The European Commission presents its draft Affordable Housing Act next week. The European Parliament's special committee on the housing crisis meets the same day, where Energy and Housing Commissioner Dan Jorgensen will lay the draft out before MEPs.

The numbers behind that draft explain the urgency. Since 2013, house and flat prices in the EU have risen by more than 60 percent. Average rents - by around 20 percent, but considerably more in the cities. And these are not the prices of a market with no housing: by the Commission's own estimates, around 20 percent of homes in the EU stand empty.

Twenty percent of the housing stock empty and a housing crisis in the same sentence is a figure that demands a pause. That is not a shortage of walls - that is walls standing outside the market of the people looking for somewhere to live.

The Commission names one part of the explanation directly: short-term rentals. The number of nights booked through the major online platforms reached around 854 million in 2024 - 93 percent more than in 2018. The Commission is careful not to declare it the sole cause of the crisis, but notes that in the most pressured cities and tourist areas it further reduces the number of homes available for long-term living.

The bill for the solution is correspondingly large. The Commission estimates Europe needs to deliver more than two million housing units a year to meet current demand - about 650,000 of them additional, on top of the roughly 1.6 million already being built. The investment: around 153 billion euros a year.

And here is the limit of the whole operation. Housing policy remains a competence of the member states. The EU can offer financial instruments, coordination and common rules - it cannot build a single flat in place of any government. The Affordable Housing Plan, the first in the Commission's history, was presented last December. The law now following is meant to hand tools to national, regional and local authorities: greater housing supply, better use of empty buildings, development of social housing, simplified planning and construction procedures, and measures on short-term rentals.

Tools, then. Whether anyone picks them up is an entirely different question, and the answer to it is not decided in Brussels.

What is worth keeping from the whole exercise is the method, not the law. The Commission first counted how many homes are standing empty, and only then proposed what to do with them. That is the order of operations missing from every housing plan that opens with a promise of new construction.