Housing Moves Up the European Agenda: Insights from the First Meeting of the European Housing Alliance
Brussels, June 2026
Last week I was in Brussels for the inaugural meeting of the European Housing Alliance, the new coordination platform that will carry the European Affordable Housing Plan from principles into practice. It was, by any measure, a significant moment for everyone who works on housing, planning and placemaking across the EU, and it was striking to see how far the conversation has travelled in a short space of time.
It was noted that a few years ago, the idea of convening several hundred organisations around a single table to talk about housing at European level would have seemed unlikely. Housing has traditionally sat firmly within national, regional and local competence, and the EU’s direct powers in the area remain limited. Yet close to 700 organisations have already registered their interest in the Alliance, and roughly 500 people joined the first meeting online alongside those of us in the room.
There can be no doubt, housing affordability has become one of the defining political and social questions of the moment, and there is a clear appetite to work on it together.
What the Alliance is, and what it is not
The Alliance was launched in May 2026 by Dan Jørgensen, the European Commissioner for Energy and Housing, and this first meeting – framed as moving “from principles to practice” – was its formal kick-off. It serves as the governance structure for the European Affordable Housing Plan, which the Commission published in December 2025.
It has been a particularly frustrating decade for anyone involved in housing delivery – or indeed, waiting on that housing – so to manage expectations, it’s important to note that the Alliance is a voluntary, subsidiarity-bound platform for cooperation, mutual learning and the exchange of practical experience. It is explicitly not a new EU housing authority, and it is not intended to duplicate existing structures such as the European Platform on Combating Homelessness. Most of the levers that actually shape housing outcomes – planning systems, social housing, construction policy, tenancy law, the bulk of housing support – remain with member states, regions and municipalities. The Alliance’s value, as the Commission frames it, lies in coherence: bringing a fragmented policy area into closer alignment, surfacing what works, and helping good practice travel.
*The principle of subsidiarity is an important one: social and political decisions should always be handled at the most immediate or local level capable of resolving them effectively. Within the EU context, this is often used as short-hand for Member State, however, within individual Member States, this can break down further to local authorities and even municipal districts, if that degree of ‘local’ can effectively tackle the issue at hand.
The day was structured around three questions: WHO should be around the table (“Who is not in the room”?), WHAT the priorities should be, and HOW the Alliance should work in practice. Outputs will flow through an annual work programme and a set of thematic work streams, with written submissions remaining open after the meeting.
A strong Irish presence
What stood out to me, listening from the room, was how prominent the Irish contribution was – and how well-timed. Ireland takes up the Presidency of the Council of the European Union on 1 July 2026, the first leg of the trio it shares with Lithuania and Greece, and housing sits high on its agenda.
The Irish Presidency’s housing priorities were set out clearly: an approach “defined by delivery and action”, captured in the phrase Ní neart go cur le chéile – there is no strength without unity. In concrete terms, Ireland will work to broker Council agreement on two instruments: the Affordable Housing Act, which the Commission is due to present during 2026, and a Council Recommendation on fighting housing exclusion, linked to the forthcoming EU Anti-Poverty Strategy. Ireland also intends to host an informal housing ministerial in late November 2026, held alongside a meeting of the European Platform on Combating Homelessness. The alignment between the European Affordable Housing Plan and Ireland’s own Delivering Homes, Building Communities was emphasised more than once.
Eamon Ryan (Ireland’s former Environment Minister), who now chairs the Commission’s Housing Advisory Board, offered one of the more substantive interventions of the morning. He described the Alliance as the “operational core” his board had recommended – a delivery hub anchored in the local. I found his framing of the geography of the crisis particularly resonant: he set the acute pressure on cities alongside the very different rural reality of low prices and depopulation, and he named the siloed structure of government departments as the single greatest obstacle to delivery. His point that existing housing stock should be treated as “the first source” of new supply is one that deserves to be heard well beyond Brussels.
For me, the Irish presence at this meeting represented something I care about in my own work: the ability to speak simultaneously to Ireland’s interests and to the wider European agenda, without treating the two as separate conversations.
Construction innovation in the spotlight
A theme that surfaced repeatedly – and one of real interest to those of us working with the built-environment sector – was construction innovation, and modern methods of construction (MMC) in particular.
The Cyprus Presidency, which preceded Ireland’s, flagged modular and off-site construction together with building information modelling as innovation priorities capable of accelerating delivery, reducing cost and improving efficiency. The European Economic and Social Committee, through John Comer (another Irish man) pressed the case for MMC more forcefully still, arguing for a rapid shift to methods that cut build times and embodied carbon while improving structural precision. Importantly, he coupled that ambition with a caution worth repeating: MMC should not be treated as a purely technological or market-driven question, but as part of a broader agenda in which innovation, quality, workers’ rights and the public interest advance together. He also called for a shared digital data space on housing-stock data, greater standardisation, and coordinated European research into new building materials – points that speak directly to the chronic data gaps in this field.
There was also a concrete institutional development: a Task Force on Offsite Construction, operating as a subgroup of the High-Level Construction Forum, with its first meeting reported as imminent. This is a useful marker for anyone tracking how MMC moves from rhetoric to delivery at EU level.
Alongside new build, the reuse of existing buildings drew strong support. Repurposing and retrofitting registered as one of the highest-interest topics, with city representatives pointing to substantial embodied-carbon and cost savings from reusing existing structures, while noting candidly that such projects too often remain stuck at pilot scale and that building codes still tend to favour new construction over adaptation.
Priorities, and the honest tensions
The Commission shared polling from the registration process. Among the four pillars of the Affordable Housing Plan, mobilising investment came out on top, followed by boosting supply, enabling support, and protecting the most affected. By topic, social and affordable housing led by a clear margin, followed by repurposing existing buildings and financing models. When participants were invited to name what was missing, the live responses pointed to speculation, tenants’ rights, financialisation and the right to housing.
It would be misleading to present the meeting as one of consensus, and I think it is more useful to record the tensions honestly. A strong current of civil-society voices – representing people with disabilities, those experiencing homelessness, students and young people, and communities facing discrimination in the housing market – argued that the Alliance risks being weighted toward well-resourced institutional actors. Their call was for the most-excluded to be prioritised, and for civil society to be treated as co-creators of policy rather than merely as communicators of decisions taken elsewhere. A related concern was geographic: engagement was visibly stronger from countries such as Spain and Italy than from parts of Central and Eastern Europe, and several speakers asked for best-practice examples that are genuinely relatable to different local, historical and institutional contexts rather than a single dominant model.
These are not criticisms or failings, they are representative of the questions this coordination platform exists to work through, and the fact that they were aired openly on day one is a sign of health rather than dysfunction.
How the work gets done
The final session turned to method. The Dutch Urban Envoy offered the Urban Agenda for the EU as a working template – a political anchor, a multi-annual rolling work programme, a co-chair model shared between the Commission and the rotating Presidency, and, crucially, a dedicated secretariat to keep the work moving and visible.
Vienna’s representative added a practical challenge: the need for valid data and indicators, and for a clearer member-state layer sitting between the political and expert levels. The recurring refrain – that form should follow function, and content should drive the process rather than the other way around – felt like sound advice for any new structure of this kind.
Next steps – Calls for Evidence
Among the next steps will be a call for evidence, a request for examples of how housing can be delivered quickly.
Since 2024, I – in a personal, professional and community context – have been calling for the housing ‘crisis’ in Ireland to be escalated to a housing ’emergency’ and the distinction is important (context: https://caroltallon.com/this-housing-emergency-requires-an-eu-ireland-response/).
Siginificantly, we briefly discussed whether ’emergency’ responses could be considered within this call for evidence – it was confirmed that it could.
In December 2025, at the instruction of the Vice-Chair of the EU Special Committee on the Housing Crisis (HOUS), Ciaran Mullooly MEP, we convened an EU Emergency Housing Summit in Galway, bringing together 90 stakeholders – including local authorities, disability campaigners, credit union, and representation from most of the industry bodies operating across the built environment – to collaboratively develop a framework for emergency housing delivery, drawing explicitly on two recent Irish precedents: the rapid delivery of healthcare buildings during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the modular rapid-delivery housing provided after the outbreak of war in Ukraine. Neither was perfect; both showed that when something is treated as a genuine emergency, planning, procurement and delivery can move at a pace we are otherwise told is impossible (https://caroltallon.com/eu-housing-summit-galway-2025/).
The work programme and thematic work streams of the Alliance will be shaped by what participants bring forward and responses to the call for evidence. With emergency-scale delivery now confirmed in principle, the task for those of us with evidence – on what worked, and what did not, during the Covid and Ukrainian responses; on emergency sequencing of planning and procurement; on local-authority site-readiness; on carefully governed, time-limited mechanisms that accelerate delivery without undermining rights or standards; and on a shared EU repository of best practice – is to put that evidence in front of the Alliance while its priorities are still being set.
What I took away from this most recent Brussels engagement is that there was more alignment on the problem (the ‘what’) rather than the solutions (the ‘how’). The challenges are huge, but it was interesting to hear about small pockets of success in regions, that might potentially act as a model for scaling. Ireland included.
Email: carol@caroltallon.com