There are compounding issues too:

• Most cities, even more pronounced in Western Germany, have lackluster district heating networks — meaning green district heating concepts like in Denmark wouldn't work nearly as well.
• There was a huge privatization wave in the 90s. Residential buildings in many cases now need to make a profit every year. High-capex measures that bring mediocre/hard-to-forecast opex improvements (entirely dependent on the price of fossil gas vs. electricity) like heat pumps are not going to win you fans among profit-driven investors.

This is why gov's need to start applying minimum energy and water efficiency standards to existing structures and fining registered owners for properties that don't meet those standards. If you can't afford to uplift a property long term, you don't deserve to own it. I rent an old-ass 1960's unit with single pane windows and seals that are fucking decades old (possibly original) so it's a nightmare to heat/cool. The shower uses something like 3-5x as much water as newer properties just to maintain hot water. The boomer owners don't give a shit because why would they? They don't have to live with it and there's nothing to motivate them to change... The amount they charge for rent won't change enough to profit off it anytime soon.

It's illegal to build new properties as inefficient as my rental, with heavy fines and forced remediation for non-compliance, yet every existing structure can get away with efficiency levels that became illegal decades ago and consume significantly more resources than everyone else coz gov's protect capital first and foremost.

That's just a wild guess. Switzerland is facing the same situation and yet, landlords are investing frenetically in the energy transition of their buildings to increase value. We're in a vicious circle of renovation and increasing rents where it has become an everyday struggle to afford rent. At least in thd cities.

Council housing provides housing for 5million Germans. Another 5million live in cooperative housing.

The UK is still in Europe, but no longer in the EU

I don't understand why it's missed out here

FYI there's a duplicate sentence there:

In the EU in 2021, 70 % of the population lived in a household owning their home, while the remaining 30 % lived in rented housing.

It's alright, I wouldn't see Turkey in the club either

It's just not common in Germany to buy apartments. People either rent, and if they want to buy, they buy a house. Most apartment buildings belong to big companies and not to smaller landlords, making it also not cheaper or in any way attractive to buy an apartment.

In Eastern Europe apartment ownership is very common on the other hand. All the old Soviet blocks have individual ownership of each apartment in it, and the buildings are maintained by groups of people who own the apartments in that building (I forgot the word, not a native English speaker, sorry. But basically like a union out of each owner in the building, there's monthly meetings to decide stuff etc). Landlords usually will not be big companies like in Germany, but just private persons who have had the apartment in their family for a long time. This also makes it easier to buy an apartment, if you don't want to rent.

It's just very different structures and mentalities. When I still lived in Germany I found it stupid to ever buy an apartment and would have just rented forever, since house prices are astronomical. Now I live in Eastern Europe and it took some time to adjust, but it's really just the norm here to buy or own an apartment at some point in your live and most natives I know here own one, or live in a place that a family member owns.

I would guess that property prices in big cities are just not as inflated as in central and western Europe.

No, what does is that a lot of the countries sold the government owned houses built in the communist era for cheap to the tenants. So that helps a lot and only happend a generation ago. Germany unfortunatly did not do that and sold the East German housing to mainly west German companies or individuals.

The homeownership rate declined in 82% of states between 2005 and 2020.

🪦

the worst states aren't under 50%.

I wouldn't necessarily classify private home ownership as good or bad.

For one, there are different styles of living and if you need something small or need to move a bit more often, renting often makes more sense.

Then there's the more fundamental question if private home ownership actually means exactly that — in many cases, the home is basically still owned by the bank. The mortgage crisis hit really hard in countries with supposedly high home ownership like the US and Spain.