Affordable Housing: the MOT mobilizes border regions

This working group is being held in a favorable political context, marked by the proposition of publication of the Affordable Housing Act by the European Commission, and the review of France’s “Housing Recovery” bill.

It addresses housing as an issue that highlights interdependencies among border regions. Certain living areas face significant pressures related to economic and cross-border attractiveness, metropolitan dynamism, tourism, and land scarcity. This is particularly the case along the French-Luxembourg, French-Swiss, and French-Monaco borders, where local authorities struggle to meet the housing needs of workers drawn to job opportunities across the border. Rising prices and rents are putting the most low-income households at risk and forcing workers to live farther from their places of work, while the supply of public housing remains insufficient to meet demand.

The discussions helped put these tensions into perspective, identify common challenges and regional specificities, and share existing practices and proposed courses of action. Several policy levers were highlighted in particular: developing monitoring based on comparable data across countries, repurposing industrial wasteland, promoting urban renewal, and exploring mechanisms for financial solidarity and co-financing of housing between employer regions and residential regions. The need to better integrate these issues into cross-border and bilateral cooperation bodies was also emphasized.

Included in the MOT’s 2026 work program, this initiative aims to bring together regional experiences and formulate proposals for European, national, and local institutions. It is expected to result in a manifesto titled “Toward a housing policy tailored to cross-border regions,” to be published at the Borders Forum in Strasbourg in November 2027.