[P2P-F] Fwd: Guardian : More than 11m homes lie empty across Europe - enough to house all of the continent's homeless twice over

Mon Feb 24 14:39:08 CET 2014

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Dante-Gabryell Monson <dante.monson at gmail.com>
Date: Mon, Feb 24, 2014 at 8:37 AM
Subject: Fwd: Guardian : More than 11m homes lie empty across Europe -
enough to house all of the continent's homeless twice over
To: Michel Bauwens <michelsub2004 at gmail.com>

http://www.theguardian.com/society/2014/feb/23/europe-11m-empty-properties-enough-house-homeless-continent-twice

More than 11m homes lie empty across
Europe<http://www.theguardian.com/world/europe-news> -
enough to house all of the continent's homeless twice over - according to
figures collated by the Guardian from across the EU.

In Spain <http://www.theguardian.com/world/spain> more than 3.4m homes lie
vacant, in excess of 2m homes are empty in each of France and Italy, 1.8m
in Germany and more than 700,000 in the UK.

There are also a large numbers of vacant homes in
Ireland<http://www.theguardian.com/world/ireland>,
Greece, Portugal and several other countries, according to information
collated by the Guardian.

Many of the homes are in vast holiday resorts built in the
feverishhousing<http://www.theguardian.com/society/housing> boom
in the run up to the 2007-08 financial crisis - and have never been
occupied.

On top of the 11m empty homes - many of which were bought as investments by
people who never intended to live in them - hundreds of thousands of
half-built homes have been bulldozed in an attempt to shore up the prices
of existing properties.

Housing campaigners said the "incredible number" of homes lying empty while
millions of poor people were crying out for shelter was a "shocking waste".

"It's incredible. It's a massive number," said David Ireland, chief
executive of the Empty Homes <http://www.emptyhomes.com/> charity, which
campaigns for vacant homes to be made available for those who need housing.
"It will be shocking to ordinary people.

"Homes are built for people to live in, if they're not being lived in then
something has gone seriously wrong with the housing market."

Ireland said policymakers urgently needed to tackle the issue of wealthy
buyers using houses as "investment vehicles" - not homes.

He said Europe's 11m empty homes might not be in the right places "but
there is enough [vacant housing] to meet the problem of
homelessness<http://www.theguardian.com/society/homelessness>".
There are 4.1 million homeless across Europe, according to the European
Union.

-- 
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