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Mayors seek funding for affordable housing from European sources

by AI | 23.Oct 2024 | Europe in brief AI

Mayors of European cities seek a more direct relationship with the EU. They want to solve the lack of affordable housing with the help of the European Union.

Building of the European Parliament in Strasbourg, July 16, 2024. Photo: EPA/CHRISTOPHE PETIT TESSON

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STRASBOURG – Mayors of European cities, including Zagreb’s Tomislav Tomašević, have expressed their expectations to EU institutions for the Union over the next five-year period, highlighting priorities such as financing affordable housing and a more direct relationship with Brussels.

Mayors of large Union cities gathered on Monday and Tuesday in Strasbourg, the seat of the European Parliament, at the conference “A Better Europe Starts in Cities” where they called on members of the European Parliament and EU institutions to cooperate over the next five years to achieve the goals outlined in their ten-point declaration.

In the declaration from the Eurocities network meeting hosted by Jeanne Barseghian, the mayor of Strasbourg, they asked the Union to develop a “long-term policy for cities and a new partnership” with city leaderships with the aim of creating a “more democratic European Union”.

Alongside requests for cooperation in creating more inclusive cities and achieving EU climate goals, they highlighted the policy of affordable housing implementation and, in relation to that, more accessible legislation for local public investments and public services, and “steering national governments towards greater fiscal decentralization”.

Eurocities is a network of more than 200 cities with over 250,000 inhabitants, and the full member from Croatia is the city of Zagreb. The goal of the network’s work is to advocate the interests of major urban centers in EU institutions.

“The implementation of EU policies mainly happens at local levels, in cities, and cities have not been exactly at the table when decisions on creating those policies were made, and it mostly falls on the city’s shoulders at the end,” explains the mayor of Zagreb. (October 24, 2024)

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