In his opening remarks of the event, Rick Hathaway, Vice President for Europe and the Middle East at Habitat for Humanity, said that “a home is not a place, it's a process”; to emphasize the importance of tackling housing crisis that has recently been growing more rapidly than ever.
The use of vacant buildings plays a crucial role in addressing the surging demand for housing.
Reusing and regenerating housing resources aligns with the principles of the circular economy, climate mitigation, and environmental protection, and can contribute to social and cultural inclusion. Habitat for Humanity, that hosted the event, recognizes that the EU’s alignment with the Paris Agreement hinges on a circular economy that reuses the embodied carbon already produced by the construction industry in empty spaces and buildings, providing a sustainable approach to housing alongside greener construction methods.
The panel discussion “revitalizing empty spaces” offered insightful ideas on how the European authorities, in cooperation with real estate market participants, could dig in the issue of reusing vacant units to tackle a crucial problem that thousands of Europeans are challenged with, especially in the current turbulent economic environment. Representatives of the Building Performance Institute Europe, the Laudes Foundation, Housing Europe - the European Federation of Public, Cooperative and Social Housing, and the European Federation of National Organisations Working with the Homeless (FEANTSA) addressed the issue, starting from their point of view and giving useful recommendations on how to go forward.
“Turning empty spaces into affordable housing is a win-win situation, especially if we recall the European states’ commitment in carbon budgets,” said architect Alice Haugh from Laudes Foundation. “Since every country signed up to the Paris accord to keep warming within 1.5 degrees, we need to take this very seriously. It means that we only have roughly 176.000 new homes that we can construct across the whole of Europe per year, to stay within carbon budgets. When we know that there are more than 800,000 homeless people on any given day in the EU and at least 80 million are burdened by housing costs, these numbers don’t add up.” According to their research and in terms of how the build environment is perceived; “housing crisis” is used more often than “climate crisis” in the media across the sector".
According to Emily Bankert, from the think tank Buildings Performance Institute Europe, we do not need to build new, to tackle the housing problem. We have to optimize what we have already built prior to undertaking new residential developments. There are two main points of intervention, according to Emily. First, on the side of operational energy of the buildings in which there have already been adopted and promoted various measures and the EU policy makers seem to have understood this. Second, on the side of the embodied emissions of new buildings that have yet to be addressed.
Dara Turnbull from Housing Europe, said that an appeal from the EU policy makers to tackle climate change could be a source of funding for projects that are working to address the oversupply of office buildings in the main European cities and how can we use them as residential spaces and homes. There is an urgent need to have those properties used for residential purposes but to have a tangible result on this you need to properly understand the problem of vacant spaces.
The panelists agreed that is important to use vacant spaces, but to achieve this someone needs to know where those spaces are located. To date there have been only crowed sourced initiatives to gain information on where these units are. You need a common approach at the European level on defining, identifying, and tackling vacant housing. Poor data on vacant spaces are a hurdle on this course but leaves room to act.
