Affordable Housing in the Mediterranean Region:
The 21st Century has brought to the fore an unprecedented crisis causing a range of largely urban precarity from financial market instability and extreme financialization of real estate markets, increasing concentration of income, globalization of migration, demographic shifts, natural disasters, global warming, and wars, aggravating housing unaffordability and jeopardizing public health. According to the United Nations Report, Housing is key to COVID-19 response and recovery, our homes stood at the center of all these social, political, and environmental shifts, including the safety of our lives during the pandemic (UN, 2020).
Such global precarity resulted in escalating housing and utility costs that imposed a financial burden on many households, affecting not only those with a low and middle income but, often young households, vulnerable elderly, and people who are reliant on a single or precarious income, including labor migrants and their families and people in need of international protection. The home is a complex site of mathematical calculation within a housing market, but it is also a site of personal, familial, and animal relationships and care — it’s a site of homemaking. (Rogers and McAuliffe, 2022)
Home is also a crucial element of placemaking, enhancing or restricting segregation processes, that cannot be isolated from key issues such as public space, transport, communication networks, and the socio-environmental quality, becoming part of the wider notion of our dwelling (Herzberger, 2018). Looking at home in this way helps to explain why there remains an urgent need for housing policy to embrace and attend to the diverse mix of happenings that impact our homes and daily lives.
Yet, market valuations of housing often stand in for a more detailed ethical debate about what housing is for and for whom it is built. The question of what property developers can sell and what people can afford in a housing market is subject to policy because the housing market is often thought of as a rational and objective economic process. When we think about our housing system in this way, the social claims about the value of housing are sidelined as a private matter for individuals to think about in the privacy of their homes.
This raises a social contradiction where, on the one hand, we have a right to housing while, on the other, housing is portrayed solely as a capital asset. Public actors and their housing policies play a fundamental role in achieving a balance between the market and the quality of life for all citizens. However, the current situation is anything but harmonious and just.
By taking a critical perspective of the current housing market, we aimed at broadening the meaning and remit of what affordable housing is, who it is built for, what it stands for, what it can achieve, and how it can narrow the injustice, exclusion, and discrimination inbuilt within housing systems. The development of affordable housing through sensitive and evidence-based recommendations may contribute to reshaping the housing market through an infrastructure that ‘cares.’
Through dialogue, collaborative methodologies, and an outward-looking post-pandemic housing toolkit, modern housing developments can improve their designs and service provision. Such housing policies require a deep understanding of changing demographics and modern households to develop planning policies based on equity, affordability, access, and a secure and safe surrounding environment. The combination of service provision, compassionate governance, engagement strategies, and social research are key to striking a balance between capital, quality of life, and the natural environment. It is also quintessential to find alternative ways to allocate funds across sectors, including community-led initiatives within the third sector.
During this conference, we brought together countries from the Mediterranean Region – Portugal, Greece, and Malta – to discuss how our current housing policies can be improved. Housing Europe, the Malta Housing Authority, and various stakeholders active in the field of housing and the fight against homelessness were brought together to learn lessons from each other to collaborate and support each other now and in the future.