Contextualized pathways to reduce housing inequalities in the green and digital transition.

Project Information

ReHousIn

Grant agreement ID: 101132540

DOI

10.3030/101132540

EC signature date 6 November 2023

Start date 1 March 2024

End date 28 February 2027

Funded under

• Culture, creativity and inclusive society

Total cost

€ 2 630 643,75

EU contribution

€ 2 630 643,75

Coordinated by

VAROSKUTATAS (METROPOLITAN RESEARCHINSTITUTE) KFT
Hungary

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - ReHousIn (Contextualized pathways to reduce housing inequalities in the green and digital transition.)

Reporting period: 2024-03-01 to 2025-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

The ReHousIn project addresses the critical connection between Europe's green transition efforts and persistent housing inequalities. Ecological initiatives, such as energy-efficient retrofitting of the housing stock, urban densification, and nature-based solutions (NBS), often interact with planning and socio-economic systems in ways that can unintentionally exacerbate residential disparities or cause new forms of exclusion.
The core motivation of the project is to understand this complex relationship, which is largely an under-addressed area in policy and research. The project's main objectives are to:
1. Disentangle the mechanisms affecting the reproduction of housing inequalities across a variety of welfare and housing regimes.
2. Provide context-sensitive knowledge on how green transition initiatives affect housing inequalities and identify effective policy and planning tools to address them.
The expected impact is to provide a robust, comparative evidence base for developing and improving EU and national policies. The project aims to reconcile conflicts between environmental policy instruments and the provision of affordable housing, ensuring that the ecological transformation results in a socially just transition.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

The project conducted extensive research across nine European countries (Austria, France, Hungary, Italy, Norway, Poland, Spain, Switzerland, and the United Kingdom) and processed specific fieldwork in three cities of each country.
Key technical and scientific achievements and outcomes:
• Contextual analysis (WP2): Completed a comparative quantitative analysis of housing trends and inequalities from secondary data sources like EU-SILC and censuses, establishing a baseline for the nine countries (D2.1). Findings confirm common challenges, including increasing housing costs and a shrinking public housing sector.
• Policy and regime analysis of green policies (WP3 & WP4): Finalized national reports detailing the regulatory systems for environmental and energy policies (EEP in D3.2) and the trajectories of welfare/housing regimes (D4.2). The analysis of housing regimes confirmed a general trend towards commodified housing systems across all cases, identifying that this process occurs through different path-change (e.g. post-socialist states) or path-dependency (e.g. corporatist/familistic states) mechanisms. Governance fragmentation was identified as a major barrier to equitable policy implementation.
• Local case studies (WP5): Selected 27 local case studies (metropolitan, mid-sized, and small cities/towns) and commenced in-depth qualitative fieldwork (semi-structured interviews). Preliminary case findings are emerging, illustrating how green initiatives interact with local contexts, from new-build densification – that turned out to be the most important factor causing gentrification - to affordability pressures in energy retrofitting projects.
• Stakeholder validation and mobilisation (WP7): Successfully organized and completed the first round of nine Policy Labs (#1), engaging 231 diverse stakeholders across the 9 countries. Most of the labs confirmed the pressing nature of the issue and highlighted that without safeguards, EEPs may carry a risk of exacerbating existing housing inequalities, although at different levels and through diverse transmitting mechanisms.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The project's most significant result beyond the current state of the art is the systematic, multi-scalar integration of research streams. This approach moves beyond theoretical conflict by providing concrete comparative evidence on the mechanisms of change, allowing the project to:
• Develop a new, functional typology of housing systems and welfare regime clusters that tracks the how and where of re-commodification over 30+ years, providing an advanced framework for comparative analysis.
• Directly link the national filtering effects of housing regimes (WP4) to local outcomes of specific green interventions (WP5), establishing a clear causal relationship for policy action.
Key mechanisms identified for policy intervention:
• Land and planning: Countries retaining public land holdings or highly regulated planning gains show a stronger capacity to deliver affordable housing, highlighting the need for supply-side interventions.
• Retrofit paradox: Energy refurbishments often serve as a legal basis for "value-adding" rent increases in rental markets, necessitating a clear uncoupling of environmental upgrade costs from rental income regulation.
• Local capacity: Local authorities' ability to buffer negative impacts may be severely constrained by national frameworks and centralisation, requiring support for local policy capacity and financial autonomy.
The exploitation of these results is focused on translating the complex data into actionable recommendations via the second Policy Labs and a final comparative report (D6.2) ensuring the evidence base informs political and civic action.

Image on the structure of the ReHousIn project presenting the interconnection between the WPs