The Housing Market Is Nuts

European housing affordability is difficult to measure with official statistics. Eurostat’s housing-cost share is available only as a national average and counts mortgage interest but not principal repayments, so it can make countries with many outright homeowners appear less burdened. Its results conflict with people’s reported experience: the Netherlands ranks as most costly by measured spending, yet only 6% of Dutch households call housing a heavy burden, compared with 26% in Portugal and nearly 40% in Spain and Italy. Europe also lacks comparable regional home prices and wages. The analysis argues that this data gap leaves public debate reliant on weak proxies, including crowd-sourced estimates, and criticizes the effort required to assemble usable figures from national statistical offices.

To compare affordability across 312 NUTS-3 regions in Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and the Netherlands, the analysis combines national price and wage data and uses regional employment as a proxy for where economic activity - and potential housing demand - is concentrated. It introduces “housing purchase effort”: the number of months of gross local salary required to buy one square metre. Employment maps show jobs clustered around major cities and industrial corridors, with much sparser activity in interior regions; the Netherlands is more uniformly dense. National averages put Portugal and France at roughly one month of salary per square metre, while the Netherlands fares better than its higher prices might suggest because wages are higher. Regional maps are intended to expose disparities hidden by these averages.