Barcelona: The European Commission tabled the Affordable Housing Act on 9 September 2026, handing city halls in areas of housing stress the legal cover they have demanded for a decade to restrict short-term rentals, and tying that power to a cohesion budget that has already shifted billions towards homes.
The proposal sets a threshold rather than a licence. Before a city limits platform listings, it must show that short-term rental activity has damaged housing affordability or availability for at least three years, and that gentler measures would not work as well. Mayors gain a route; they do not gain a shortcut.
Money follows the rulebook. Cohesion policy committed EUR 10.4 billion to housing in 2021-2027, mostly energy renovation and social housing for vulnerable groups. Since the mid-term review opened the door under Regulation (EU) 2025/1914, member states have proposed a further EUR 4.7 billion as of 2 September 2026, according to the Commission’s financing guidance for areas under housing stress.
State aid rules moved first and matter most. The Commission created an affordable housing category exempt from prior notification, with no compensation cap, letting capitals design subsidy schemes without queuing in Brussels for clearance. Member states may now measure affordability through rent-to-income, mortgage-to-income or price-to-income ratios, or simply count the years of income a home costs.
Regions read the package with one eye on 2028. The next long-term budget folds housing into National and Regional Partnership Plans and a mandatory 14 per cent social spending target, which local leaders welcome and distrust in equal measure, because a target written in Brussels can be met without a single key changing hands in Seville or Naples.
The European Committee of the Regions has pressed this point since the Affordable Housing Plan appeared. Its president Kata Tutto called the plan a first step taken in full respect of subsidiarity, while Barcelona mayor Jaume Collboni, the Committee’s rapporteur, described housing as the principal source of social inequality in Europe and asked the Act to protect a right to housing outright. Their joint reaction framed the regional debate.
Delivery still runs through banks. Eight InvestEU implementing partners now deploy housing finance, and negotiations with a ninth, covering social and affordable housing in Catalonia, should close this autumn. The EIB Group raised targeted housing support to EUR 6 billion in 2026, lifting its total for this decade past EUR 25 billion.
Concrete examples already exist and they are unglamorous. Berlin’s municipal company HOWOGE signed a EUR 500 million unsecured facility towards roughly 3,200 units by 2029. Portugal borrowed EUR 1.5 billion to build and renovate more than 50,000 social homes. Prague financed some 700 apartments aimed at public-sector workers.
Parliament and the Council now take the Act through the ordinary legislative procedure, where the short-term rental threshold will attract the heaviest lobbying. Platform operators will argue that a three-year evidence test invites arbitrary local bans; tourist cities will argue that three years is two years too long.
Whether any of this reaches tenants depends on reprogramming decisions taken in regional capitals rather than on the Act’s final wording. The Commission keeps urging managing authorities to move money until the programming period closes, and the numbers suggest many of them still have room.
