of the working method in the working group for cost-reducing building standards. It started with a wide interview of a lot of architects and planners and asked them for proposals. They submitted a great number of proposals regarding standards that they thought were too high or were not suitable for affordable housing and not really necessary to provide healthy and good quality living standards. From these 6,000 proposals, 350 were deemed suitable and discussed further in plenary sessions. And from these, 65 were approved in the plenary.
And after these 65 had been approved, 39 of these saving potentials were scientifically confirmed. And in this field of action, 600 euros can be reduced, or more than 600 euros. Next slide, please.
I'll show you the focus areas in the cost-reducing building standards. First, we focused in building standards, then in technical standards, accessibility standards, sound insulation standards, and fire safety standards. And you can see on the slide a number of the examples in which we think standards can be reduced and at the same time maintaining sound living standards. And what's special about this working technique is that every standard reduction was had a price tag where you can see how much money each individual measure contributes to saving money. Next slide, please.
Then we've got the second area of action, optimized processes and planning. What can private parties do to reduce construction costs? First of all, it's very important the awareness of cost drivers and saving potentials.
For example, the building ground I choose, does it have the good conditions to provide cost-effective building? And then what's very, very important, the formation of construction teams. Bring at an early stage everybody involved together in the practical project, the architect and other parties involved. And that helps to improve the quality of planning, avoid replanning, and make the most of each other's knowledge in order to save money. Next slide, please.
Then acceleration of procedures, that's the part for the authorities. Continuously enhance the efficiency of local development planning process and planning permission procedure. And then we defined a new standard, phase zero we call it, a very, very early stage of the planning process, which again brings together all parties involved, all authorities, everybody involved in the planning and building process, again to provide for a very strict procedure and again avoid the need to replan during the process.
And what's really interesting, by speeding up the process per month, there's a saving of 15 to 25 euros possible per square meter. That really shows the incentive to speed up processes. Next slide, please. Where are we now? Hamburg Standard distribution and application.
We're strongly promoting knowledge transfer by everybody involved in the standard. We apply the Hamburg Standard with a number of more than 20 pilot projects started one year from now, one year ago in July 2025. And we're pushing for a nationwide implementation in Germany. Next slide, please. And as you recognize, there are lots of structural similarities with the EU housing policy.
We strive for deregulation and simplification, process optimization and innovation, and are trying to overcome slow administrative procedures as a cost driver. Thank you very much.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, also for this in-depth preparation here to understand the Hamburg model. I will now invite the coordinators and political group representatives to take the floor up to two minutes, with I think always the best concrete questions, because we have the opportunity with all the expertise in the room to get good answers. And I will start with EPP, Jagna Marczułajtis-Walczak.
Jagna Marczułajtis-Walczak
Thank you, Chair. I will speak in Polish. Szanowni Państwo. Dla mnie najważniejszy temat w tej komisji, w której pracujemy, to temat dostępności dostosowanego mieszkalnictwa dla osób z niepełnosprawnościami. Poruszamy dziś na komisji temat właśnie dostępnych cenowo i wysokiej jakości mieszkań.
I pamiętajmy, że właśnie dla osób z niepełnosprawnościami mieszkanie to znacznie więcej niż dach nad głową. To podstawowy warunek korzystania z prawa do niezależnego życia, godności oraz pełnego uczestnictwa w życiu społecznym, zgodnie z konwencją na rzecz osób z niepełnosprawnościami.
Pragnę podkreślić to, o czym napisaliśmy w raporcie komisji HAUS. Mieszkania muszą być również dostępne fizycznie, projektowane zgodnie z zasadami dostępności i projektowania uniwersalnego, tak aby mogły z nich korzystać osoby z niepełnosprawnościami, osoby starsze oraz wszyscy ci, którzy na różnych etapach życia napotykają bariery. Dostępność mieszkań nie może oznaczać wyłącznie ich przystępnej ceny. Dlatego europejska polityka mieszkaniowa musi iść w parze z rozwojem mieszkań wspomaganych oraz usług świadczonych w społeczności lokalnej. Naszym celem nie powinno być jedynie budowanie większej liczby mieszkań, lecz tworzenie prawdziwie włączających społeczności, w których każdy może decydować o tym, jak i gdzie chce żyć, gdzie nie musi być skazany na życie w DPS-ie.
Ułatwienie życia Europejczykom z niepełnosprawnościami nie jest przywilejem ani dodatkowym kosztem. Jest miarą dojrzałości naszych społeczeństw i inwestycją w bardziej sprawiedliwą, silniejszą i odporniejszą Europę.
Upraszczając przepisy i przyspieszając inwestycje mieszkaniowe, nigdy nie możemy rezygnować z wysokich standardów dostępności ani z prawa każdego człowieka do samodzielnego i godnego życia. I tu nasuwa się moje pytanie i chciałbym zapytać naszych dzisiejszych prelegentów, jak według nich realizowany jest artykuł 19 konwencji osób na rzecz konwencji CRPD, czyli konwencji praw osób z niepełnosprawnościami w ich kraju, czyli prawo do niezależnego życia. Dziękuję bardzo.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much. And for the S&D group, I will ask and raise a question here. And I have two. One, Mr. Teles, you mentioned that your cooperative housing model would make up around 5% of the market in your region. And what, do you have any idea how much this is high in European comparison or not?
Because as we said also in our report, that these kind of models play an important role to stabilize the market.
So how is it in your region with this and other non-profit housing, to what amount does it rise together? And the second question I would like also to Mr. Panisouara and Madame Dr. Mechel on if you could give, you know, we are discussing in Europe now how to achieve simplification on a European level. We have very different housing markets, very different also traditions here. If you could give one key recommendation in Europe how we should approach this procedure on simplification without deregulation, what would be your concrete recommendation here? And I will change my role again and I will hand over to again Mr. Gordon Posanoc.
Gordan Bosanac
Thank you, I'll also have very concrete questions. First goes to Mr. Teles. You mentioned as far as I understood in Catalonia you have 71 buildings which covers, which has 1,220 homes.
So this is on average like 20 less than 20 flats per building. So when we are talking about cooperatives are in general we are talking about these smaller buildings? Or they are also bigger cooperative buildings? If not if they are not bigger ones what are the limitations? Why it's difficult to build something with hundreds hundreds flats for example?
I can imagine you know cooperatives a different approach but can you explain a little bit on that? And second question you also mentioned the investors. I guess those are the banks most of the time who are following you. Can you tell us how easy or how what are the difficulties to find investors and what are the interest rates if it's not a secret and are there fixed interest rates or they are changeable through these 30 years of the loan? And my question for Dr. Mechel is on Hamburg.
Yes, reducing building standards for me how you did this without changing the legislation or you did change national or regional legislation? This this required as well? And has there been any reducing of standards related to the energy efficiency or you didn't touch this part? And second it was interesting to for me to see to hear this optimizing processes on planning how you wanted to improve. And then you said but you entered in early ongoing coordination processes.
But isn't this the consequence of that like more meetings, you know, if you start earlier with coordination, it's more meetings. So are you simplifying or how this reflect then to efficiency and reducing of the price? Thanks.
Rudi Kennes
Ja, dank u. Dank u voorzitter. Mijn vraag is niet zozeer gericht aan de specialist zelf. Het is eigenlijk gewoon de prijzen van de woningen in de Europese Unie, die zijn met meer dan 50% gestegen de laatste jaren, waardoor dat eigenlijk gewoon betaalbare en fatsoenlijke huisvesting eigenlijk voor miljoenen Europeanen vandaag dat dat een droom is geworden. En ook bij mij in Vlaanderen is het zo dat bijna één op vijf van de huishoudens eigenlijk meer dan een derde van zijn inkomen moet besteden aan wonen.
En onder huurders loopt dat eigenlijk nog op tot boven de helft van hun inkomen. En in heel Europa zien we voorbeelden die laten zien dat eigenlijk betaalbare huisvesting en bescherming tegen speculatie dat we dat perfect kunnen laten samengaan. Zoals bijvoorbeeld wooncoöperaties die zorgen voor betaalbare woningen.
En woonbeleid gebaseerd op speculatieve investeringen is blijkbaar enkel alleen toch maar goed voor het financieel rendement van privébedrijven. We weten dat innovatieve lokale en non-profit woonmodellen werken en dat ze moeten groeien. Dus waarom, mijn vraag is dan, waarom maakt het EU-beleid hier dan geen prioriteit van? En nog veel belangrijker, waarom trekt de EU niet meer middelen uit voor sociale huisvesting? Al sinds de jaren tachtig natuurlijk onder de invloed en de ban van mevrouw Thatcher hebben lidstaten hun sociale woningbestand allemaal uitverkocht aan particuliere investeerders.
En dit publieke woningbestand moet opnieuw worden opgebouwd zodat iedereen over een fatsoenlijke sociale woning kan beschikken. Sociale huisvesting vandaag is volledig verwaarloosd en wordt eigenlijk door heel veel mensen niet meer gezien als een volwaardige en een goede optie. Dus wat gaat er aan gedaan worden om sociale huisvesting opnieuw tot een aantrekkelijke optie te maken? Of zal het idee van betaalbare huisvesting het gebruikelijke recept hier blijven volgen, namelijk waarbij overheidsgeld gaat worden gebruikt om de zakken van particuliere ontwikkelaars te vullen en met dit geld woningen van te lage en te slechte kwaliteit te bouwen en de bewoners aldus uit te buiten. Dank u wel.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, dear colleagues, for all the questions. I think I will just turn the order differently so that this time we start with Dr. Friederike Mechel and then work our way up there. You have the floor.
Friederike Mechel
Okay, thank you very much. First, I'd like to respond to the first intervention, although you didn't pose a question, but you stressed the importance of quality standards as regards the living condition of handicapped people and aged people and barrier-free construction works. And what we identified in the Hamburg standard is that these conditions not only pose costs, but at the same time it's possible to build barrier-free buildings and apartments by reducing costs.
For example, in Germany we've got a technical norm that requires, that's really, really silly, to have a step in front of a French window. And this costs money in construction and it also poses an obstacle to when you use a wheelchair, for example, to get to your balcony. And by simply omitting this, you save enormous costs and have at the same time a barrier-free way to enter your balcony and to better use your apartment. Mrs. Bischoff, your question, what would be the recommendation for simplification to the European Union? First of all, I'd like to stress that there are many similarities we've got and many common objectives.
But I think the European Union can really help and support measures like the Hamburg standard and other initiatives like this by bearing in mind that procedural requirements post costs.
And that technical standardization, we've got European standards, when they exceed the level that's needed, then it's really worthwhile reflecting, do I really need this standard to provide for the thing I really want to regulate and my need? And is that still in relation to the objective I'd like to have or I'd like to reach? This goes for example energy performance standards of buildings. This goes for environmental standards. This also goes for the procedures in environmental legislation.
Do I really provide for a better bird protection if I really exceed the standards and really exceed the length of the procedure, or can I find ways to reach the same objective, maybe even in a higher quality, by a more dense procedure and more other procedural requirements? And this brings me to the next question, changes in legislation. Yes, we identified the obstacles and the cost drivers.
And regarding the technical standards, we identified these technical standards derived from legislation, technical norms, both European and national in Germany, and own administrative requirements from the state of Hamburg. These were the sources of the cost-driving factors in these technical standards. And we assessed each and every one of these standards as to whether it is allowed to not to adhere to it or is it mandatory. And if it's mandatory, of course I have to adhere to it, but there are standards I can deviate from. First, the administrative requirements that we posed ourselves in Hamburg, we deleted.
We don't have them anymore. And as regards technical norms in the national level, we entered a dialogue with the norming organization in Germany, with the DIN.
And they are very, very interested in an awareness-raising process and in further giving thought in the norming process to the cost issue. And as regards legislation, we strongly support, for example, in the European Building Performance Directive, the Energy Performance Directive, to strictly make a shift and strictly consider the carbon neutrality instead of building performance standards. Because carbon neutrality is what we have to reach by 2050. In Hamburg, we have to reach it by 2040 already because of a referendum we've got there. And what we identified is by putting a too strong focus on the thickness of the walls and the energy efficiency of the building, that's a tremendous cost-driving factor, while at the same time we have to reach the carbon neutrality.
So that would be our really pledge for the European Union to consider this while rethinking the EPBD. Thank you.
Alexandru Panisoara
Thank you. Well, regarding the procedures to make to issue a building permit, for example, faster, but not to lose quality of the construction, the main issue that I see it, it's regarding the public authority, of course, because it's a lack of professional in the public authorities. It's hard to bring professionals and pay as as the public servants are paid. In private, they do much more money than in a public sector. So that's why I I underlined this new concept, I see it very very practical and efficient, as I said, the Netherlands already starting to implement step by step, by transferring most of the responsibilities that are today under the public authority to verify technical issues regarding the documentation, to transfer this responsibility to the private sector, to the professional, because imagine, for example, in Romania, an architect studies six years, takes a lot of exams to have a license and to have the right to practice the his job.
And after all of this, we have some verifier, another person overqualified that verifies the architect project. And then all this documentation comes in front of a public servant that look over things that are over his competence. But it's his job and he has this power. And unfortunately, as far as I saw last year and this year also in Romania, the legislation in construction changed to reduce the terms, to skip some approvals with like silent agreement. But it's important not to ignore the authority of the state.
It's the most important. His first job is to regulate. This is I think the in Romania especially the poorest part of his job. The regulation is very weak. It's not very clear.
It takes it gives a lot of space to interpret, to apply the from we have a same rule but it's applied very differently all around the country. So let's move all of this to the private sector and give them all the framework that they need to to elaborate all the documentation they need like very clear and predictable urban planning regulation, fiscal regulation. Of course, because all these changes that comes create a lot of increase the the increase the expenses on the construction because when somebody buys a land he expect to have the rules and all the urban planning regulation applied also to him when he bought the land.
One or two years, all these rules are changing and he needs to adapt his project to the new rules and of course other type of costs. So from my point of view, it's not enough just to reduce the terms in the legislation to deregulate because at the end is the one, the public servant, the one that will apply the law. And this we need to limit, what is the limits of the public servant applying the law. And for this in Romania we have procedures. Unfortunately they are regulated but not very good implemented in the public authorities.
But if you have a very clear procedure, you know exactly what a public servant, the role of the public servant, from where to where he has the competence and if he's doing something over the law, who you need to address, to whom you need to address in order to correct this. So from my point of view, it's not only about the legislation, it's also about the human resource and how to split the competence and the accountability to each other.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, also with your appeal to clear rules and procedures and also I would continue with Alexandra Krucli.
Aleksandra Królik
Thank you, let me first answer the question of Ms. Jagna Marczułajtis. Actually we are from the same country, so I won't say anything that is new to Ms. Marczułajtis.
However, in Poland, the convention, the Article 19 is not fully implemented. Persons with disabilities have access to supported housing, personal assistant services, or deinstitutionalization programs. However, still it's incomplete because the access depends on the place of residence and local projects. It's not universal, it depends on the municipalities. Some municipalities are more proficient in providing this kind of services and letting persons with disabilities to guarantee right to choose where and with whom they live.
However, it's not universal in our country. And now we have quite a lot of changes in regulations, the changes, we are still waiting for the legislation on personal assistant services that is underway. But there is still a lot, a lot to be done.
And please remember that when we are speaking about access of persons of disabilities to this kind of housing, we are also speaking about our aging population, aging society. With age, usually some, some disabilities also arise. So it's not just, just a unique problem of persons with disabilities and their families. It's a universal and very important problem and challenge that should be very high on the European agenda. And if I may also answer the questions that actually wasn't directed to us, how to make social rental attractive again.
From, from my part of Europe, I can say that it's important to build trust in it again and to build consistency because usually when we after the transformation, the communist time, when we are rebuilding social rental in, in Poland and in countries of Central and Eastern Europe, it's not very usual that we are consistent in it. The rules are set for, from one elections to another and you, you don't build housing policy, you don't develop it and you don't build trust only in four or five years. You need decades to do it.
So I would appeal to all the politicians in Europe for consistency. Even if the governments change, it's very important to treat housing as our priority, and social rental, social housing is a basis because the system should work like that, that it has a solution for everyone, from the people experiencing homelessness to the housing safety. And each person on the ground locally should have access to all the solutions. Because we never know. I'm also involved in homelessness prevention in our national federation, and homelessness is not a choice.
Sometimes people who are in a very good situation can find themselves in the situation of the crisis of homelessness. That's why it's the responsibility of our system to build consistent and whole path of solutions for everyone.
So to build the trust in social rental we need consistency and we also need more trust in local leaders, in civil society and social economy entities. Now actually not only in Poland social economy entities that mostly focused on reintegration and professional activation of groups that vulnerable groups, now they realize that without a decent home it's impossible to reintegrate, to build new professional life, to build anything. That's why those leaders who are usually the engines that start all the changes, they see housing as one of the priorities. So hopefully also on the European level they will be giving this given this support to also be important actors in delivering housing, affordable and decent housing to everyone. Thank you.
José Téllez
Thank you chair. I will speak in Spanish. Bien voy a responder directamente algunas cuestiones que los algunos diputados me han podido trasladar empezando por el final sobre la cantidad de viviendas que hacemos por la vivienda cooperativa.
Concretamente en Sostre Cívic preferimos hacer proyectos, edificios a partir de 20-30 viviendas para precisamente aplicar un poco de escala, pero no descartamos ninguna opción. O sea, también tenemos el proyecto más pequeño que tenemos es de tres viviendas, también tenemos de 10, pero actualmente estamos desarrollando dos proyectos que son los más grandes que se han desarrollado en toda España de 60 y 62 viviendas cada uno y estamos trabajando en uno de 120, que si todo va bien tirará adelante, de 120 viviendas en la ciudad de Barcelona. Todos estos proyectos están siendo con colaboración pública, por tanto tendemos a hacer cuanto más vivienda mejor porque queremos responder también a esta emergencia social por el derecho a la vivienda. Sobre los tipos de interés y los créditos bancarios, nosotros actualmente nos estamos financiando básicamente a través de créditos públicos, créditos públicos de banca pública a nivel catalán y español y también del Consejo de Europa a través del Banco de Desarrollo del Consejo de Europa. Y con este tipo de bancos tenemos un crédito fijo alrededor entre el 3,5 o 4%, pero tenemos una política pública muy interesante en Cataluña que nos subvenciona el tipo de interés y por tanto se nos queda un tipo de interés alrededor del 2%, 2,5%.
Esto es una política pública de subvención del tipo de interés que creemos que es muy interesante y que nos permite también garantizar la asequibilidad a largo plazo de los proyectos. Pero también tenemos otro tipo de proyectos que están financiados por banca privada pero banca privada no tradicional banca privada pública ay perdón cooperativa o ética no? que entonces se trabajan con con tipos del del Euribor no? pero que también es muy importante que este tipo de bancos también financie este proyectos no? Respecto a la banca tradicional aunque haya habido diálogos no hay una confianza en este tipo de modelo de vivienda cooperativa para trabajar no confían en este tipo de gestión colectiva de la vivienda pero seguimos trabajando porque creemos que después de tantos años de trabajo en algún momento tendrán que entrar porque también es importante que entre la banca tradicional para poder desarrollar este tipo para poder escalar no la vivienda cooperativa aunque estamos muy contentos de poder financiarnos con banca pública y creemos que este es el modelo que se tiene que desarrollar para garantizar la asequibilidad.
Las preguntas que nos trasladaba la presidenta sobre el tipo de sobre el porcentaje respecto al mercado, lo que decía mi presentación es que la vivienda cooperativa actualmente en Cataluña representa el 3% de la vivienda social de Cataluña. La vivienda social en Cataluña, como en el resto del Estado, son porcentajes que están muy por debajo de los estándares europeos. Estamos hablando de un 2% del stock, por tanto estamos hablando de cantidades que son pequeñas, muy pequeñas, pero que han crecido sobre todo en los últimos siete, ocho años, ¿no? Por tanto estamos hablando de un modelo emergente que tiene mucha capacidad todavía de escalar pero que está todavía en unos porcentajes muy bajos. Cuando nos referenciamos en algunos ejemplos europeos, nosotros con quien más nos reflejamos son en el modelo danés, en el modelo austriaco y el modelo suizo, que son modelos en algunas ciudades donde la vivienda cooperativa representa entre el 20 o el 30% del stock de viviendas.
Evidentemente estamos muy lejos de estos porcentajes. En estos países y ciudades que nos referenciamos llevan centenares de años de trabajo, por tanto nos queda mucho trabajo por hacer, pero sí que es verdad que está estudiado y está demostrado que en estas ciudades donde el stock de vivienda cooperativa es tan grande acaba actuando como autorregulador del mercado al lado también de políticas públicas, ¿no?
Y por tanto, eso es a lo que nosotros aspiramos también en nuestro país. Y sobre otros modelos non-profit con los que trabajamos, nosotros trabajamos muy activamente al lado de las fundaciones que hacen alquiler social, fundaciones sin ánimo de lucro que llegan a otro tipo de público que nosotros no llegamos, ¿no? Que es un público que de emergencia, que no tiene la capacidad a lo mejor para participar tan activamente como en las cooperativas, pero que necesitan también de una política pública determinada y por tanto somos aliados, ¿no?, en hacer incidencia pública. Y por ejemplo ahora estamos trabajando que en el Estado español haya una ley específica para las housing associations, ¿no?, que no existen en nuestro país y que sería muy pertinente y aquí estamos fundaciones de alquiler social y cooperativas de vivienda. Y creo que sería muy interesante que hubiera un impulso europeo, ¿no?, que regulara y que diera una seguridad jurídica a todos los Estados miembros, especialmente en el Estado español, sobre este tipo de promotores de vivienda sin ánimo de lucro, ¿no?, porque a veces los marcos son muy estrictos y eso dificulta desarrollar política pública.
Y ya para acabar, la diputada de Polonia, ¿no?, hablaba de las personas con discapacidad y aquí puedo hablar de mi proyecto en concreto, de mi proyecto personal, donde que todavía está en promoción en Barcelona, es uno de esos proyectos grandes de 62 viviendas y que precisamente lo estamos desarrollando con otra cooperativa que trabaja con personas con discapacidad.
Y estamos trabajando en una comunidad inclusiva y de las 62 viviendas va a haber más de 10 viviendas para para personas con discapacidad. Y estamos trabajando codo con codo personas con discapacidad, todo tipo de personas para crear una comunidad inclusiva porque precisamente es muy interesante este tipos de vivienda lideradas por la comunidad para para trabajar la la inclusión con personas que tenemos diferentes tipos de capacidad. Muchas gracias.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much and before closing this exchange of views, I would really like for a second time to give the floor to the European Commission for a brief intervention. So Mr. Baldwin, you have the floor.
Matthew Baldwin
Thank you again, Madam Chair, for inviting us to such an interesting discussion and thank you very much to all the presenters for doing such a good job. I will also quickly go in reverse order and make one of a few comments. Dr. Mechel indeed presented the ideas on the Hamburg standard at our recent high-level event and I think it's a very interesting perspective on how we can look at just really practical ways of reducing construction costs by simplifying standards and procedures without, of course, compromising essential quality, safety, and sustainable requirements. And it's a hard thing to create a standard and so you have done it, as it appears, the Hamburg standard, and very interested in the numbers and and the follow-up work.
And thank you for your remarks also on the the approach we take in the Energy Performance of Buildings Directive at basically looking at the least cost way of achieving carbon neutrality rather than lots of nitty-gritty ways. So thanks, that's not always appreciated. Thank you for the presentation on social rental agencies. I note that we didn't in the end manage to include those important words together in the Affordable Housing Plan, but it is not to mean that we don't really recognize the importance of this mechanism, this idea behind social rental agencies. And we see from not just the examples you gave, but from our own experience of how well it works well on the ground in terms of practical ways of delivering social and affordable housing in very different housing models.
So please continue with all of your work. Then on on simplification, Mrs. Bischoff, you asked exactly typically the right question, as you always, in terms of what precisely do we do? And I very much agree with the response of the panelists. There are ways in which we need to look hard at what we do inside the EU.
Technical standards, for example, can reduce costs on occasion where they enable scale, where they lower costs that way. But they can also be the part of the overall complexity and complication, unnecessary complication, which is impeding not just construction, but also renovation and other means of bringing supply back on stream. So simplification very much on top of our agenda. We will bring forward a housing simplification package in 2027, as identified in our housing plan. We're working already in close conjunction with this committee on a comprehensive mapping of EU legislation and initiatives and how they affect housing supply and affordability.
We've launched a call for evidence on the 1st of July. Submissions may be made until the end of September, and this is a good opportunity for all housing stakeholders to be heard, to make sure that you're pinpointing issues in EU legislation that cause problems. And by the way, this can build on the submissions we've already received as part of the open public consultation on the plan. In particular, what we're looking for in this is very precise examples of how EU legislation impacts in specific cases, specifying the particular legal requirement. It doesn't help us to say we have a problem with the nature restoration law.
Practical suggestions on how delays can be reduced and costs reduced, in terms again always thinking of trying to produce affordability. And this can often be good practices as well as precise legislation, as well as of course suggestions to increase productivity in construction and renovation. We're talking directly to member states, to regions, to cities. We've had multiple meetings and we will follow up across the board. We will continue to engage.
But I just want to underline a point which I think each of you have made: the process must be about simplifying processes and procedures and cutting red tape, but not about lowering standards and deregulating. And then finally, just quickly, but it's a very rich topic which again several of you have touched on, particularly Mr. Telles, in cooperative models and non-profit frameworks. We identified these topics as key areas of our work and it's set out clearly in the plan. We will be following up with the Parliament in the requested pilot action to develop, for example, a social bond framework for affordable housing to support the financing of social and affordable housing projects by cooperatives and non-profit housing providers. We think it's a key model to ensure affordability overall.
There are lots of ideas out there, different ways of developing non-profit housing. And I'm very struck by just since we've been working as the task force, there's already a new alliance sprung up called the European Collaborative Housing Alliance, looking at different models of student housing, co-ops, non-profits, and particularly in new places which we don't always associate with these models in Central and Eastern Europe, for example. What will we do? We'll try to promote a comprehensive approach with a combination of measures relating to favorable regulatory frameworks, supportive policies, and where we can, financial incentives. We know there are barriers, legal recognition in some member states, even of things that are quite well known, such as community land trusts.
We want to use the potential of the social economy framework to create social and affordable housing opportunities for everyone whilst contributing to housing price stabilization. When we dig down into it, we see 21 member states have adopted or are planning to adopt national or sub-national strategies.
And this is all very encouraging, and we hope that this really spurs the local development of community-led and collaborative housing models all across Europe. Last but not least, we very much agree on the comments a number of the panelists have made about the importance of addressing disability. This is also addressed in the plan and work continues on that, and I know this committee is also addressing this as well. Sorry to be a bit long, but thank you very much for the opportunity to comment again on a very interesting set of presentations.
Gabriele Bischoff
Thank you very much, and I would really like to thank all our speakers. I think you have seen that with your insight, with your examples, how important it is to exchange with you as the experts on the ground on both topics: on one hand, really on non-profit and limited-profit cooperative housing, also to see barriers that we need to address, as the Commission highlighted already, but also on this huge endeavor of simplification without deregulation and without cutting the standards that we want to define for quality housing.
Really, I also want to thank not only our speakers, all speakers, our colleagues, interpreters, and everyone that participated in this hearing today, also the ones digitally connected or that listened. We look really forward to continue this work in really practical terms so that these models can grow and from the exception to the backbone of the European housing supply. So, should members have no further comment, I will close the meeting and I would like also to underline that our next meeting will be after the summer break on the 7th of September 2061. So, thank you very much to all, the meeting is now closed.
Gabriele Bischoff
Ah, 7th September 2026. I think we are all getting a bit tired, so that you know it's in September 2026. And with this, I also thank the secretariat for all their work and staying alert until the last minute.
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