Cities that filled up with holiday lets are about to get a legal instrument for pushing back. The Commission presents its Affordable Housing Act on 9 September, and the draft circulating in Brussels hands national, regional and local authorities explicit power to restrict short-term rentals and second-home purchases in areas where housing pressure has become acute.
The text draws a line between two kinds of host. Commercial operators running several holiday properties fall inside the restriction. Someone who rents a spare room or lets their own flat during August falls outside it. That distinction answers a complaint platforms have made for years, namely that blunt municipal bans punish households while professional portfolios simply restructure. It also concedes the counter-argument, which is that a large share of listings in Lisbon, Barcelona, Amsterdam and Dublin belong to businesses rather than residents.
Housing sits awkwardly in the Union’s competence. Member states own the policy, and the treaties give Brussels no authority to build homes or set rents. The Commission has therefore worked through the instruments it does control: state aid rules, cohesion funding, procurement and the internal market. The Affordable Housing Act continues that approach by clarifying what national restrictions survive free-movement scrutiny rather than by mandating anything directly.
That clarification carries real weight. Municipalities that capped tourist rentals have spent a decade in court, and operators routinely argue that such caps breach the services directive or the free movement of capital. A member state that restricts second-home purchases faces an even harder defence, because capital movement protections extend to buyers outside the Union. Naming the conditions under which those measures hold gives city halls something they have lacked, which is legal certainty before litigation rather than after it.
The plan grew out of the wider European Affordable Housing Plan the Commission launched on 16 December 2025. Housing costs have risen faster than incomes across most of the Union for a decade, and rent burdens now push millions of tenants above the forty percent threshold economists treat as unsustainable. Younger workers absorb most of that pressure, which feeds directly into labour mobility, family formation and the political mood in exactly the cities the Union depends on for growth.
Landlord associations and platform lobbies will contest the scope. They argue that restricting supply of tourist accommodation raises prices for visitors without adding a single long-term unit, and that the shortage stems from planning permission and construction costs rather than from holiday lets. Housing campaigners answer that converting even a fraction of professional listings back to residential tenancies would move rents in the tightest neighbourhoods faster than any construction programme could.
The Commission collects evidence until 30 September, and the act then enters ordinary legislative procedure, where twenty-seven governments with very different housing markets must find a common position. Dublin and Bratislava do not share a problem, let alone a solution. Whether affordable housing survives that negotiation with its enforcement powers intact will say more about the Union’s appetite for touching national policy than about anyone’s view of tourism.
