Every minute in Europe a building is destroyed, according to the Demolition Atlas, an investigatory project led by climate journalists supported by Solomon and the Holcim Foundation for Sustainable Construction.
Approximately 40 percent of the European Union’s (EU) waste generation comes from construction and demolition. The majority of EU countries don’t have national databases which track demolitions, Solomon investigators found.
Existing tax incentives for developers and building regulations make new construction à la demolition more profitable than preservation, further exacerbating the problem. HouseEurope!’s Olaf Grawert and Arno Brandlhuber, architects who teach at ETH Zurich, have launched a European Citizen’s Initiative, HouseEurope! Power to Renovation, to buck this disastrous trend. Per its website, HouseEurope! is an initiative and also a nonprofit with a heavy focus on the built environment and housing.
Power to Renovation would result in more affordable housing, lower cost of living, and reduced carbon emissions throughout Europe, the sponsors affirmed. This would work by incentivizing developers to adaptively reuse existing buildings, instead of knocking them down for new ones.
Against the Status Quo
Today, the EU provides a channel for citizens to pose ballot questions, resulting in EU policy changes that go into effect for all 27 member states. For a European Citizens’s Initiatives to be considered, sponsors need to gather at least 1 million signatures, among other minimum thresholds, and then EU policymakers can vote on it.
Home prices in the EU have annually increased by 60 percent every year since 2015. The EU is aiming for all buildings to be zero-emissions buildings by 2030. To meet this goal in time, the EU’s renovation rate needs to be tripled.
HouseEurope! is meant to help expedite this process, as part of the EU’s Green Deal. Its cofounders contend that the EU’s housing crisis is not just a simple supply-and-demand issue. There should be new incentives to make adaptive reuse more economical than tear downs. This would both keep housing costs down and slash carbon emissions, Grawert and Brandlhuber argue.
The HouseEurope! legislation is based on four key pillars meant to enforce the “right to reuse,” among these tax incentives for material reuse, a move toward “potential-based evaluation criteria,” and considering embodied carbon within “taxation frameworks.”
Developers would also receive new subsidies for renovating buildings and reusing materials, should the bill come to pass, the Citizen’s Initiative states. On its website, HouseEurope! offers Renovation Stories that architects and developers can aspire to, as a playbook of sorts.
“This development goes hand in hand with the Green Deal of the last EU mandate,” Grawert told AN. “Taken together, the ambition is clear: to address the housing crisis while reducing environmental impact—in other words, to solve the housing question without externalizing the costs to people or to the planet.”
As of now, the Citizen’s Initiative has almost 80,000 signatures. Only EU nationals can sign the initiative. The deadline to reach 1 million signatures is January 31.
This may seem like a long way to go, but “other European Citizens’ Initiatives have been in very similar positions and still succeeded,” Grawert affirmed. My Voice, My Choice: For Safe and Accessible Abortion garnered several-hundred thousand signatures in its final days, he said.
Grawert and Brandlhuber are also planning another initiative, A Right to Housing, which they will launch at the UIA World Architecture Congress this June in Barcelona.
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