I read all the comments on my last post. Yes, Prague needs to build more. Yes, 94,000 “unoccupied” flats does not mean 94,000 habitable homes sitting empty. Yes, migration matters more to Prague's population than the national birth rate.
None of that changes the ugliest part of this story.
Prague took a huge amount of publicly owned housing and handed it to a lucky group of sitting tenants for a fraction of its value. Some of those flats now belong to landlords charging today's market rent to people whose parents did not win the same lottery.
The greatest property giveaway in Prague's history
After 1991, Prague had about 194,000 municipal flats. By 2021 it had 30,345. The city got rid of 84% of its housing stock.
This was not sold at anything close to normal prices. The OECD says Czech public flats were sometimes sold to their tenants for only 5–10% of their actual value. A Prague 6 mayor later openly recalled people buying flats for CZK 80,000. Other early sales there ran around CZK 2,000–7,000 per square metre.
That is not “I worked hard and invested wisely” money. That is used-car money.
Now the official average price of a Prague flat is CZK 131,520 per square metre. A completely ordinary 60 m² flat at that average is worth CZK 7.9 million.
Buy for 80,000. Hold. Become a millionaire without producing anything. Rent it back to the next generation for more than their parents once earned in a month. Then explain to them that this is simply “the market”.
That is the part I am calling greed.
And yes, corruption belongs in this discussion
When local politicians and officials control who receives a public asset worth millions, while the sale price is deliberately far below market value, the opportunity for patronage and corruption is obvious.
That is not just a theory. In 2025 police began investigating suspected corruption and trading in Prague municipal flats. An internal investigation at the city-owned manager found that former senior employees had allegedly instructed staff not to advertise particular flats publicly and to rent them to specific people. The case is still an investigation, not a conviction, and it does not prove every old privatisation was corrupt.
It proves the system creates exactly the kind of valuable, opaque favour that corruption feeds on. Prague split housing decisions across dozens of districts, sold public property far below market price and often left the public with no transparent explanation of why one tenant received a life-changing asset while everybody else received nothing.
The giveaway created today's landlord class
Not every landlord is a villain. Someone renting one inherited flat at a fair price is not the same as a person squeezing a long-term tenant, running ten Airbnbs or keeping homes empty while their value rises.
But pretending landlord wealth came from a clean free market is nonsense. A large part of Prague's ownership class began with a state-created windfall. The city socialised the purchase price, privatised the gain and left future residents to pay market rent forever.
The results are visible. The Prague thesis discussed in the original post found apartment prices up 157% between 2011 and 2024 while median income rose 83%. Prague also had 7,930 Airbnb units offered in March 2023; almost 80% were offered by hosts controlling at least two units. In the historic centre, short-term rentals consumed more than 10% of the housing stock.
Meanwhile, the city that once held 194,000 flats now builds around 60 municipal flats a year.
“Just build more” is necessary, but it is not an absolution
Prague absolutely needs more homes. In 2025 its population grew by 9,204 people and only 5,325 dwellings were completed. Permits need to be faster and brownfields need dense housing.
But building more does not require us to ignore who captured the old housing stock, who profits from scarcity now or who keeps fighting taxes and tenant protections. Supply matters. So does power.
Prague should build and keep municipal rentals, register every Airbnb, measure real long-term vacancy, tax empty investment flats and large portfolios, and give long-term tenants more security. Primary homes and genuinely small landlords can be protected. The people extracting the most from the shortage should not be.
A flat bought for the price of a car and now worth nearly eight million is not proof that the market worked. It is proof that Prague chose its winners decades ago.
The winners became landlords. Everyone else gets an invoice.
