🏠 Can you map a housing crisis without talking to a single tenant?

The ESPON #HOUSE4ALL study (“Access to affordable and quality housing for all people”) is a European research project on housing affordability and quality across the ESPON area. Using webscraping and income data, the study turns millions of listings in all 27 #EU Member States plus Norway, Switzerland, Iceland and Liechtenstein into a picture of who is being priced out, where, and under which conditions.

🏠 Unaffordability is the norm. In many regions, even a modest home means 30+ years of mortgage on a single income.

📈 Demand overheats, supply lags. Demographics, urbanisation, cheap credit and short‑term rentals push demand up, while land, planning and productivity constraints hold supply back.

🧩 Systems are fragmented. No shared EU definition of “affordable” or “social” housing, and each policy tool comes with clear trade‑offs.

➡️ The study calls for continuous monitoring and linking listings with transaction data to spot stress earlier and guide interventions.

For us, the takeaway is clear: The opportunity lies in backing founders who can read those layers, plug into local and EU policy, and use data like HOUSE4ALL to build scalable solutions that move markets.