Is sustainable and affordable housing for all possible?

Abstract

The call for sustainable and affordable housing for all is to be heard and read widely, in UN documents, in strategic policy documents of the European Commission, or across a range of NGO releases. There is a striking discrepancy between the appellative demands of such major but non-binding policy documents and real developments in Europe’s cities, towns, and villages which face a housing crisis, energy “renoviction” in the centres and disinvestment in peripheral settlements.

One such discrepancy is that between an imaginary collective “we” that populates the policy documents and actually existing actors involved in the production of housing and energy. The “we” in policy documents suggests that there would be a group of stakeholders sharing a common interest in the realisation of sustainable and affordable housing for all, while actually operating actors in the provision of housing may not share this interest nor the collective economic perspective. Actors in real housing markets either enjoy or struggle with the commodities involved here. Housing itself is a commodity, traded on markets that – depending of the specific housing regime – are more or less regulated by welfare states. Even actors who do not work for profit struggle with the commodity-character of the ingredients needed to provide housing: land, building or retrofitting materials. Prizes for both are rising steadily. And, finally, energy, which is the one important good that needs to be saved to make housing “sustainable”, is a commodity traded on markets.

The existence of social movements claiming a right to sustainable and affordable housing or a right to energy make clear that the imaginary “we” in policy documents does not exist but rather housing and energy are both highly contested policy fields. There is a movement for the Right to housing, which is a legally acknowledged human right, and there is movement for a “Right to energy” prominently represented by European NGOs. Both movements are flanked by scientific debates. My claim here is that unless policies address this discrepancy between housing, land, and energy as a commodity and housing and energy as a human right and an ingredient for decent lives, sustainable and affordable housing for all remains one of the many unfulfilled promises in European policy documents.