Communist Party of Greece on housing problem

In the last 5 years alone, real estate prices have increased by an average of 50% - 60% and rents by 35% - 45%.

These figures are not only revealing of how housing, a commodity, eats into people's income in very precise terms (whether as rent or as a mortgage installment), but also of the nightmare that thousands of households are currently experiencing as they seek student housing for their children.

The cost of housing is a major burden for ordinary families. However, it continues to fuel the profitability of construction and banking groups, with the support of the state, which presents the various subsidized loan programs from banks for the purchase of housing as assistance to households.

In the past few days, for example, the famous "My House 2", financed by the Recovery Fund, was completed. The program provides for the subsidy of part of the interest rates for a mortgage loan from banks. It is no coincidence that the government is starting its valuation from the fact that 2.15 billion was poured into the market for real estate purchases and sales!

The more than 14,000 households that participated in the program have begun a 30-year race to service a loan that will pay off 50% of its value in interest.

According to the Ministry of Economy, 2 out of 3 “beneficiaries” of the program had an annual income of up to 24,000 euros (the program was aimed at incomes that are excluded from the “criteria” of the banks anyway). The average amount of the loans was just over 120,000 euros, while 10% of the total value was covered by their own money. A rough calculation shows what part of the income will be swallowed up by servicing the loan, without counting the interest for the banks’ part.

It is confirmed once again that it is futile for the people to seek in the capitalist market solutions to impasses caused by its very operation. Housing - a commodity is a typical example. Just as it is futile to place their hopes for measures to alleviate the cost of housing in politics and the state that support capitalist profitability in every way.

Profits and popular needs do not meet anywhere... With state and European programs, at the end of the day, the winners are again the banks, the real estate monopolies and the construction groups. The losers are the thousands of struggling people, the majority of whom are young couples, who are trying to put a roof over their heads and end up hostages at the bank counters. A new generation of over-indebted households and "red" loans is being born...

The proposals of all the other parties are moving in exactly the same direction, confirming their common program here too. Their differences are in how each one baptizes the subsidy to monopolies (“affordable housing”, PPP, etc.) and how it presents it as an alleged benefit to the popular classes. Their proposals are so predictable that each accuses the other of stealing from his program!

This does not mean, of course, that they are indifferent to the housing problem, which is becoming more acute in Greece and throughout Europe. It concerns them in the context of the overall operation and stability of the system, because it is directly linked to work, income, but also to the growing popular discontent. However, the measures they propose have as a prerequisite that they be "costed" and not threaten the fiscal "stability", which everyone guarantees. That is why they do not relieve the people and recycle the dead ends.

Only in conflict with this policy can the people claim respite, open the way to prospects for modern and affordable housing.

In surveys in former socialist countries, the majority that continues to yearn for socialism singles out as a criterion the provision of free housing by the workers' power state. There, housing was truly a social good, confirming even today that the prerequisite for the people to prosper is to overthrow the rotten system of profit and the cost-calculated crushing of their modern needs...