Up to 20,000 apartments across Luxembourg are said to be vacant at the moment. According to Gary Diederich, spokesperson for The Left, this particular problem keeps increasing despite the fact that the housing situation has deteriorated for years.
In conversation with RTL, Diederich noted: “People are increasingly in distress, youths, families, who are suddenly put out in the street, and if they contact me that means they already tried a lot of alternatives, it is getting worse and worse from week to week, from month to month.”
Diederich complained that the government is taxing everyone the same, regardless of how much unused real estate they possess. He stressed that those with loads of unused pieces of land or flats have to be taxed more so that these speculative tendencies can be penalised more severely.
The Left also believes that now is the right time to expand the offer of affordable housing since prices are going down. For that reason they have issued a proposal for a housing pact that focuses on the ability of non-profits and municipalities to buy up and develop construction projects.
