Insights from the 25th Beyond Borders: Breakfast Debate "Housing in Border Regions"

The 25th edition of the Beyond Borders Breakfast Debate, organised by the Border Focal Point Network, was successfully held on held on 23 October 2025. The debate focused on the topic of housing in European border regions and brought together representatives of the European Commission, research institutions and local initiatives to dissect housing dynamics at EU borders and explore pathways towards collaborative solutions. 

Our esteemed host, Andrew Lansley, moderated the discussion, welcoming the four panellists and noting that housing comes with particular complexities in EU border regions. The debate aimed to identify the opportunities and challenges linked to housing in EU Border Regions and to explore the implications in citizens’ daily lives. 

The first speaker, Simona Pohlova, Acting Head of Unit Interreg, Cross-border Cooperation, Internal Borders at DG REGIO, set the scene by emphasising that housing is high on the European agenda and is especially pertinent in EU border regions. She stressed the need to look “beyond bricks and mortar” and consider housing through broader lenses like spatial planning, sustainability and social inclusion. She explained that cross-border commuting, income gaps and separate spatial planning systems create pressure on housing supply and can lead to local exclusion. The DG REGIO pilot action Resilient Borders will provide valuable insights into cross-border spatial planning, that can be useful also when tackling housing. Finally, she cited examples like the Basque Eurocity and Greater Geneva as places where cross-border governance has led to more balanced housing outcomes and highlighted the relevance of the New European Bauhaus initiative's principles.  

Our next speaker, Dr. Magdalena Górczyńska-Angiulli, Researcher at the Luxembourg Institute of Socio-Economic Research (LISER), provided a detailed description of the housing condition in the Luxembourg cross-border region. She explained that Luxembourg's growing population, saturated construction sector and high housing prices force many workers to live in neighbouring countries like France, Germany, and Belgium. This creates a heavy reliance on cross-border workers, who make up 47% of Luxembourg's employees, but also places a strain on public services in the neighbouring regions that house them. She highlighted a significant price gap where housing in Luxembourg is three times more expensive than neighbouring border regions, and that cross-border workers face an average two-hour daily commute. A key problem she identified is the lack of a shared evidence base, with each country producing its own statistics without considering cross-border interrelations. Her central conclusion was the critical need for collaborative strategies and cross-border governance to address these interconnected housing dynamics.

Our next panellist, Stefan Moser from the European Commission’s Housing Task Force, outlined the European Commission's broader approach to housing challenges. He explained the Task Force's goal is to support Member States by sharing principles for success and good practices in topics such as housing demand and supply, social policies, and supporting vulnerable citizens. He identified three key objectives that must be pursued together: affordability, sustainability, and quality/decency. To achieve these, he pointed to the need for more efficient planning and permitting processes, digitalisation and the adoption of modular construction to reduce costs and construction time. He also stressed the importance of finance, making funding more accessible and transparent, and focusing on social inclusion for vulnerable groups and essential workers. He emphasised the need for a strategic rebalancing of development across territories, rather than just building more in high-pressure areas and announced the creation of a “Housing Alliance” to foster more intensive cooperation, including across national borders. He linked housing solutions directly to improved cross-border mobility, noting that efficient public transport can make longer commutes productive rather than lost time. 

Finally, Elina Yli Luukko, Executive Director of Arctic Construction Cluster Finland, presented a practical, innovative solution from the Nordic border region. She described the “Nordic Tiny Villages” project, funded by the Interreg Aurora programme involving Finland, Sweden and Norway. The project addresses the specific lack of high-quality, affordable housing in areas with fluctuating demand, such as mining towns (where mines have a limited lifespan) and tourist areas (where seasonal rents are high). The solution involves small, movable, wooden houses that are prefabricated as two-dimensional elements for easy transport. These homes have a surface of between 25 and 65 square meters, have minimal foundation requirements to avoid damaging nature and can use off-grid technical solutions. She highlighted the flexibility of the concept, which can also be applied to other needs such as student housing, refugee accommodation, and even temporary housing for military purposes. The concept is modular, as they can be combined to create even smaller or larger dwellings. 

In closing, Simona Pohlova reiterated that the main challenges are affordability and administrative burdens, which are especially pronounced in regions with high commuter numbers. She agreed with the poll results that coordinating spatial planning and improving cross-border mobility are key to improvement. She welcomed the concrete examples of cross-border data collection, governance projects, and innovative housing pilots as valuable pathways forward, demonstrating how cooperation can make housing in border regions more affordable and manageable. 

The two poll questions that were featured on the debate were: 

1. What is the biggest challenge in housing in border regions? In this poll question, the participants clearly identified housing affordability / housing costs as the most important challenge in housing in border regions; this finding resonated with main elements of the interventions of the first two speakers. 

2. What would improve housing in border regions? In the second poll, participants suggested that coordinating spatial planning and urban development policies is the best way of improving housing in border regions, followed closely by improving public transport and cross border mobility; this finding highlights the important relationship between spatial planning and transportation and in particular the utilisation of public transport networks as a basis for spatial planning and housing decisions.