If you want to live in a European city where residents think affordable housing is easy to come by, avoid London and head for Ljubljana. That's one of the possible conclusions to draw from a massive new report on European cities published by the E.U.
According to Eurostat's 2015 Urban Europe report [PDF], published this week, most European big city residents feel that decent housing they can afford is increasingly hard to come by. As the map above shows, only in Athens and Greater Manchester did more than half of citizens agree that decent value housing was easy to find. In slightly smaller cities, however, things get a little easier. Among cities of between 600,000 and 1.2 million inhabitants, more than half of respondents in Ljubljana, Naples, Palermo, and Diyarbakir, Turkey, agreed that affordable housing was easy to find. [...]
Even though residents of Vienna and Munich expressed doubts about whether they can find affordable housing with ease, they are also among the happiest with their incomes in all of Europe, with over 83 percent of citizens in those cities responding that they were satisfied with the financial situations of their households. Meanwhile, the number of Athenians satisfied with their financial situation is far lower, even though the same people consider local housing relatively affordable. [...]
Here we can see that the housing stock in Wales, rural France, French-speaking Belgium, Eastern Germany and Polish Silesia is notably older than elsewhere, with most dwellings built before 1919. These regions all have something in common: they’re industrial heartlands that experienced intense urbanization over a century ago. They are also regions where economic growth has recently been relatively sluggish. The one exception to this rule is of course rural France, where depopulation of the countryside has removed any real pressure for massive redevelopment.
The map also reveals some interesting reflections of Europe's recent history. The effect of two world wars and the global depression, for example, is still writ large in Europe’s housing map. In only two small regions across the map does housing stock built between 1919 and 1945 predominate. By contrast, Great Britain’s and Sweden’s largely green coloring, which denotes housing built between 1946 and 1970, shows how vast those countries’ public housing construction programs were in the years following World War II.
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