Many Greeks are spending more than half of their monthly salaries on rental costs that have risen significantly in recent years.

Since 2018 rentals have gone up over 14 percent, forcing one in every two Greeks to pay more than 50 percent of their salary towards it. The highest increases have been noticed in the country's largest cities, Athens, Thessaloniki and Patra.

According to the country's largest real estate union, foreign investment in housing stock and short-term rentals such as Airbnbs have contributed to the problem. But this is only part of the issue, with the head of the country's largest real estate union saying it is much more complex.

"You have to dive deep to understand why it's happening," said Eleftherios PotamianosI, head of Hellenic Real Estate Union. "It's the small construction activity that has decreased compared to the past years. There are also many empty apartments not for rent or sale. Most belong to the government, funds or foreign banks. And that has been the question recently: Why are there some many, and why are they closed?"

Greece's housing shortage is also not straightforward to understand but building new apartments means huge costs at a time when the economy is struggling.

So the government is shifting its focus to empty apartments. "We know we have hundreds of thousands of homes that are not in the market," Spiros Protospaltis, Governor for the Greek public employment service told CGTN. 

"They are not offered for rent. And that is very troubling because they are already built and these are just vacant homes, vacant apartments. So one of the things that we're going to try to do is to give incentives and give subsidies to owners of those apartments to renovate them and offer them for long-term rental purposes."

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Both the government and real estate unions agree that building new housing complexes and persuading owners to rent out empty properties could help alleviate the shortage.‌

But until hundreds of thousands of apartments make it to the market, many young people will have to continue to share living space – relying on others to put a roof over their heads.

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