Housing Europe at TEN LAW final conference

Tenancy law is affecting the daily lives of European citizens: about one third of them depend on rental housing, therefore residential renting plays a crucial role in providing flexible and affordable housing for the healthy functioning of national labour markets and welfare states. At the same time, numerous European households face serious trouble financing their housing costs due to unbalanced tenure structures: social housing has been shrinking, owning a home is easily rendered unaffordable at the impact of financial crises; while residential renting cannot properly play its role as a reliable alternative without the appropriate legal environment.

The appropriate regulation of residential renting affects not only the everyday life of European citizens, but also options for domestic mobility, and also a fundamental value of the EU, namely the free circulation of labour. Against this background, the EU-funded research project TENLAW has set out to provide the first large-scale comparative and survey and analysis of European tenancy law.

The final project conference was held on September 17-18 in Budapest, with two intense days during which the project outputs and the analysis of tenancy law in different countries/regions were presented, as well as proposals for  the EU to coordinate exchange of good practices on tenancy regulation and housing policies among Member States.

The conference participants included high level representatives of the European Commission, representatives from ministries, universities and research institutes, as well as Housing Europe, Habitat for Humanity, FEANTSA and International Union of Tenants. We thank the project coordinators and conference organizers for this great opportunity to exchange with experts from different countries and different disciplines!