How can we create affordable, high-quality housing? Just look outside the Czech Republic 

For many readers this might be their personal experience. Now imagine that your municipality contacts you and asks you to join a citizens’ council to express your view on what you need in your neighborhood. You discuss the proposals together and the municipality really reviews them and looks for solutions with you and other residents of your quarter. Some things transform quickly in your neighborhood, maybe new services and firms appear, your neighbors are able to come up with some joint activities and develop them there (some have chosen gardening, others a community chicken coop, some activities for children). The municipality financially supports your activities and together with experts and architects designs a plan for repairs and transformations of your quarter. In a couple of years, new apartment units grow up next door to your building and new neighbors move in, the old, dysfunctional buildings are demolished and new, high-quality spaces for children and older residents to spend their free time in are created. The situation in your quarter gradually transforms itself. You might not even want to move away anymore.

Is this an illusion? Not exactly

This is exactly how the gradual transformation of a diverse range of constructions into modern housing has happened in Germany, France, Holland or Austria. The investment resources for transforming whole quarters and supporting local residents have been acquired by the municipalities from EU funds, the national budget, bank loans, and from their own resources. The difference is that in those countries, municipalities want to protect their residents, including the economically weaker, and at the same time they want to develop high-quality housing, and those states meet them halfway. This may sound like a fairy tale to a Czech reader, but for more than 30 years, that fairy tale has been happening just a few kilometers from the Czech border, where our neighbors are transforming it into practice. A visit to the German cities of Dresden or Leinefelder, or to the Austrian capital of Vienna, is all it takes to confirm this.

Regulated rent

Not only will you find housing into which you might be glad to move immediately in those places, but you will also learn that even if you have a low income, you can access an apartment there and pay a regulated rent for it that corresponds to your economic situation. Private owners have to meet various conditions, so they don’t just offer big apartments to well-situated households, but you will find smaller, more affordable housing in one and the same building intended for low-income households, so-called social housing.

Do you fall into the 20 %?

That regulation is also generously compensated for by financial incentives from the state. Do you want a state subsidy to repair your real estate? Do you want to invest into new housing construction? You can get one, but on our terms, say Austria, France and Germany. The main condition that is applied across the countries of Europe is a mandatory percentage of social apartment units in the property subsidized. Know that these are not housing projects which no low-income family has ever actually seen. The truth is the very opposite.

In England, for example, municipalities themselves are able to choose some of the low-income renters for privately-owned apartment buildings. Legislation facilitates that. In some German towns, the proportion of social housing in either reconstructed or newly-constructed buildings is clearly established at a minimum of between 20 and 40 %. This means that in one and the same condominium or cooperative, people of various incomes meet each other, and most also pay regulated rents. Again, legislation makes that possible.

According to an investigation by the OECD from 2021, in the Netherlands a total of 40 % of the apartment stock is social housing, while in Austria it is 20 %. In Germany, housing is handled differently, with social housing in Munich accounting for 40 % of the housing market. In France, municipalities must arrange for 20 % of the apartment stock on their territories to be social apartments as per the 1991 Loi d’orientation pour la ville.

No more apartments unoccupied

This is not an illusion, it’s a functional practice for many years outside the Czech Republic. Nobody wants apartments to be unoccupied in any municipality, they want renters. For that reason, once again, the states of Europe have adopted laws limiting unoccupied apartments or at least financially punishing landlords for them. In England, the owners of unoccupied apartments and other real estate pay a higher property tax – 300 % higher – than they do for an occupied apartment. The approach taken by Munich is interesting, whereby the city fines the owners of unoccupied apartment units or those offered just for short-term rentals as much as EUR 500,000. Over the course of 13 years, until 2018, they succeeded in returning a total of 1800 apartment units to long-term leases through this tactic. That’s no small feat. However, it was made possible by an adopted law.

Does it also seem logical to you that the providers of social housing should meet basic conditions which are anchored in legislation, to which you could always refer? That apartments should not be moldy or have other flaws of a construction or technical character? That the state should establish a ceiling for rents that is strictly upheld?

Will we live to see this in the Czech Republic too?

The governments of the Czech Republic, whether they have been more social, more populist, or more right-wing in their focus, have continually postponed submitting the law on social housing that has already been drafted. In their legislative plans this law appears, then disappears, then reappears. Such legislation figures a bit like a ghost to scare people. The author of this text does not know what the variations of this planned law look like, but thanks to the interest of people from the Czech Labor and Social Affairs Ministry, she was able to study practices abroad with respect to the subject of social housing for some time.

Outside the Czech Republic, laws supporting social housing have become the first systemic tool states have adopted when they wanted to arrange affordable housing for their citizens. Let’s cross our fingers and hope that this much-needed law on social housing will also make it onto the agenda of the Chamber of Deputies and that it will move past the first reading. Not just people at the ministries, but the residents of housing estates are well aware that legislative transformation is necessary here.

The author is an anthropologist, researcher and analyst from the Ústecký Region of the Czech Republic and has authored the analysis Kam umístit sociální bydlení? Analýza ideálního počtu sociálních bytů v obci i domě: zahraniční zkušenosti a přenositelnost dobré praxe do ČR [Where should social housing go? Analysis of the ideal number of social apartments in a municipality and in a building: Foreign experiences and the transferability of good practice to the Czech Republic].

This commentary was first published in Czech in the magazine Romano voďi 1/2023.