Education

Going on Assignment in Prague July 2026 – July 11, 2026

No Way Home

By Lauren Holladay

18 August 2025 Transitions magazine

Prague residents struggle as ever-rising rents, population growth make the decades’-long housing shortage even worse.

Vilem Smejkal, an art student at the Academy of Arts, Architecture, and Design in Prague, faces the possibility of leaving the city after graduation because of the shortage of affordable housing.

After moving to the city four years ago, Smejkal now lives in a mostly working- and middle-class neighborhood with a roommate whose family owns the flat. They charge a reasonable rent, but he is concerned about being able to afford housing after he finishes his studies.

“I am [worried], because now, I have this luxury of living for much lower prices. And I can see from my other classmates that the pricing is really, really high, and it scares me in a way,” he said. “I got used to this comfort that I have now, so when I look at other flats or apartments where I could live, it’s like, ‘Wow, OK, so they’re paying double the amount for the same things that I have, or even for smaller apartments.’ ”

Apartment buildings in Prague’s upscale Vinohrady neighborhood. Photo by Lauren Holladay.

Before his current place, Smejkal lived farther from the city center with three roommates. Despite sharing the space with more people then, he paid roughly the same as he does now.

Like many other residents of the Czech Republic’s capital city, he is afraid that he will not be able to afford to live on his own in the future.

“It makes me wonder if I want to move out of Prague, because in any larger city I can get the same opportunity, but I want to keep living here,” Smejkal said. “I don’t want to have roommates in the future, basically, but it’s hard to get a flat without them.”

House Prices and Rents Keep Rising

Young families and single people in low- to mid-level earning brackets have long struggled to afford even small flats in Prague, and the problem is getting worse everywhere in the country, according to several estimates. Deloitte’s 2024 European Property Index declared the Czech Republic to be “the least affordable country for home ownership among the 18 countries surveyed.” And according to online cost of living database Numbeo, the Czech capital ranks seventh in Europe in terms of the price to income ratio, a fundamental measure for apartment purchase affordability.

In terms of rental costs, Prague ranked 24^th among 63 European cities surveyed by Deloitte, ahead of such generally more expensive cities as Milan, Vienna, and Brussels.

Forced to Consider Alternatives

Smejkal is currently employed at Prague Glass Experience, a glass art shop in central Prague, and pursues photography on the side. After graduation, he said, he would prefer to stay in the capital where there are more job opportunities and higher wages than in other Czech cities.

“It’s kind of scary, because living here doesn’t seem that expensive, overall, in the Czech Republic. But when it comes to housing, there is a big increase suddenly, of how much you have to pay just to have one room,” he said.

Many other Prague residents also worry that rising rent and purchase prices could force them to leave the historical city that they call home.

An author and librarian at the municipal library – who declined to give her name for privacy reasons – expressed similar concerns. Currently, half of her income goes on paying rent.

“It seems really easy to find a job here, and I’m happy here, but I now face the possibility that maybe in a couple of years, the rent here will be unaffordable for me,” she said. “If I had to move [to another apartment], I would be in really big trouble.”

Originally from the Czech countryside, the librarian moved to Prague in search of work about nine years ago. She said that she previously lived with a roommate in an apartment, later moving to her current home.

“Back then, I thought, ‘OK, I found this little apartment, it’s a little bit too expensive for me, but I can live here for a couple of years.’ And now that I’m living there, I think, ‘I was so lucky,’ ” she said. “I think if I have to move again, I maybe wouldn’t be able to afford living on my own. Maybe I would have to leave Prague, which is bad because this is the only place where I got a job.”

What’s Behind the Housing Price Rise?

Migration into Prague is the main driver of the city’s rising population, according to Jiri Nemeskal, a researcher at Charles University’s department of social geography and regional development. The influx highlights Prague’s growing attractiveness to people across Czechia and abroad, he said, as well as to the acceptance of Ukrainian refugees into the country – which hosts the highest per capita number of any nation. Many are attracted by the dynamic job market: the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO) reported in 2024 that the city and the surrounding Central Bohemian region had an average 1.5% unemployment rate, the lowest in the country.

Prague’s huge popularity with tourists and the conversion of apartments into short-term rental offerings makes finding accessible housing even more difficult for locals.  

Smejkal said that these short-term rentals make him more concerned for his future in Prague.

“Around the center of Prague, a lot of these houses around us are just for Airbnb and for tourists, and a lot of the new housing that is developed is immediately bought by these big corporations so that they can rent it at higher prices,” he said, reflecting a common view that the housing market is tilted in favor of foreigners and higher-earning Czechs. “The prices are not going to get lower, because why would they do that?”

Other countries in Europe have taken to regulating short-term rentals to try to alleviate the housing shortages.

In May, the Spanish government ordered Airbnb to remove about 66,000 short-term rental listings it said were in violation of regulations. While restricting Airbnb and its like in Prague may reduce the problem, it will not solve it, according to Vaclav Orcigr, a researcher with the Institute of Contemporary History and the non-profit environmental organization Arnika.

A lengthy report on Prague’s housing problems, edited by Orcigr for Arnika in 2024, proposed a number of policy options to ease the shortage, including adopting urban planning models previously used in other cities, expanding municipal rental housing, and ending the privatization of public-housing stock.

According to Orcigr, Prague’s housing crisis can be traced back to the mass privatization of housing in the 1990s, when the country transitioned from socialism to capitalism. Currently, he said, the primarily private market means that, with such a small share of publicly owned housing stock in Prague, housing demand cannot be met.

‘Political Priorities’

There has been some response to the housing shortage on the municipal level in attempts to meet the demand for more, and more affordable, housing.

For example, the city created the Prague Development Company (PDS) in 2020 with the goal of coordinating construction of new municipal rental buildings as well as constructing them itself. PDS manages 400,000 square meters of city-owned land in around a dozen locations in the city and plans to build between 6,000 and 8,000 apartments by 2030.

Though the permitting process for PDS’s first urban rental housing projects began in 2024, the development company has not completed any municipal construction projects since its inception in 2020. Orcigr said there has been no city-owned housing construction since the early 2000s, and that the city’s “political priorities” have rendered housing plans ineffective.

“We are not naive, and we don’t think that our development of the city is completely changing the situation,” said Petr Hlavacek, Prague’s deputy mayor for spatial development and urban planning. “But the idea is that we can somehow cool this situation, because these apartments are going to be for all of the people who are important to the city.” The PDS-built apartments will provide homes for a broad spectrum of the local community, including policemen, nurses, and young families without housing, he said.

According to Orcigr, a big part of the question of whether Praguers will be able to afford living in the city depends on the public viewing housing not just as an investment, but as a foundation for stable and inclusive urban life. He said discussions of affordable housing often overlook its role in creating conditions for a diverse population across a range of social groups, something essential to keeping a city functional and accessible to people from all income levels.

“Housing is perceived mostly as an economic asset, rather than as an infrastructure for life,” he said. “And this is something that is probably the biggest problem.”

Lauren Holladay is a third-year undergraduate studying journalism and electronic media at the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. She began work on this article while attending Transitions’ Going on Assignment international reporting class in July.