Housing isn’t just an issue in the UK. Last week in Madrid housing campaigners from across Europe gathered to protest outside one of Europe's largest property events, and there was outrage following the eviction of an 87-year-old woman from the home she had lived in for more than 70 years.
It’s not surprising. Across the EU, house prices increased by 53% between 2010 and 2024, while rents increased by 25%. In the UK the cost of rent as a share of people’s income has been rising steadily for decades. This financial pressure perhaps explains why housing is becoming such a politically charged issue.
And it got me thinking about why housing matters quite so much.
The obvious answer is that we all need somewhere to live. But having enough decent, secure and affordable homes affects much more than whether someone has a roof over their head.
There is increasingly good evidence that high housing costs impact much more than people's bank balances. They can restrict where people work or study, contribute to poverty and affect physical and mental health. One recent study, for example, found that as people spent more of their income on housing, overcrowding, severe housing deprivation, poverty and poor health all increased.
So perhaps a country that fails to provide enough decent, affordable homes doesn't just become a more expensive place to live. It becomes poorer. Not just financially, but poorer in security, health and opportunity.
And I wonder if there is an even bigger issue here. I'm definitely not suggesting there is a simple line between expensive housing and support for political extremes.
But if lots of people come to believe that however hard they work, something as fundamental as a decent home remains beyond their reach, I don't think it's unreasonable to ask what that does to their faith in the systems around them.
One positive thing we can do is look at what happens in different places. Take Vienna, which has a very different approach to housing from many cities. About 220,000 homes are owned by the city and another 200,000 are subsidised, meaning more than 60% of Vienna's population live in one of those two types of housing. The city argues that having such a large supply of social and subsidised housing also helps keep prices more affordable in the wider housing market.
Now, Cornwall isn't Vienna, and I'm not suggesting we can simply pick up their housing model and plonk it down in Redruth (but if not maybe we can have some of their chocolate cake?). But I do think Vienna challenges an important assumption: that if we leave the housing market alone for long enough, it will eventually provide the homes that people need.
Private developers will understandably try to maximise the profit they make from the homes they build. That's natural, but it also means we shouldn't expect the private market on its own to provide all of the homes that society needs. That's why Government has such an important role. It needs a clear housing strategy, it needs to set the rules within which the market operates, and it needs to intervene where the market can't, or won't, provide the homes that are needed.
I talked a few months ago about how a reliance on the private market affects things here in Cornwall. If you divide Cornwall into five areas according to property values, many people on lower incomes live in the lower-value areas. But those can also be exactly the places where it's hardest to make new housing schemes financially viable.
Markets respond to value and whether the numbers work. Housing need doesn't conveniently arrange itself in the same places. And that's where organisations like Coastline and other social housing providers come in.
It's also another reason to celebrate the £35 million of Homes England funding that we talked about a few weeks ago, which will support Coastline to deliver another 298 affordable homes across Cornwall. A lot of those 298 homes are in parts of the country where we know the market alone isn't providing enough homes that local people can afford.
Perhaps that's what those protests in Europe made me think about most.
At Coastline we talk about our ambition to end the housing crisis in Cornwall. That's obviously a huge ambition, and we aren't going to achieve it on our own. But housing isn't simply another policy issue, or another economic market. Where and how we live affects an extraordinary amount of the rest of our lives.
Every decent, secure, affordable home we provide gives someone a stronger foundation on which to build theirs. And that's worth remembering when what we do every day can sometimes feel like it's just 'housing', when it's much, much more than that.