Finding a suitable apartment in Luxembourg is not an easy task. A lot of people already struggle with looking for a roof over their heads. Therefore, the government decided to offer a helping hand, amending several measures in the Affordable Housing Act last year, which led to a new calculation of the rent prices people have to pay for social housing. Unfortunately, not everyone was satisfied with the result.
Recently, a family who lives in social housing in the North of Luxembourg contacted RTL to raise awareness of the new affordable housing contract their social service office had laid out in front of them. Their rent had increased. Strangely, the rent prices of their neighbours in the same apartment complex had decreased. Did the social office mess up their contract? Disagreement resounds from another social service office in Mersch. Most rent prices had decreased by a maximum of €100, yet some also increased.
The secretary of the social services office in Mersch, Filipe da Silva, explains how people reacted to the changes.
“I think dialogue is very important there. When you explain it to the person, the tenant, plead them to listen that there was a new calculation which means the rent will be higher… if everything is explained in detail, the situation will most probably be understood. That is the experience we have had in Mersch with our concrete cases.”
The social offices received a new technological tool to calculate the rents. Mandy Kiens, in charge of directory at Gutt Wunnen, elaborates:
“Everything that is taken into account is simply the entire income, child benefit, potential pensions, the REVIS (the Social Inclusion Income), and in case tenants work under the conditions of the latter. Basically, everything that is paid to their bank account each month”.
What is not a part of the calculation is whether people are paying off a loan. Is that true or false?
Mandy Kiens explains: “That is something tenants have remarked is rather negative, the exclusion of loans one might have. I reckon it is difficult to determine on a global scale whether that is good or bad, since those are individual situations. I also think that it is complicated to develop a tool which can really determine every single individual situation.”
For the amount of rent it does not matter whether child benefit is a part of the monthly income or not. A person with a child thus pays just as much as a single person with the same salary. However, a child usually costs money. Instead, small families have the right to receive a bigger apartment.
There is also a common understanding that the location of the apartment does not affect its price.
Mandy Kiens adds further information: “I believe the tool is meant to find a national solution and I think that it would once again become more complicated to divide everything by area, meaning that one would pay more in the South or city centre than in the North. Where do people want to live, well in the North. We might even have the opposite phenomenon one day, that the North will become more expensive due to an abundance of people. It would just be too difficult to consider it all. What is taken into account though is whether it is a house or an apartment.”
Looking at the rents of social housing, they appear rather high. Are these prices still less expensive than on the free market? Filipe da Silva responds that “generally speaking, yes, the rent prices for affordable housing are considerably cheaper in comparison to what is practised on the free market at the moment. In addition, we have witnessed a noteworthy increase in rents registered during the past months and years. Rents are extremely high.”
Nevertheless, the conclusion is that there is a lack of affordable housing. A possibility to go against that trend is the social rent management.
