National Housing Policy opened for public consultation

The National Housing Policy Strategy 2026–2035, which has been released for public consultation, aspires to serve as the roadmap that will redefine citizens’ relationship with housing.

Greece is facing a distinctive housing crisis: property prices and rents are rising faster than incomes, the supply of housing in high-demand areas remains limited, and the generation currently in its thirties and forties is finding it increasingly difficult to access either homeownership or decent long-term rental accommodation.

The new strategy is structured around three major pillars, nine strategic objectives, and a total of fifty intervention measures. In reality, however, it represents an effort to reorganize the housing market as a whole.

The first pillar focuses on increasing housing supply. The state now acknowledges that the country suffers not only from expensive housing but also from a shortage of available homes. For this reason, emphasis is placed on bringing thousands of vacant apartments back into use, encouraging the transition of properties from short-term to long-term rental markets, expanding social housing, and accelerating new residential construction.

It is precisely here that the strategy’s most noteworthy technological component emerges.

The government proposes modernizing the building permit issuance system through upgrades to the e-Permits platform and the Unified Digital Map, introducing artificial intelligence tools as part of the process. AI will be able to verify supporting documentation, identify errors, and assess the completeness of application files, reducing delays that have long hindered engineers, investors, and property owners.

The second major intervention concerns social housing, an institution that has been largely absent from the Greek reality.

The strategy introduces models of social housing development through land-for-development schemes, the utilization of inactive military camps, public-private partnerships, and pilot property renovation programs in Athens and Thessaloniki. The approach is clearly European in nature: the state does not build on its own but acts as a coordinator of capital, land, and investment.

At the same time, particular emphasis is placed on areas that have effectively become “housing deserts” — islands unable to accommodate doctors, teachers, and police officers; university towns experiencing explosive rent increases; and major urban centers that are gradually losing their character as places of permanent residence.

The proposed measures include digital platforms for student flat-sharing, organized housing schemes for public-sector employees on islands, and even dedicated programs for the allocation of public land for the development of affordable housing.

The third, and perhaps most critical, component concerns governance.

This is also where the greatest long-standing weakness of the Greek model can be found: the absence of a unified decision-making center. The proposal to establish a Unified Housing Policy Authority seeks to fill the gap left by the abolition of the Workers’ Housing Organization in 2012, bringing together ministries, local government authorities, the national cadastre, financing instruments, and housing market data under a common framework.

The question, however, remains fundamentally political.

Can a €6.5 billion plan, comprising 48 existing measures and dozens of new interventions, reverse a crisis that has been fifteen years in the making? Or is the state merely attempting to manage the consequences of a market that has already changed the rules of the game?

The answer will ultimately be determined by a single indicator: whether, by 2035, housing will have returned to the realm of a social right or whether it will have been definitively transformed into an investment asset accessible only to those with sufficient capital.

For, at the end of the day, housing policy is not merely a technical exercise in property management. It is the most direct referendum on the kind of society a country chooses to build.