From Policy Creep to Social Spillover? The Case of Housing Policy in the EU

The housing affordability crisis, driven by a decade of skyrocketing prices, has now firmly entered the EU policy agenda. This is marked by the second Von der Leyen Commission conferring an explicit housing mandate to a designated ‘Energy and Housing’ Commissioner, tasked with preparing an ‘Action Plan on Affordable and Sustainable Housing’. Although housing remains outside the EU's formal competencies, EU institutions have increasingly targeted the sector since the Global Financial Crisis. Scholars have previously described this as a European housing policy “by stealth,” a process of incremental competence creep. This paper argues that the creation of a dedicated Commissioner signals a critical shift from this “stealthy” approach to an “open” EU policy entrepreneurship. We analyze and explain the emergence of a coordinated EU housing policy by drawing on European integration theory and the role of cross-border interest groups. We contend that housing is a crucial case for neofunctionalist theory and its refinements. In particular, this research develops the concept of ‘social spillover’ to account for the pressures from national civil society groups in response to the EU’s ‘policy creep’ on the housing sphere, which resulted in their gradual Europeanization and politicization of housing in the EU arena. These pressures, in turn, reoriented EU policymakers towards a consistent affordable housing agenda, thereby legitimizing and entrenching earlier ‘stealth’ dynamics. To test this mechanism, we combine Bayesian process tracing, sequence analysis and semi-automated text analysis of the EU interventions in housing policy, from the Maastricht Treaty to the present, based on extensive documental sources and elite interviews.