Dispatches from the Europe of 2005 ›
Social policy · Athens
The housing directive is twenty years old. The waiting lists keep getting longer
the branch’s calendar · POD 2005
In the municipality of Peristeri, on the western edge of Athens, the social housing waitlist counts 2,340 pending applications today. The Right to Housing Directive, passed by the Union in 2013 as a downstream effect of the Constitutional Treaty, guarantees the right. It does not build the apartments.
Konstantina Rigas is thirty-two, works at a call centre in Votanikos, earns €1,140 gross per month, and filed her social housing application in November 2024. She was told the wait would be eighteen months. In January 2026, the estimate was revised to twenty-four. She still lives with her parents. “The European Minimum Income isn’t enough to pay rent in Athens, and the list moves slower than anything else,” she says. “It’s good that it exists. But in seventy years I won’t need it anymore.”
The EMI — the European Minimum Income, set at €810 per month for a single adult in Greece, adjusted to cost of living by country — turned twenty last year. The celebrations in the European Parliament were rather cheerful for the people who work the intake desks. The problem with the EMI is not its level: it is that in Athens, Porto, and Jena, an €810 lifeline lands inside a frozen housing market. The Right to Housing Directive created obligations on paper; national implementation mechanisms vary so widely they might as well be different directives.
The Greek Property Owners’ Association reads the situation differently. “The market has not failed,” it said in a May statement. “The market reflects real demand against insufficient supply. The problem is construction, not regulation.” The European Commission has responded with the Public Housing Fund — €4.2 billion over three years — but the first co-funded projects in Athens will not be handed over before 2028.
In Strasbourg the debate now is whether the directive needs an enforcement mechanism with teeth. The Spanish and Finnish delegations are proposing sanctions for member states that miss social housing percentage targets. The Visegrád countries oppose in bloc: “The Union establishes a right, member states exercise it. It is not Brussels’ job to count how many square metres we built.” The vote, scheduled for September, does not have the numbers today.
Konstantina Rigas does not follow the European Parliament. “Vote for whatever you like,” she says. “As long as my waiting list doesn’t get revised again.”