In late 2025, the E.U.
Commission presented its first European Affordable Housing Plan. The E.U.’s involvement
in “social housing,” which translates into federal funds being used to provide
housing beyond homeless shelters for people who cannot afford to house
themselves, implies that the programs of the states had been insufficient. The
U.S. could take a lesson from the Commission’s plan, which is cleverly
multi-pronged in tackling the societal problem. Both in the E.U. and U.S., both
federal and state funds were needed even in 2025 when neither economy was in
recession. It is better to increase the supply of affordable housing when times
are good than when unemployment is soaring. This is an exception in the E.U. to
the usual pattern wherein the E.U. increases its competencies, or enumerated
powers, in periods of one crisis or another. Russia’s multi-year invasion of
Ukraine, which borders the E.U., and the Union’s foreign and defense activity demonstrate
how European integration has typically been enhanced by crisis rather than when
times are good.
Homeless in both the E.U. and
U.S. was a problem in 2024. In its “9th Overview on Housing
Exclusion” in 2024, Feantsa estimated a total of 1,287,000 people “rough
sleeping, staying in night shelters, or temporary accommodation” in the European
Union.[1]
According to the U.S. Federal Reserve Bank, 771,400 people were homeless in
January, 2024—an increase of 118,300 from 2023.[2]
The total population of the E.U. at the end of 2024 was estimated at 450.4 million,
and that of the U.S. was 341.8 million (whereas the respective states tended to
cluster in the tens of millions). That works out to .0028% and .0023%,
respectively. This may come as a surprise because in Europe, housing is more
likely to be viewed as a right than in the United States.
Dan Jorgensen, the E.U.
Commissioner for Energy and Housing (and the first such commissioner in E.U.
history), said at the time of the Commission’s presentation of its proposal, “Housing
is not just a commodity; it is a fundamental right. We must mobilise every euro
and do everything in our power to make sure that in Europe everyone can afford
a decent place to call home.”[3]
In the U.S., the lax regulations on investor-speculators on houses, condos, and
even apartment buildings evince a commodities-orientation to residential
real-estate, whereas in the E.U. the homelessness problem may have more to do
with insufficient supply rather than the salience of a political ideology
favoring business or disfavoring the poor as deserving their plight.
I contend that permanent
housing as a right is a better political ideology than is the business-commodity
view of housing units both because being homeless takes such a terrible toll of
the human psyche and because society should be obligated via the market or else
the state to supply permanent housing because economic interdependence is endemic
to a society as opposed to Hobbes’ state of nature, where life is short and
brutish. Put another way, being in the state of nature in terms of housing
while being in a society does not work because a society and a state of nature
are mutually exclusive. It is inconsistent to insert, especially within city
and even a town, the state of nature, whether in the form of sociopathic violent
gangs in south Chicago in Illinois that are impervious to law and order, or homeless
individuals in a town or city that does not have sufficient “commons” on which homeless
people could build small units. Having the state of nature within a society is
not like Ying being in Yang in Chinese philosophy; rather, it is like inserting
a vice like vengeance into omnibenevolence—a point that Nietzsche makes in
claiming that the Abrahamic deity is “dead” in the sense of having been discredited
by being both vengeful and perfectly benevolent.
By the end of 2025, it was well beyond time for the E.U.’s Commission to come up with a plan to rid the Union once and for all of the sordid plight of homelessness. Ridding
Europeans of the constant, underlying existential angst that does not leave a
mind that is subtly aware that homelessness could occur in the future can be
expected to result in happier, more relaxed people and thus less interpersonal
strife. It is realistic that the E.U., together with the member-states, could
eliminate in 2026 the problem of homelessness by relaxing state rules on whom
can receive housing assistance (i.e., not just the very poor), using federal “European
Social Housing” funds to get homeless people immediately into at least
short-term housing (even hotels), and incentivizing the construction of more
housing units to meet the demand, and even reducing housing prices and rents
for everyone. The sordid commodity perspective in America would be exposed as severely
flawed, as it reflects elected officials across that Union being in the
campaign-financing pockets of private finance and business rather than looking
out for, or protecting, all constituents from the horrible experience of being
homeless. Just in virtue of being a human being—how we are hard-wired and how
vulnerable the human brain or mind is to the incapacitating harm from severe,
existential stress—something beyond short-term housing should be ensured unconditionally.
How a human mind reacts to being homeless ought to justify the unconditional aspect,
as those who do not work must wander around at all times and be subject to
theft is a callous ideological belief.
