In a recent article in The Guardian (7 July 2025) Tim White summarises the main questions of Europe’s current housing crisis. He stresses how much profound and widespread the housing crisis is and highlights that it was caused by the radical changes in the Europe’s housing markets made in recent decades according to the neoliberal paradigm’s principles.

Recently I published in the Italian cultural magazine “doppiozero” an essay on the “Viennese roots” of the neoliberal paradigm (the English version of this essay can be now freely downloaded from my website). My reflections were stirred by Richard Cockett’s most recent book: Vienna. How the city of ideas created the modern world (Yale University Press, 2023) – a fascinating journey through the city’s intellectual landscape in early 20th century. Anyway, one of the first manifestations of the neoliberal paradigm in the making was a vehement criticism against the housing policy of Vienna’s social-democratic government (1919-1934) and against the provision of public housing in particular.

Since the beginning neoliberals have maintained that the provision of public housing – as any other planning policy – would make the housing market ‘worsen’ rather than ‘progress’. A thesis without foundation, as any rhetoric impervious to empirical evidence, yet used to validate the ambition to entrust housing provision to competitive markets.

Surely, in a democracy empirical evidence can be put aside, but for how long?