Vacancy in Europe: a strategic resource with the potential to address intersecting climate and housing challenges
In the face of rising housing costs, growing homelessness and accelerating climate breakdown, Europe finds itself in a paradoxical situation: millions of homes sit empty while millions of people lack stable housing. According to recent data, over 47.5 million dwellings across the EU are vacant, even as 1.27 million people experience homelessness and over 19 million live in inadequate housing conditions.
To respond to this housing crisis, we need solutions that are resource- and energy-efficient, aligning with the EU’s Zero Land Take and climate neutrality by 2050 goals. The mere construction of new buildings, often energy-intensive and land-consuming, cannot be the default solution. Urban sprawl, material depletion and embedded carbon emissions are linked to the construction of new dwellings.
Unlocking potential of vacant buildings
In this context, vacant buildings offer a valuable opportunity to address housing needs while respecting environmental limits. They complement new construction, offering a way to expand housing supply without consuming more land or resources. Community Land Trusts have shown they can successfully bring challenging sites, such as vacant or underused properties, back into productive use by enabling communities, often overlooked by the market, to shape and steward their own housing.
The Upcycling Trust, an EU-funded Interreg North-West Europe programme, serves as a complementary tool for CLTs and OFSs, making it easier to renovate vacant buildings by unlocking investments dedicated to climate renovations. It focuses on renovating vacant, energy-inefficient housing units and making them permanently affordable to vulnerable populations. This is achieved by placing land in common ownership, thus preventing speculative resale and ensuring long-term community stewardship. Tested and adapted in five cities across North-West Europe, namely Lille, Brussels, Ghent, Rennes, Cork, the model holds potential in transforming unused and energy inefficient buildings into high-quality and affordable homes.
Before exploring how the model is applied to tackle vacancy in pilot sites such as Lille Ghent and Cork, it's essential to understand how it differs from existing policy frameworks, how it addresses the critical gaps they leave unfilled and how it can be used as a complementary tool to support existing policies. As shown in Table 1, the added value of the Upcycling Trust lies in its social dimension, specifically, its ability to prevent speculation, ensure long-term affordability and reduce inequality, rather than exacerbating it.
Table 1: Comparative Housing Instruments and the Upcycling Trust (source: adapted from FEANTSA)
From local roots to European impact: grassroots innovation and the strategic reuse of vacancy
Many of the elements missing in mainstream housing policy already exist within local initiatives across Europe. Models of hybrid land ownership, such as Community Land Trusts (CLTs) and Organismes de Foncier Solidaire (OFSs), have proven that collective land ownership is both feasible and effective in delivering permanently affordable housing. In addition, CLTs have shown they can successfully bring challenging sites, such as vacant or underused properties, back into productive use by enabling communities, often overlooked by the market, to shape and steward their own housing.
Born from the urgent pressures of climate breakdown and housing exclusion, the Upcycling Trust was also shaped by inspiring small-scale examples across Europe. Consider Granby Four Streets in Liverpool, a project driven by community-led regeneration, self-build construction and material reuse, all underpinned by democratic decision-making. The Hastings Commons, based in the UK, also serves as an inspiration for the Upcycling Trust, demonstrating how substandard units can be transformed into high-quality and affordable homes through community ownership and engagement.
These examples show that innovation in housing often starts from the ground up. The Upcycling Trust proudly builds on this tradition but goes a step further.
An adaptable model to different contexts
What adds value to the Upcycling Trust model is its scalability and adaptability. While rooted in local needs and practices, it has evolved into a flexible framework that can be adapted across diverse contexts. It is especially effective for renovating vacant buildings, treating vacancy not as a symptom of decline but as a collective opportunity to regenerate homes, reduce emissions and ensure long-term housing affordability.
In this context, following the new initiative from the EU Commission, the European Affordable Housing Plan, in June 2025, Community Land Trust Brussels and European Community Land Trust Network, jointly submitted a contribution to the Call for Evidence launched by the Task Force. Their submission highlighted how the Upcycling Trust, originally rooted in small-scale, grassroots initiatives has evolved into a scalable, policy-relevant framework, one that could inspire structural policy change across EU member states. A key part of the submission focused on the challenge of vacancy and highlighted the Upcycling Trust’s potential to turn underused housing stock into a driver for both environmental sustainability and long-term social affordability.
Lille, Ghent and Cork: testing the Upcycling Trust through vacancy reuse
Linking Temporary Use to Long-Term Affordability
In Lille, the Upcycling Trust model is applied in Alouettes, a post-war built residential area comprising 85 homes. The housing is architecturally homogeneous, but ownership is mixed: 16 are owned by Lille Métropole Habitat (LMH), and 69 by private owner-occupants. Many properties are vacant or in poor condition, therefore the project aims to coordinate a collective renovation, improving safety and comfort while transforming vacant houses into affordable homes through the Organisme de Foncier Solidaire (OFS). Before renovation begins, a temporary occupation phase has been introduced to activate the vacant stock and address the concerns of the neighbouring residents regarding illegal occupation.
This temporary use is not designed as a long-term housing solution but as a transitional measure aligned with the renovation timeline used to keep buildings in use, prevent deterioration and support vulnerable groups. According to FEANTSA, temporary occupation, when well-managed and legally supported, can serve as a useful bridge between vacancy and reuse, helping maintain properties while offering social value.
In the Lille pilot, LMH has partnered with several local associations active in youth support, health interventions and in the support for people affected by violence. The initiative has prevented unmanaged use, kept the housing active and remained flexible enough to align with future renovation efforts. This pilot provides an example of how the Upcycling Trust can integrate transitional and long-term strategies to turn vacancy into a social asset.
The pilots in Ghent also mobilise vacant units to unlock their potential as permanently affordable housing for people in need. In Ghent, Community Land Trust Ghent and Het Pandschap are transforming a long-vacant, fire-damaged private home on Spijkstraat into four affordable units, using the hybrid ownership model to protect the homes from speculation.
Reusing vacant dwellings and addressing gaps in affordable housing provision
In Ireland, the Upcycling Trust is being explored as a response to a striking paradox: despite urgent housing needs, over 4,000 publicly owned homes remain empty. In Cork alone, approximately 450 ‘void units’, council-owned dwellings lying vacant due to insufficient renovation resources, represent a significant untapped opportunity.
Cork Community Land Trust (CCLT) and Self-Organised Architecture (SOA), in partnership with Cork City Council’s Department of Strategic & Economic Development and its Planning and Active Land Management units, are in the early stages of identifying one such void property to serve as the pilot site for the Upcycling Trust model.
Although still at an exploratory stage, this pilot illustrates the transformative potential of the Upcycling Trust in Ireland. If successfully implemented, it could provide a replicable pathway to bring vacant social housing stock back into use as affordable homes through community stewardship. Importantly, it would also establish a new category of affordable housing, positioned between traditional social housing and the market-driven private rental sector, and tailored to low-income urban households who are currently underserved by existing schemes.
Conclusion: scaling vacancy reuse as policy
The Upcycling Trust demonstrates that vacant housing can be a powerful lever for social and environmental transformation. As a complementary tool to existing policies, it offers a scalable strategy to turn underused housing stock into permanently affordable homes. To formalise their objectives and principles, the project partners co-created a manifesto, a collective document that reflects the values guiding their work. It is meant as an invitation to others who wish to reimagine renovation in ways that are both just and sustainable.
Read the full version of the Manifesto here