How Green Tape Stops Europe Building

Europe has a housing crisis. In almost 40% of major European cities, houses are no longer affordable—meaning that the average income cannot cover rent or mortgage payments. In 47% of cities, housing is considered “at risk” of becoming unaffordable. And in just 14%, the housing market remains at an affordable level. The cause for this is at once highly complex and frustratingly simple—there aren’t enough homes. 

In 76% of European metropolises, the main driver for rising prices is that demand exceeds supply. This can be partially blamed on high construction costs—something that 71% of cities flag as a major barrier to affordability. Third is land availability, a factor noted by 60% of cities. Housing, obviously, cannot be built if there is nowhere to build it. 

There is one thread that runs through all these complaints—environmental regulations. Demand is outpacing supply because developments are being held up by ludicrous laws, on both a national and European Union level, that prioritise trees, animals, and even barren scrubland over human flourishing. These rules place immense burdens on developers and ring-fence land that could otherwise be used for much-needed housing and vital infrastructure. 

This week, Works in Progress magazine hosted a short series of talks in Brussels on the matter of Europe’s lack of housing. Fergus McCullough, co-founder of Progress Ireland, introduced one anecdote that was equal parts hilarious and depressing. In Berlin, there is a piece of land that, in theory, should present the ideal opportunity for development. In a meadow beside a disused railway line, developers put forward plans for 2,000 new homes, along with schools, offices, daycare centres, shops, a bike path, and a tram line. A third of the apartment units would be affordable housing. 

But it’s been 16 years since the plans for the Pankower Tor development were mooted, and so far nothing has been built. The obstacle is toads. Construction has been halted since 2022, when the Berlin administrative court ruled it would be illegal to move the population of natterjack toads that live there. The natterjack toad is not indigenous to that patch of meadow, nor even Berlin. In fact, they are thought to have fallen off the back of a gravel truck sometime around 1997 before making their home there. Nonetheless, this was enough for the court to decide that it is illegal to kill, capture, or to otherwise “significantly disturb” them by “deteriorating the conservation status of the local population of a species.” They cannot even be moved. The toads must, legally, stay exactly where they are.

The developers tried to be as accommodating as possible to the toads. They decided, to get around these absurd restrictions, to buy a nearby train shed and turn it into a home for the toads. But this, too, was blocked when Berlin declared that the train shed was ‘historic’ and had to be preserved. Then, it was decided that a nearby allotment be converted into a little zoo for the toads—complete with wetlands, brush, sand piles, and special winter shelters. The court was actually fine with this—but the environmental group that initially approved of the development has since decided to block it, arguing that the allotment site is home to a species of sand lizard that couldn’t possibly live alongside the toads. Ironically, because the original Pankower Tor site has been left untouched for so long, it is now starting to grow more and more trees—creating a habitat unsuitable for the natterjack toad. 

Unfortunately, the Pankower Tor saga is far from an isolated incident. In 2021, the European Court of Justice (ECJ) ruled that a protected species didn’t even have to live in the area marked for development for it to stop building. The European hamster is now considered critically endangered in Western and Central Europe but now has a particular stronghold in Vienna. This has caused a headache for developers in the Austrian capital, with one legal battle between an employee of a construction company and the city council going all the way to the ECJ in Luxembourg. The city fined the employee for clearing the topsoil from a site containing at least two wild hamster burrows, which allegedly destroyed the entrances. The construction company argued that the burrows were actually abandoned and that there were currently no hamsters living there. But this didn’t matter to the ECJ, which ruled that the hamsters’ breeding sites “must enjoy protection for as long as is necessary in order for that animal species successfully to reproduce.” This meant that the burrows themselves, as well as the surrounding land, could not be disturbed or built upon so long as there was any chance at all the hamsters might return. 

The UK has many of its own natterjack-toad and European-hamster-style farces. High Speed Rail 2—the rail project that is so far £8 billion over budget despite most of it having been cancelled—has been widely mocked for dedicating £100 million to building a ‘bat tunnel’ in Buckinghamshire. Under the Habitats Regulations, all bat species in the UK must legally be protected. That means a small colony of 300 rare bats that live in woodland near the railway line must be accommodated for. The solution to this was a one-kilometre-long mesh tunnel over the railway tracks, which, as it turns out, could actually trap bats inside and lead to their untimely deaths anyway. Nonetheless, HS2 developers have been compelled to splash out a whopping £330,000 per bat just in case a bat might end up on the line. In the words of Natural England: “No bat death is acceptable.” 

This is the case all over Europe. Not just because of EU-inflicted rules, but also those self-imposed by national and regional authorities. In Brussels, where rent is an average €1,350 per month and the average home costs €578,753, it was recently ruled that no further building permits can be issued on any undeveloped land larger than 0.5 hectares in order to better adhere to climate goals. The whole of France has a policy of “net zero artificialisation,” which bans development on natural, agricultural, and forest land until 2050. This, naturally, prevents many new housing developments, which account for 42% of ‘artificialised’ land. There is currently also discussion about expanding this rule EU-wide—though even France isn’t convinced this is a good idea. 

Why do so many European governments insist on placing the wellbeing of animals and plants above the wellbeing of human citizens? While no one wants to see the wanton destruction of wildlife (particularly rare and endangered species), it is physically impossible to prevent disruption to every living being on Earth. At some point, a decision has to be made as to whether we are willing to accept a certain degree of harm to hamsters, toads, or bats if it means that human beings can prosper. Right now, this green tape is not just tying up development but also living standards. We need to cut through it if we want to thrive.