Name: La puerta cerrada
Author: Jaime Luque
ISBN: 9788409917280

More than a housing crisis

A generation did everything asked of it.Yet still cannot get on with life.

Understand the problem

What drives housing costs and holds back supply across Europe.

See the consequences

How housing shapes who can live, work and build a future in our cities.

Explore the responses

What governments and cities can do — and what might follow.

A story echoed across Europe

He is 28, with a master’s degree and a job. But moving out still does not add up.

One of the stories in the book

Matteo · Milan

Matteo works at a digital agency in Milan, yet still sleeps in his childhood bedroom. He has a permanent contract; what he cannot find is a home he can afford. His story opens the book with a question that resonates across Europe: what happens when studying hard and finding work are no longer enough to start a life of your own?

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Inside the book

Understanding the forces behind the housing crisis

A generation on hold

Qualified and employed, but unable to afford a home.

Cities pushing people out

Essential workers far from the services they sustain.

From homes to holiday lets

How platforms reshape neighbourhoods.

Property and investment

The returns investors seek — and who gets housed.

The rules of renting

Protection, incentives and the effects on supply.

A European response

Finance, construction and the energy transition.

FROM DIAGNOSIS TO SOLUTIONS

How do we open the door again?

The book examines which policies can expand supply, improve access to housing and prevent well-intentioned solutions from making the problem worse.

Build more, build better
Industrialised construction and the rules holding back its expansion.
Rent at cost
Vienna’s experience and the challenges of making it work elsewhere.
Finance for the long term
The role of patient capital in homes for people on ordinary wages.
Weigh the consequences
When rent protection shrinks supply, or renovation displaces residents.

An open door casts warm light onto a street at night.

The answers are not simple. But they exist.

Discover the full analysis in The Closed Door.

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About the book

A European crisis, told through the lives it shapes

A young man unable to leave home. A city pushing its workers further away. A neighbourhood reshaped by holiday lets. The Closed Door begins with these stories to explain why a home has slipped beyond the reach of so many Europeans.

Jaime Luque connects everyday experience with the decisions behind it: investment, rental rules, land and the barriers to building. He looks beyond the asking price to explain why the numbers no longer add up.

The book also examines ways forward, from industrialised construction and cost-based rents to long-term finance. It weighs their potential against their limitations, without pretending that a complex crisis has an easy answer.

A PREVIEW FROM THE BOOK

The Ghost Neighbourhood

EXTRACT FROM “THE CLOSED DOOR”

Translated from the original Spanish edition.

The mayor of the Balearic village faces a brutal paradox.

The ghost neighbourhood is sustained by the financial gravity of global tourism. Having lost its traditional fishing and agricultural economy to globalisation several decades ago, the village now depends on the summer influx of the very same second-home owners who are pushing local residents out.

Absent foreign owners pay the municipal taxes that pave the streets, maintain the historic church square and fund the fire brigade. In August, they spend freely in the fish restaurants and hire local plumbers, electricians and contractors at premium rates to renovate their kitchens and maintain their swimming pools. Three months of summer capital sustain the remaining local businesses through nine desolate months of hibernation.

If the mayor bans foreign buyers, or taxes second homes heavily enough to force a mass sell-off, wealthy owners can simply pack up and move to a more tax-friendly jurisdiction, taking their disposable income with them. If that happens, the fragile local economy collapses. Plumbers are left without pools to maintain. Restaurants without diners. The municipal budget sinks.

But if the mayor does nothing for fear of triggering a recession, foreign owners will keep buying, house prices will continue to rise, and permanent, year-round residence will become mathematically impossible for anyone who works in the village.

The village is being suffocated by the very same capital that keeps it alive.

This is not an isolated situation. In different forms, it is repeated across Europe’s periphery, wherever a global buyer and a local salary compete for the same finite stock of housing, and where neither the public nor the private sector is building for the people who live there all year round.

The story continues in

THE CLOSED DOOR

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The author

Jaime Luque

Professor of Real Estate · ESCP Business School

Jaime Luque directs ESCP’s Institute of Real Estate Finance and Management (IREFIM) and the Monaco Government Real Estate Innovation Programme. His research brings together property finance, housing policy and technology.

In 2025 he was appointed to the European Commission’s Housing Advisory Board. In this book, he brings the decisions he studies as a researcher into focus through their consequences for people seeking a home.

THE BOOK

It’s time to open the door.

A look at Europe’s housing crisis, its causes and the decisions that can change it.