Dear Europeans, let’s team-up!

We live on a continent where we collectively have a great amount of financial resources available. We have countless existing buildings that could be revitalised or repurposed.

Across Europe, there are thousands of innovative companies that can and want to contribute to a green transition of the built environment. There is also a rapidly growing number of companies which have started to explore how they can help their (future) employees find affordable housing. Yet, the biggest opportunity for change is coming from the individual: There are presumably millions of citizens who are longing for a change of their housing situation in this very moment.

Now, the EU allows us to collaborate across borders like no other place on earth. So we started to imagine:

The most impactful European housing company in 2050 could be… ours!

Right now, the most influential housing companies on a European scale are corporates that treat and trade homes as an asset class. We’d like to imagine a different future:

Let’s co-create a European Housing Coop that will enable 1+ million (future) humans by 2050 to collaboratively own and use living spaces all across the EU - fostering a beautiful life, in community and within our planetary boundaries.

Before we dive into how this European Housing Coop could come alive and what it would actually do - let’s first unpack the current housing crisis in a bit more detail…

The ecological perspective

• While the majority of actors in the orgareal estate industry have now “woken up” to the reality of climate change (82% of a 2022 survey consider ESG elements in their operational & investment decisions), the big transition to a circular & climate net zero approach is still ahead of us
• We increasingly take up more living space per person - across the EU, the amount of sqm per capita has more than doubled since 1960 - in Germany e.g. it has gone up from 19sqm to 47sqm in 2022
• At the same time, it’s estimated that 1 of 6 properties in Europe are vacant – equal to around 38 million empty homes
• For many decades, the real estate industry has practiced a way of tearing down buildings that were supposedly not suitable anymore, replacing them in resource consuming ways with again not future-proof ones in terms of energy efficiency, usage flexibility and material recyclability (~75% of our building stock is currently energy inefficient)
• Buildings and the construction industry are the world’s biggest consumer of raw materials - and in the EU, buildings are responsible for 36% of greenhouse gas emissions

The economic perspective

• Access to affordable and adequate housing is considered a human right. However, in the EU, housing has become unaffordable for many people, with over 80 million affected. Out of the ~450 million EU citizens, 1 out of 10 people spend more than 40% of their income on housing (>30% is commonly understood as being unaffordable). In some countries like Italy, that ratio is 3 out of 10.
• Financialisation of housing as an asset class, speculation on rising land values, increasing commerce with short-term rentals (#airbnb), and lack of creation or sale of affordable housing stock have all contributed to an accelerated housing crisis across the EU, particularly in cities.
• House prices have gone up by an average of 52% between 2010-2024 in the EU. In combination with the rise in interest rates starting in 2022, buying a house or apartment is becoming a less viable option for many.

The social perspective

• Humans generally have a longing for both, community and privacy - but most existing housing & apartments are not well designed and structured to cater to both. 35% of residents across the EU report a frequent feeling of loneliness in life (loneliness and weak social connections are associated with a reduction in lifespan similar to that caused by smoking 15 cigarettes a day)
• At the same time, solitary living arrangements are on an all-time high, about 40% across the EU live alone
• We can witness an increasing segregation in the EU, between generations & cultures, social & financial backgrounds, political perspectives, renters & owners, urban life and the countryside. Most new building projects in the housing sector don’t aim at building bridges in our society. Rather, they often accelerate a divide in our society.

tl;dr?

• We need to adapt how we (re)build and live more in tune with our planetary boundaries
• We need a lot more long term affordable housing solutions across Europe
• We need to create more approaches to housing that foster community and fight segregation

In the middle of our current housing crisis, the role of publicly owned housing becomes more important than ever. But given the limitation of resources and the often slow bureaucratic processes, (most) cities can’t fix the housing crisis on their own.

What about the private real estate sector? Many companies have paused their development activities in the housing sphere because they can’t generate the financial profits they seek under the current market conditions. The available public subsidies to foster social housing are often perceived as not sufficient / suitable or to limiting. Other corporate players continue to build, but are focused on high end / luxury housing or serviced, temporary apartments.

In the bigger cities, even a large portion of people with decent “middle class” salaries can’t afford to buy their own apartments anymore - if one didn’t inherit a larger chunk of money.

Now, there is another, often-call third model in the housing sphere that has been around for decades, in some places even for over a century: Housing cooperatives!

Many Housing Coops willing to scale face similar challenges:

• Lack of access to affordable real estate assets with a development potential
• Lack of access to affordable capital to realise developments & refurbishments (especially with the increase of interest rates on the financial markets and substantially higher building costs)
• Limited resources / capacity to explore & leverage digital solutions / new technologies / organisational approaches to enhance efficiency, streamline processes, decrease the carbon footprint and lower costs
• Unlike large corporate housing developers or public housing organisations with 10.000+ flats, most housing cooperatives don’t have a lot of buying power to negotiate “good deals” with suppliers in a competitive market environment
• Existing coop members must also support new developments (…and that support is difficult to gain if new developments imply rising costs for existing members - without adding individual benefits)

Our approach

The European Housing Coop (EHC) aims to become the first community driven and technology powered company that accelerates the creation of sustainable, cooperative housing on a European scope.