Homes without people for people without homes!

Our civilisation has managed to send billionaires up to the space for leisure and tourism, but hasn’t succeeded in guaranteeing everybody the basic right to a decent and affordable house yet.

For too many people, housing is an impelling need, but for wealthy investors they represent an easy asset to profit from - resulting in increasing financialisation of housing. They even buy houses with no intent to live there: they keep them empty waiting for the value to rise and sell them.

This is one of the reasons why so many people still live in the streets, and it cannot be ignored anymore. In the European Union, there are around 700 000 people without homes and more than 11 million houses without people.

Homes must remain for people, and not purely for profit-making!

Our governments must act now to stop this greedy business from being lucrative. We call on European governments to:

• Set up a transparency register of real estate ownership information
• Map property that is not in use and put in place a progressive tax on vacancy to tackle speculation