Across Europe, the financial sector has pushed up house prices. It's a political timebomb | Tim White

We've been living in a great experiment: can finance provide basic human rights such as housing? The answer is increasingly no

The housing crisis is now as big a threat to the EU as Russia," Jaume Collboni, the mayor of Barcelona, recently declared. We're running the risk of having the working and middle classes conclude that their democracies are incapable of solving their biggest problem."

It is not hard to see where Collboni is coming from. From Dublin to Milan, residents routinely find half of their incomes swallowed up by rent, and home ownership is unthinkable for most. Major cities are witnessing spiralling house prices and some have jaw-dropping year-on-year median rent increases of more than 10%. People are being pushed into ever more precarious and cramped conditions and homelessness is rapidly rising.