The Institute of Small Enterprises of the Hellenic Confederation of Professionals, Craftsmen, and Merchants (GSEVEE) released the study by Assistant Professor Nikos Kourachanis entitled: Housing Crisis and Housing Policy in Greece: Challenges and Prospects.
The purpose of this study is to achieve a comprehensive understanding of the factors contributing to the current housing crisis in Greece and to formulate a critical assessment of existing interventions in housing policy. The starting point is that the episodes of multiple crises over the past fifteen years and their management have exacerbated social inequalities. The field of housing represents an indicative case study. In terms of housing resources, a systematic process of reversed redistribution is attempted from lower and middle social classes towards higher ones. The framework for managing existing housing precariousness challenges, such as rising rental market, non-performing loans, and foreclosure auctions, energy poverty phenomena and the privatization of the energy market, as well as the resulting landscapes of humanitarian crisis (homelessness and refugee management), leads to an excessive deterioration of housing conditions. This phenomenon is inherent to the values and orientations of neoliberal housing policy. Following the examination of the pathways to the housing crisis in Greece and the depiction of contemporary challenges of housing precariousness, the aim is to outline a plan for the perspectives of social housing policies with a dual scope: the eradication of homelessness and the universal provision of affordable housing as an inalienable and universal human right.