Europe sets its sights on older people’s ‘too big’ homes

55% of Spanish households live in a home that is “too large”

Diego is 73, lives in the house he has spent his whole life in and has renovated it through a Provivienda programme. He is clear about it: “There’s nothing like your own home.” His preference is not an exception. 88% of people over 65 who live in their own home want to receive care there rather than move to a centre, according to the study A Key to Our Future: Housing and Ageing in Community.

The picture is a pleasant one until it meets the data on the housing stock. At the presentation of the European Union’s first Affordable Housing Plan, the Commissioner for Energy and Housing, Dan Jorgensen, summed up the strategy in one sentence: “What we have to do is ensure that not a single square metre of the current housing stock goes to waste.” Empty and underused housing is fully part of the equation.

What Eurostat considers a “too large” home

The report Housing in Europe 2025 measures the share of the population living in households considered oversized for the needs of those who inhabit them. In Spain that figure reaches 55%: more than half the population, compared with 33% on average across the EU-27. In most cases the cause is that older people or couples remain in the home after their children have moved out.

The gap widens when you look at age. Among people over 65, the proportion rises to 75% in Spain, compared with 47% across Europe as a whole. This is not a census of grand homes: it is a snapshot of demographic ageing crossed with a market that does not generate alternatives for moving. The document itself admits that the desire to stay at home “contrasts, in some cases, with the real condition of the homes and with the economic, physical or social limitations of those who live in them.”

Ageing at home, but with accessibility and resources

The intention hits a wall. 10.7% of households of people over 65 have insufficient resources after paying the costs of the home they own. And the home ages along with the person living in it: 10.5% of people over 65 report a serious limitation and 34.7% some type of limitation, according to the INE (Spain’s national statistics office) Survey on Essential Characteristics of the Population and Housing. In the 85-and-over group, one in four people considers themselves severely limited.

Living longer does not miccionan living better. Spain has a life expectancy of 84 years, above the European average of 81.3. Healthy life expectancy —the years lived without significant limitations— stood at 62 years in 2023, below the EU average and without recovering pre-pandemic levels. That gap between the two figures is, to a large extent, the difference between a house and an adapted home. For many people, moreover, entering a residential institution is not an option: institutions are seen as places where you lose control over your own life and break the bond with a familiar environment.

650,000 homes a year and €150 billion

The European Commission estimates that 650,000 additional homes a year will be needed over the next decade to close the supply gap in the EU, at an approximate cost of €150 billion. And it does so in a striking context: empty homes already account for 20% of the European total. The plan does not talk only about building: it mentions reuse, converting commercial premises for residential use, renovations to bring buildings back into use, densification and management of empty flats or underused buildings. It also promises to cut red tape, both for new construction and for renovation.

Here is the crux of the matter. There is too much space in some places and a lack of available land in others, and the European framework pushes to shift the existing stock rather than expand it. Anyone who reads only the construction part misses half the plan.

From “reuse” to antiestéticar of expropriation

Part of the public has reacted along a different path. Some argue that the language of “mobilising square metres” is a prelude to tougher measures: forced rental, housing allocation or expropriations. Some compare the scenario to the Soviet kommunalka, the communal flats where several families shared a room and facilities, while others recall the line from Doctor Zhivago —“there was room for a lot of people here”— as a warning of how it all began.

Another strand reads the plan as a direct attack on property. And there is no shortage of those who point to a double standard: people are being asked to make tighter use of housing owned by others while certain public officials occupy homes with far more space than the discourse itself considers reasonable. These are opinions, not clauses in the text. The European plan, as drafted, talks about reuse, renovation and management of the housing stock, and contains no obligation to share a home.

A third line of response shifts the focus to demography and immigration. It is a framing that the report does not support and that should be distinguished from the data: the document talks about accessibility, resources and housing conditions, not about who occupies what.

The statistic that unsettles

The underlying contradiction remains. 650,000 new homes are needed a year, but one in five homes in the European stock is already empty and 75% of older Spaniards occupy more square metres than their household needs. No one has yet explained how to fill that gap without touching anyone’s home.