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The Greens demand a European fund to boost public investment in social housing

2022-01-27T12:28:50.218Z


The environmental group in the European Parliament wants it to be assumed that "there is a housing crisis in Europe"


An assembly of those affected by the sale of public social housing in the Community of Madrid to investment funds. Olmo Calvo

The European Greens are going to propose this Thursday an action plan so that the EU can act in one of the fields that is causing the most social problems: housing.

To do this, they start from an exhaustive report on the sector in the Twenty-seven in which striking figures are revealed, such as the fact that the so-called institutional investors (funds, banks, insurers...) own 3.2 billion euros in real estate in Europe and they criticize that, increasingly, EU regulations “are driving the shift towards housing as a [financial] asset”.

Among the measures that environmentalists put on the table are the creation of a European fund to support investment in social housing and the purchase of real estate before it ends up in the hands of vulture funds, impact assessments on the housing market with each that the EU prepares or that central banks act with credit restrictions when “house price inflation” soars.

"It is true that many powers over housing are state-owned, but we have been fields of action in which the European institutions can act," explains Spanish MEP Ernest Urtasun, from Catalunya en Comú, in a conversation with this newspaper.

Why?

Because, as the document itself explains, ·it is time to recognize that there is a growing housing crisis in Europe”.

The report, prepared by Daniela Gabor, professor of Economics and Macrofinance at the University of West of England, and Sebastian Kohl, researcher at the German Max Planck Institute, underlines that the US fund Blackstone has some 700,000 million dollars in real estate assets in Europe or that in recent years, real estate funds have greatly increased their role in this market, with the consequent increase in demand and, probably, in prices. If in 2010 there were 350,000 million euros invested by these financial vehicles, in 2021 it has increased to one billion.

According to this parliamentary group, the growing role of institutional investors is bringing “ownership structures that are usually very opaque” to the markets.

To avoid the latter, they demand that the European Union's social taxonomy include measures to increase transparency "through a mandatory disclosure regime for all institutional owners with housing assets."

Another prominent measure is an impact assessment on each financial rule that the EU draws up.

Urtasun explains that the Twenty-seven tend to have a large number of financial regulations and directives and that a measure like this will help to think about the consequences that these regulations have on a market such as housing, which is increasingly becoming an object of speculation.

Along with these, the environmental group defends the creation of a European fund to promote investment by states and regional and local administrations in local housing and to acquire real estate that in times of crisis can fall into the hands of vulture funds, something that is seen in Spain, or in other institutional investors.

The objective would be for it to work in a "countercyclical" way, thus cushioning the impacts of real estate crises when bubbles collapse.

The proposal even goes so far as to put on the table that the fund itself be the owner of the real estate so that an "affordable" public housing stock is created.

Source: elparis

All business articles on 2022-01-27

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