Every Child’s Right to Safe, Secure, and Adequate Housing
Taken from "Unequal Childhoods: Rights on paper should be rights in practice" Eurochild 2025 flagship report on children in need across Europe.
Across Europe, access to safe, secure, and adequate housing has become one of the most pressing structural challenges affecting children and their families. While poverty is often measured in income terms, its consequences are often most visible in the places where children grow up. Housing conditions shape children’s physical and mental health, educational opportunities, stability, and overall development. When housing is insecure, overcrowded, or substandard, children’s rights are directly undermined. According to the latest national statistics, roughly 400,000 children are homeless in the EU.
Eurochild’s Recommendations
To ensure that every child grows up in safe, secure and adequate housing, governments at national and EU level should take the following actions:
1. Prioritise safe, secure and adequate housing for every child
- Provide every child with safe, secure and adequate housing that supports their physical, mental, and social development.
- Apply a child rights-based approach to the early identification of housing-related risks, including homelessness.
- Implement adequate legal protections to prevent forced evictions.
- Ensure families facing eviction can access safe alternative housing options.
2. Increase social housing and develop comprehensive national strategies
- Substantially increase the social housing stock.
- Lower access barriers to social and affordable housing.
- Develop comprehensive national housing strategies rooted in children’s rights.
- Include long-term planning, accelerate the construction of affordable homes, address regional disparities, and improve the quality of existing housing.
- Reinforce inclusive and child-sensitive housing policies and maintain affordability. Replace a segregated housing approach with an inclusive and integrated approach.
3. Tackle the financial burden of high housing costs
- Address the financial burden of high housing costs including energy costs, especially for low-income families.
- Adopt policies to regulate housing prices and prevent families from being overwhelmed by disproportionately high costs, particularly during economic and cost-of-living crises.
- Introduce measures such as rent control policies, subsidies for low-income households, and targeted support for families at risk of poverty.
By implementing these measures, governments can move towards housing systems that protect children from poverty and exclusion, strengthen families, and ensure that children’s rights are upheld in practice.
