Residential Research Paper series

‘Solving Europe’s housing challenge: Aligning institutional capital to public policy ambitions through an industrial housing strategy’ is the third paper of this series. Europe’s housing markets are broken, characterised by an acute shortage of appropriate housing, which impacts rental affordability through the spectrum of housing segments and tenures. A crude estimate of the cost of the challenge across Europe’s seven markets is close to €12 trillion. This puts the solution beyond the scope of most parliamentary cycles and beyond the financial capacity of public authorities in isolation.

• The paper reveals that the scale of Europe’s housing challenge demands an industrial strategy that encompasses a more holistic, multi-decade approach to developing a housing solution masterplan.
• There is a need to align public and private stakeholders over a long-term horizon, as well as stakeholders with a shorter-term business cycle, such as contractors who play a fundamental role in delivery. Harnessing institutional capital – especially long-term ‘patient’ capital – is an appropriate way to address the housing challenge.
• The paper explores existing public and private initiatives that can be part of policymakers’ toolkit, ranging from funding availability and costs to tax incentives, land availability, planning, and certainty of timing.

Given the scale of the European housing crisis, INREV’s series of residential papers are publicly available to help raise awareness and transparency in the search for a solution.