European prices, Macedonian salaries - and fewer and fewer people who can square the two. Owning a home in Skopje is slowly shifting from a need to a luxury, and the numbers say it more clearly than any election manifesto.

In central Skopje - Centar, Karposh, Aerodrom - a square meter already costs over 3,000 euros. A 60-square-meter flat that used to sell for around 80,000 euros now asks more than 150,000. Prices have nearly doubled in a few years, while salaries stayed where they were. Rent, meanwhile, runs from 350 to 550 euros a month for a two-room flat - often more than a single average salary.

The shift shows in buyer behavior too. People now spend far more time researching and comparing offers before they buy, listings stay active longer, and more and more search across several neighborhoods instead of just one. That isn't a sign of abundance - it is a sign of people counting down to the last denar, because a 150,000-euro mistake isn't easily forgiven.

The question politics keeps dodging is simple: how is a generation supposed to buy a home on a salary that doesn't follow the reality of the market? When a square meter in Skopje is measured against a square meter in a European capital, but the salary stays local, the math doesn't add up. And while everyone waits for someone to fix it, an entire generation lives in rentals - paying off someone else's loan instead of building its own.