Europe's housing shortages are even worse than America's

Samuel Hughes · 16 Jun 2026

Others here said this too

Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

Their wordsWithout densification restrictions, housing shortages will only ever be serious in cities where land is really intensely scarce, as in Hong Kong.

Also said by Daniel Herriges, Noah Smith, Pieter Levels

Read the piece on worksinprogress.news ↗

5 korrents from this piece ↓

Samuel Hughes did not write this page.

Every claim below was made in this piece, quoted word for word and numbered in the order the piece makes them, so you can read it there rather than take our word for it. The sentence above each quote is our reading of the claim, not their wording. Each quote was checked against a stored copy of the page at build time; where the two differ, the quote is the fact.

Our reading
Europe's housing shortages are worse than America's, and Europeans do not discuss zoning as their cause at all.

Their wordsIn fact, European housing shortages are generally worse than America’s.
Our reading
Green belts and other limits on outward growth cannot explain European house prices, because densification would have supplied nearly all the same homes.

Their wordsBut this effect is far too small to explain the increase in house prices in Europe since 1914, when, after all, most urban continental Europeans lived in flats.
Our reading
Housing affordability is almost the direct inverse of how many new homes are built, so the answer is to build more houses.

Their wordsWithout densification restrictions, housing shortages will only ever be serious in cities where land is really intensely scarce, as in Hong Kong.
Our reading
Zoning is a European invention: German and Austro-Hungarian cities wrote the first rules protecting rich suburbs from denser building.

Their wordsIn fact, zoning was invented in Europe, in Germany and Austria-Hungary, in the late nineteenth century.
Our reading
Europe has no visible NIMBY movement because its NIMBYs already won: nobody proposes suburban densification, so nobody has to fight it.

Their wordsI suspect the same is often true in the rest of Europe: NIMBYism is the ultimate reason why the French and German states don’t solve their housing shortages through unbanning densification, but since the claims of the NIMBYs have been preemptively conceded by everyone, NIMBYism has basically remained latent.

Keep reading

The other pieces are the ones whose claims are worded most like this one's. That measures language, not agreement: they may argue the opposite.