Human Storage: A Luxembourg Housing Story (Part IV)

“Premium living in Luxembourg”?

The phrase sounds lovely until your next-door neighbour turns their house into a micro-hostel and your peaceful Sunday becomes a tour of suitcase traffic and overflowing bins.

This four-part series takes a closer look at how Luxembourg’s growing room rental market is reshaping our neighbourhoods - and what it means for the quality of life and the future of community life.

1. Livability for Sale

In planning debates, it’s the mantra you hear again and again: density is good. And to be fair, there’s truth in that.

Density supports bakeries, cafés, bus lines, local shops. It’s what allows a place to function without everyone needing to drive ten kilometres for a litre of milk. Done right, density means walkable streets, vibrant squares, chance encounters. Done right, it’s beautiful.

But there’s a thin - very thin - line between density and plain old overcrowding.

Density is what happens when you plan for people. Overcrowding is what happens when you just count them.

Good density comes with infrastructure. It thinks about mobility, waste, water systems, sound insulation. It adds public space as it adds people.

Overcrowding, on the other hand, is what happens when your only real plan is to squeeze as many bodies as possible into spaces never meant to hold them, and hope for the best.

And this is exactly where the colocation / Café Zemmeren model crosses the line.

When a single-family house morphs into a pseudo-hostel, none of the things that make good density work are actually in place:

• No allocated parking for the extra vehicles.

• No soundproofing between rooms.

• No communal kitchens designed to serve ten people.

• No shared agreements, no community-building mechanisms, no neighbours you might recognise three months from now.

The house still looks like a family home from the outside.

But functionally? It’s human storage.

And here’s the thing about storage: you don’t tend to ask the boxes how they’re getting along.

When places become transactional - a bed, a bin, a bathroom slot - the social fabric frays fast. Because why would anyone invest in relationships, in neighbourhoods, in shared responsibility, if they’re gone before the next lease cycle?

But the real kicker is that the logic of real estate is relentless:

• Why stop at six renters if no one is counting?

• Why not seven? Eight?

• Why not double occupancy discounts and a bunk bed special?

Call it flexible living if you want. But the math doesn’t lie.

Densification, when done well, supports community.

But this isn’t densification. It’s extraction.

And no one ever fell in love with a town because of how many people they could pack into one house.

2. Why This Matters (And Why People Are Leaving) or Why Pay Champagne Prices to Live Next Door to a Hostel?

It’s easy to dismiss these things as minor irritations. A bit of extra noise, some parking hassle, the occasional overflowing bin. Nothing serious. Certainly not the stuff of housing policy debates.

Until, of course, you start asking the uncomfortable question:

Why would anyone pay over a million euros to live next to this?

Why spend the better part of your working life financing a home, only to find that the house attached to yours has quietly morphed into what’s essentially a budget hostel with worse management?

Because here’s the thing:

People will pay high prices for beautiful places.

People will pay high prices for well-functioning places.

But very few are happy to pay top euro for what feels like student dorm conditions, minus the campus nostalgia.

And once that perception takes hold, it doesn’t just sit quietly in the corner. It spreads.

The local reputation suffers. The property values follow. And the very landlords who were so eager to squeeze every last drop of rent out of the neighbourhood might one day find themselves struggling to sell, because even desperate tenants eventually get tired of queueing for the bathroom.

Meanwhile, many others are already voting with their feet.

Across the border in France, Germany, Belgium, you’ll find people who once considered themselves part of Luxembourg’s long-term story , until they started wondering why they were paying Champagne prices for a living experience that felt more like warm flat beer in a plastic cup.

It’s not just about affordability. It’s about livability.

Because here’s the harder truth:

Livability isn’t something you can fake with a glossy property brochure. It’s not achieved through floorplans or square metre calculations. It comes from a sense of place. From continuity. From people who know each other, stay long enough to care, and maybe even argue about the hedge height for a decade or two.

Luxembourg has long positioned itself as a place of stability, safety, and quality - not just in finance, but in daily life.

But these things don’t maintain themselves. They require care. They require boundaries.

Because once livability goes, it doesn’t just quietly sneak away. It packs up, moves across the border, and takes your future tax base with it!

3. The Hostel Next Door Might Be Legal, But Is It What We Want?

The thing about bad models is that they spread fast. Especially when they’re profitable. And by the time a community realises what’s happening, the damage is usually well underway and hard to reverse.

The Colocation/Café Zemmeren model thrives in exactly this kind of vacuum:

Where legislation lags.

Where enforcement is timid.

Where responsibility gets passed around like an unwanted side dish at a family dinner: national law blaming local communes, communes blaming national law, and everyone quietly hoping the neighbours don’t make too much noise.

Meanwhile, the ads stay online. The room rentals continue. The “flexible living” narrative rolls on undisturbed.

And with every house that flips from home to business model, the neighbourhood loses just a little more of what once made it worth living in.

But It doesn’t have to be this way.

This isn’t about banning colocation. It’s not about demonising shared living. It’s about setting limits, the kind that protect both tenants and neighbours, that make room for people without turning living spaces into bunk-bed profit zones.

Other places have done it. Even within Luxembourg, a few communes are starting to wake up, realising that waiting until the street is already full of frustration (and illegally parked vehicles) is not a housing strategy.

But too often, action only comes after the complaints pile up. After the character of a neighbourhood has already been hollowed out. After the decent, long-term renters have quietly left, taking their community spirit, their tax returns, and their recycling habits with them.

The choice is still there. But the window is closing.

And the real question Luxembourg should be asking itself is simple:

Do we want homes, or just beds for rent?

Do we want communities, or crowd control?

Because once the hostel vibe takes over, it’s hard to put the genie back in the bottle. And even harder to convince people to stay.

If you’d like to share your thoughts or personal experiences, I would be happy to hear from you.

written by Helen M. Krauss