Europe faces four linked crises - climate and biodiversity, energy and resources, housing affordability, and unhealthy homes - and this green paper argues they have to be tackled as one problem rather than four. Its premise is that the existing building stock is a resource rather than a constraint: about 85% of today’s buildings are expected to still be standing in 2050, 20% of dwellings are underoccupied while 16.8% are overcrowded, and the EU needs over two million additional homes a year, about a third more than it currently builds.
The paper sets out a hierarchy for action - renovate first, extend where renovation cannot meet demand, build new only as a last resort - and quantifies what following it could achieve. Using buildings better could unlock 50–107 million dwellings and 4–9 billion m² of floor area, enough for roughly 120–250 million people, avoiding 3.9–19.1 billion tonnes CO₂e over fifty years and 5.8–13 Gt of material use. About three quarters of that potential comes from renovation.
It is explicit about what it is: a theoretical and technical potential assessment, which does not account for demographic trends, local market dynamics or grid decarbonisation, and which acknowledges substantial economic, social and regulatory barriers in the way.
Cite this report
Toth Z, Kockat J, Guglietti A, Sarran L, Feifer L, Bjørkskov KBR, Röck M, Søgaard R (2026). The housing we need for the future we want. Green paper · The VELUX Group, Living Places. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21030392
RISE authors
From the project
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Re:Living - Scaling Renovation: Impact Hierarchy
Set out a hierarchy for action on Europe's housing - renovate first, extend second, build new last - and quantified what following it would save.
