Official EU number: in 2021 18% more migrants found their way to the EU compared to 2020. 2.3 million. That's 350 000 more migrants year-to-year from 2020 to 2021. (the official EU site do not give the numbers for 2022 / 2023 yet).
Repeat that for three years and it's the basically this part from TFA:
> Nearly 900,000 people sleep rough or stay in homeless accommodation every night in the EU
Maybe, just maybe, that the EU should stop trying to absorb ever more people year after year because, obviously, there's an ongoing housing crisis and that there's simply no room at the moment to house all these people?
P.S: if I can add something to my already depressing comment... A huge number of the houses and apartments in the EU are way too big and way too old and people don't even have enough money to fix these so that they'd consume less energy. When the prices of natural gaz and electricity skyrocketed I had people around me with yearly bills raise of 4 000 EUR, 5 000 EUR and even one 7 000 EUR year-on-year. These are insane amounts for middle-class europeans. So the issue is not just "not enough housing" in the EU. It's also "way too old and way too energy-hungry housing which cannot be fixed anytime soon".
If you haven't noticed there's a war in Ukraine. If you think those refugees should be turned away I don't know what to say to you because "If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all"
Housing was shit show even before the war. Blaming things on immigrants is poor taste and bad logic.
OP mentioned a reasonable argument for the lack of supply.
A country ought to first serve its citizens before citizens of another country. Analogous to you’d first take care of your own kids before aiding others.
Yes Ukraine is in a war and one should help, but you should help yourself first so you can help others.
Let’s jump to the root cause right there - the problem is Russia. Crushing that problem will free up plenty of space and make the energy and food shortages world wide normalize.
Screaming at refugees is a diversion, especially since they rarely compete in the normal housing market in most countries.
> It's also "way too old and way too energy-hungry housing which cannot be fixed anytime soon".
The obvious thing to do with the Ukrainian refugees was to put them to work retrofitting insulation. But it's better to keep everyone impoverished and cold, in the minds of politicians.
I understand and empathize with your view. I question the assessment that the properties are too large. the amount of square footage needed depends on how you live and what you do with that space.
When I lived in smaller urban apartments, I tended to the monastic. I gave up hobbies and stop making things. the larger the living space, there is more room my life for hobbies, makerism, romantic partners and pets. I suspect I'm not the only one. My experience leads me to believe that in your living space, is gotta be enough room for each person to have their own space that contains their clutter and can have some space from their partner without leaving the house.
Well I'm not against that. But they won't be build in a day.
Note that Ursula Von der Leyen (president of the European Commission) recently said the EU would "tone down immigration" or something like that: but she only said it because the far-right political parties are the big winners of this SNAFU.
Also when you build more housing, you have to be careful about the solution you're offering too: in France for example absolutely horrible buildings, communist style (big concrete blocks making the individual feel like not an individual and no nature), have been built on the outskirts of Paris (the "HLM") and these depressing places became no-go zones where even cops don't dare to go anymore.
So it's not sufficient to "build gigantic buildings and put all the poor people in there": you have to find a balance with nature, a mix between social classes, etc. or you'll only reproduce the worst of the worst failure France managed to create.
Europe has been building houses for thousands of years. How do you think we got so many people? It didn’t solve the problem. It only encourages population growth. Building more roads doesn’t reduce traffic, and building more housing doesn’t reduce the demand for housing. It does hurt the planet and remove a lot of green space, though. Look at India and China.
then by your logic, if we have traffic congestion we should build more highways.
But we all know that building more highways creates more congestion because of induced demand. I suspect housing also experiences induced demand. At the same time, you could be right that if you build housing for 10 times the need, then you would reduce the demand for housing. Just like if you built highways 10 times bigger, we would not have congestion.
What is the suggestion then? Either we increase supply of houses to meet increased demand from higher population, or you decrease demand by evicting illegal immigrants or killing some people.
Can’t beat demand and supply dynamics with fairy dust.
> Soaring costs across the EU are pricing out renters, deterring prospective buyers and preventing new homes from being built. As Europe’s housing crisis grows, so do homelessness rates across the bloc. What are the solutions to Europe’s housing crisis?
I literally do not understand why after all these years humanity has not yet worked out a system where every person would own a small house each, and instead we have this system that makes it super difficult for so many people to ever become homeowners.
> a system where every person would own a small house each
If you really want to just own a small house it can be very affordable. It's just that it won't be a desirable place to live and there won't be many good jobs close to it.
The problem is "everyone" wants to live in big cities, preferably in the nice neighbourhoods and within a reasonable commuting distance of their job.
Part of what makes a neighbourhood "nice" is that it's not affordable for the lower classes.
Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack, if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area, if it meant getting back 50% of their income. Housing does not need to be expensive to build, it's just modern "standards".
Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.
Things don't need to be so expensive, it's not all inflation - it's scope creep and bloat.
We can build to modern standards fine. The problem is usually you're not allowed to build at all. Nearly every jurisdiction in the west has tight supply caused by nothing except laws and zoning; there's nothing about the air or the dirt preventing a bigger building.
I don't think people necessarily want to go back to the 1900s and share a ten square meter apartment with a 3-generation family, and then die in a fire because that's too many people to evacuate out of one door.
> Most people would probably prefer to live in a cheap shack,
Correlates with:
> if it was available and not in a crime-ridden area
In a system where economic advantages agglomerate in a few areas, it would be difficult to create a place that is neither losing to the agglomerating areas, nor is declining itself.
If it is an area where the economy is booming, then it will not be cheap. And if it is not an area that is moving upward, then it is moving downward, and with that comes a host of issues that can cause crime to proliferate.
> Ford Model T cost $260 in 1925 ($4561 in current USD). But today's cars are closer to $40k.
Far more capable and safer vehicles than a ford model T are available for far less than $40k. $20k cars are available, and while not quantifiably true, I think it is easy to say the $20k car of today is easily more than 4x capable and able to provide utility than a $4.5k model T.
> people absolutely freak-out if you plan to build any amount of housing at all.
This. Europeans voted for this situation, hard, like really, really hard, for years on end. They did everything they could to ensure sky-high property prices. Now they have it. I'm not entirely sure that I see the problem.
Many places have extremely specific rules about building housing. You need 'X' ft around the outside of your house which means lots must be massive to have a house on them. So you require that people need to purchase a large amount of dead space to add character to the home.
We also don't retroactively apply building codes to houses. So you have a house that would cost $500k to replace due to building code, but it doesn't meet code. But you can still sell it for nearly that price because the alternative is the $500k new house. If people were forced to follow building codes in as-built buildings they would be much less likely to press all costs on to other people.
it's not dead space if the house is positioned correctly with respect to the sun. On the roof, solar panels, in the basement batteries, in the yard either rewilded yard or garden to support local birds, insects and small animals. if you have a parking spot, again positioned correctly So you can build a carport covered with solar panels. and don't forget to turn off the lights at night so that nocturnal creatures can thrive.
Ironically, we make housing way more expensive than it needs to be by forcing homes to be heavily permitted and built to code, rather than just letting people build non-code homes and letting purchasers decide to buy it or not with full knowledge.
> and letting purchasers decide to buy it or not with full knowledge
Consumers never have full knowledge of the quality level of whatever they're purchasing, much less in something like a house that is not standard and has to be adapted to the place it's built in.
At least with a law setting minimums, if you're lucky, you can sue if it doesn't meet them.
If you buy a home without an inspection you're either very deep pocketed and playing a numbers game buying stuff off the market quickly, or very stupid.
I had an inspection for the first apartment and then the first house I bought in Auckland (New Zealand) in the first decade of the 21st century. Both turned out to be leaky. Whose fault was it? There's plenty of blame to go around - the inspectors (for failing to see the problem), the government (for deregulating), the builders (for using materials they shouldn't have), the architects (for design that would never have lasted), the local government (for approving the housing), and maybe me for not having understood something I had no experience of, and had never happened before in my country.
"Code" is not what is stopping people from building, city zoning and regulations are. There's some things that add a bit to the cost, like GFCI outlets, multiple egress points for bedrooms, and inspections. Mandatory setbacks, minimum lot sizes, height restrictions, ADU rules, etc are what dictate what is possible to build.
You could easily describe a moderate house you desire to an architect, hire a GC and have a house built to code for $75k-$150k if it weren't for permits, zoning and regulations.
I don't think having regulations is the problem here, you can easily have regulations and have more housing being built, because regulation is not a binary choice.
It is really simple. It is because humanity has decided that housing is an investment and investments need to grow faster than inflation or else they stop being good investments. Society now has a bias to ensure that the price perpetually grows and therefore we enact policy at every level from national governments to HOAs to ensure those investments keep growing.
Speculating on price signals of housing is how you get housing in places to respond to demand. People are incentivized to figure out where people are going to move in a few years and build houses there to meet the demand when it arrives - rather than responding late.
humanity didn't decide. A small portion of financial power structure decided it could monetize housing as an investment. The rest of us haven't figured out yet how to strip power from the financial elite.
Because we chose to set things up such that if you own a house, it probably represents the overwhelming majority of your total wealth, so it cannot ever be allowed to decrease in value, even if that means fucking over future generations and ultimately society itself.
People eventually die and their houses become available. It’s only population growth that creates housing demand, and for the good of the planet, that needs to stop.
That's why we need a land value tax as Henry George proposed. People should not be able to make money by squatting on land and waiting for its value to appreciate - whether as a owner-occupier or as a landlord.
Humanity has worked out a system where every person would own a small house each - the system is called "live in a remote place in a hut made out of clay and straw, with no access to running water, sewage system, electricity, roads and jobs".
Turns out most people don't like the system and prefer living in the city where all those things are available but what is not available is houses for everyone.
Western liberals don't mind forcing people to live in those conditions as long as they're not white and left out of sight. They throw a tantrum every time Israel builds temporary housing for bedouins, for example.
Bill gates owns about 270,000 acres and the area of the US divided by its population is eight acres per person. Something to think about, although I don't know what an actual conclusion would look like (some of those acres are a lot more productive than others). ;)
Do you call the holocaust a capitalist genocide? What about when my ancestors were exterminated in the Irish potato famine and the free market was used to justify it?
Are you downplaying every genocide that took place in a capitalist country? You denied a historic genocide that killed my ancestors. You think you're offended?
Well, I'm not. How can I be offended? You're a basic product of your environment. Youre told that genocides that happen under communist systems are de facto communist genocides. Obvioualy. And genocides that happen under capitalist systems happen for, well, entirely different reasons. Obviously.
Realistically though, when pol pot, Stalin and Hitler went on extermination binges to kill enemies (real or imagined) their reasons were much the same... the maintenance of their power.
Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.
> Sorry I mean giving people houses and not charging rent - the two most evil things you could ever do.
No. You explicitly advocated for Communism, not "free houses". A social structure that actively grinds human rights into dust. You don't get the play the "communists just want to give people free houses" card without admitting to being hopelessly naive or actively malicious.
Stop carrying water for history's greatest monsters.
As an onlooker to this comment chain I feel like you completely ignored his entire comment, which I thought was a decent argument, and latched on only to the last sentence.
There have been lots of countries following Leninism and its vanguardist derivatives, and zero other Communist countries. Whatever one's position on whether or not vanguardism is a valid form of Communism, it is a mistake to generalize from vanguardism to all of Communism.
What EU fixed with free movement of services and workers, they reverted with the housing market. "We think 40k is a fair salary for this role. Ermmm what's that, housing?! no we don't have a problem with it. Why don't you just live somewhere?".
We have this problem in Canada as well, and it’s a hot discussion topic among younger generation. But I’m having a hard time convincing myself government would ever intervene since majority of people actually own their homes. Why would that portion of demographic vote against their own asset? I’m assuming it’s somewhat the same problem in other countries as well.
I’m a renter, and don’t have any plans to get into real estate market. That being said, I feel bad for people just getting out of college and looking for an apartment. If you’re not in a rent controlled unit, it’s a clown show everywhere.
> Why would that portion of demographic vote against their own asset?
For me, taxes. As housing prices rise the taxes I pay increase making it more and more expensive to keep my home.
I wouldn't mind if my house never appreciated in value or even lost a little, so long as it kept its place in the rest of the market. So long as I'm not underwater on my mortgage and it's still about the same value comparatively when I eventually need to move, I don't necessarily want it to go up.
> As housing prices rise the taxes I pay increase making it more and more expensive to keep my home.
Is that true? Aside from certain areas that have a luxury tax, property taxes do not in general rise with average property values, because the coty budget is the independent variable, not the percentage. This means that cities with high property values actually become a lower-tax place to park a $10 million property investment.
In the USA, it depends on the state. Washington state is based on a budget system: so property valuations are used to figure out your share of a fixed budget. If your valuation changes in lock step of other valuations, your share of the budget remains the same. Of course, the budget increases every year (but so do the number of houses), and your share is bound to go up at least via inflation. New levies are taxed as a percent of valuation for a couple of years, and then they are fixed to a budget afterwards.
We changed how we computed valuation to charge for land more and what is built on the land less, so my property taxes have actually been going down for the last few years (since I have a town house built on a small plot of land...so my share of the budget is shrinking).
In two years my property taxes increased ~$1,200/yr. Due to caps in tax appraisals this will continue marching up higher and higher every year even if housing values stabilize, which they probably won't.
Sure my house increased in value more than the tax increases I'm currently paying, but its largely value I don't actually see and won't end up touching for a long, long time. I can't actually realize those gains until I effectively downsize the house. which is at least 20 years or so out. And who knows what my neighborhood's desirability will look like in 20 years, maybe it won't even keep up with housing inflation.
To me, day to day its just some number that keeps shooting higher and higher costing me more and more every year.
Property gets assessed by government, a sticker price is put, and then the homeowner has to pay % of it as tax over here, as far as I know. Rinse and repeat every year.
On the surface that's similar to how it's done here (BC Canada) but you have to look a bit deeper at the math. Otherwise you'll fall into the same sort of faulty reasoning as the "I don't want a raise to bump my tax bracket" people.
For the most part, property taxes are not a fixed percentage the way that, say, sales taxes are. The rate floats, and that is important.
Property taxes generally go to the municipality, which sets its budget based on its planned expenses (sewers, road maintenance, etc). The city decides it needs, say, $100 million for the next year, and let's say all of it will be paid for by property taxes.
Then they calculate the total appraised value of all of the property in the city. Let's say that's $100 billion.
From that budget and that sum, they derive a property-tax percentage for this year: 0.1%. Now if your property is worth $1 million, you have to pay $1000.
Because your property tax rate is 0.1% and your property is worth $1 million, you might expect that if your property doubles in value to $2 million, your property tax will double. This is true if your property appreciates while the total value of the city property remains $100 billion.
But most likely, if your property value has doubled, it's due to macroeconomic or region-wide trends that have caused everybody else's property value to double. Thus the total property value is now $200 billion, so your property tax rate drops to 0.05% to meet the city budget, and you still pay $1000.
This makes sense, because your tax should not increase unless the city budget also increases.
If your tax has increased, the culprit is your city budget; property values are irrelevant, because they only determine how the tax burden is divided up, not how much there is.
If property values were much lower, the tax rate as a percentage would be much higher, and that's generally the case. Municipalities offering similar services, but where properties are more affordable, will have higher property tax rates. Therefore, if you need to invest $10 million in property for whatever reason, you'll pay a lower tax rate on that $10 million in an area where property values are high relative to the municipal budget, than in an area where property values are low relative to the municipal budget, even though the latter will probably buy you more total property.
> For the most part, property taxes are not a fixed percentage the way that, say, sales taxes are. The rate floats, and that is important.
Maybe this is common in Canada, but it's definitely not common around where I live. Tax rates stay somewhat fixed, property values go up and down. Every now and then a county or city government will lower the rate when they're flush wish cash, but it's not a given. For the most part every time my property value increases I'll be paying more.
There are some things that attempt to blunt and provide relief for exploding property valuations. There's a concept of a homestead exemption which 1) reduces the valuation of your home by a fixed amount (which was potentially recently increased) and 2) caps the amount of taxable increase by 10% each year. But with #2, your assessed value does go up, the difference between that 10% and its actual assessed value is shown as a cap loss which you then whittle away in future years as it marches up 10% until it hits the current valuation. This homestead exemption can only be claimed on an individual's primary residence.
And as mentioned, some governments have already passed tax relief in the form of cutting some rates. But not after getting a few years of these windfall tax rates. I don't completely mind; I think the city I live in has some pretty good city services overall. I get a lot of enjoyment from the public parks, library, bike trails, and more. I just lament the fact this is probably just an additional cost that'll keep marching along going higher and higher outpacing inflation overall.
Fair, makes sense. We have extremely low tax rate up here (0.28% in my province), so it’s hard to see how that can be a problem for super majority of the population. And if your asset keeps inflating above the tax rate, you’re technically doing better than before.
Oh well, let’s see what happens in the next few years.
Democracies have a fundamental problem with majority oppression of minorities, because it is in the interest of 51% to vote away the belongings of the 49% in any case where they can be sure of their continued membership of whatever circumscribes the majority they belong to. Without population growth or immigration, I think the majority of homeowners may be permanent. I am not sure how the countries with home-owning majorities are going to get out of this conflict but in any case it will be a contest between a highly motivated minority and the majority. I guess history shows they can be won by the minority but not without a lot of organization and unrest.
(Contrast this with autocracies, often associated with minorities like the Iraqi Shiites oppressing majorities like Iraqi Sunnis under Saddam's regime.)
Certain aspects of the us government were put together to help counteract this, but yeah I agree to some extent. Maybe at some point the majority will be renters.
It’s interesting to compare housing to automobile prices, because recently both seem to be in a bit of a bubble (and I say this as someone working in the auto industry). Easier to import cars from overseas though if the US dollar stays strong.
>Certain aspects of the us government were put together to help counteract this
Yes, that's why I am able to say it with such confidence. :-) Although they were put in place to protect a specific minority (landowners with a high social standing in the colonies) and work by promoting the interests of those with well-established networks. Until now progressive reform has largely undone that over time, leading to more democracy.
There is plenty of space in Europe, and plenty of housing in Europe. Parts of France are full of empty houses, in Italy whole villages are up for sale, and East Germany has lost large amounts of population.
If governments could make living in areas where lots of living space is available attractive, we would not need new houses.
> If governments could make living in areas where lots of living space is available attractive, we would not need new houses.
Perhaps it's easier to make it legal to build more housing in desirable areas instead of convincing millions of people to live in small, deserted villages with no jobs
A lot of these houses can't be rented due to climate change legislations. That's the inconvenient truth. Governments can't have it both ways, no matter how hard they try. Climate change policies will be extremely costly for the population. Fixing houses so that they conform current regulations costs a lot of money.
> If governments could make living in areas where lots of living space is available attractive, we would not need new houses.
Yes, it requires jobs, services thus infrastructures thus $$$ or €€€ in that case. It also require changes in corporate culture, as corporations are trying to crack down on work from home as we speak. When it comes to education, as well, instead of making students move to Paris or Rome to study, encourage remote education when possible.
There are technological solutions to these problems, certainly.
I doubt the government can do much for this (unless you want to return to the old East German tradition of planned production): these places offers very limited jobs and lower incomes. It would need a very large investment to make these places attractive enough for business to move there
Honest question: what do we even do? I'm not European but it seems like you can't talk about the "housing crisis" without having to specify whether you're talking about Europe, Canada, the US, etc.
I see suggestions to build more housing through taller buildings, but without any incentive to do that from people who care, what policies will realistically get passed to change anything?
Here in the Netherlands we used to have social housing built by the government and then rented out at reasonable rates, from like 50's - 90's. Now after a decade+ of right-ish government the housing associations are forced to sell off these houses and don't build a lot of new ones. But if we vote for the same parties as those who supported this policy back then, I don't see why we couldn't do it again.
The inflation on rent is not due the recent "increase" in new population?
expanding this:
Not complaining but it is unfair to increase your population not organically, forbidding new constructions and expecting this "just works".
What happens is both sides are squeezed in inflation and have lower quality of life and the govt. reaps higher taxes.
Then same govt says you are evil for pointing out this?
Edit:
People are pointing out the asylum or refugee. That is not what I am talking about.
Talking about cities having an influx. Like Austin or others cities where a large flux of people migrates.
Please don't remove population movement from the equation only because it may affect some narrative
Depending in the demographics, a fertility rate below replacement level can still lead to a rising population even when excluding migrants, as the people who would be "replaced" by the new births might live for many more decades.
I.e., we'd probably still have a housing crisis in Europe even if not a single foreigner came in.
I'll guess that this is referencing asylum seekers and migrants.
I keep seeing this argument pop up all the time online and in person, but it's never really made sense to me. Population growth in most European countries is lower now than at many periods in the past, yet we were able to house rising populations somehow.
Do people think cities like Berlin and Paris just got plopped down fully formed at some distant point in the past, together with instructions reading "Population: 3 million max., never exceed or add anything"? They and their infrastructure have grown over time as the population has grown. There's no magic maximum population limit that every city in the western world has just happened to hit right in the last 20 years.
It's not entirely clear to me if this is intended to be the sum of the criteria, but even if it is, I suspect people taking a survey are not going to be able to parse that correctly.
Also not defined: Whether bathrooms are considered "rooms" for this purpose.
Assuming bathrooms are not considered separate rooms, it seems the only way to be overcrowded is if you have people sleeping in common areas, or more than 1 to a bedroom if not a couple (2 to a bedroom is fine for couples, 12-17 year olds of the same gender, or children under 12).
I live in a city where the housing situation is quite dire and I still don't anyone between ages 18-29 living in such conditions. Lots of people do live in very tight spaces though (less than 75 square feet to a bedroom, with very little common area space) which to me seems like it should be considered overcrowded, but the definition given would consider this fine, whereas two unpartnered adults sharing a 600 square foot studio with a divider would be considered overcrowded
Here in Barcelona, like many other cities, on top of this, many locals or long term outsiders, with Spanish salaries, are being priced out to lots of new professionals from outside Spain ,with much bigger paychecks. It's almost impossible to rent in the city for many locals.
> As Europe’s housing crisis grows, so do homelessness rates
In western europe.
Having said that, raising interest rates means prices will go down but still be expensive for the average joe.
Large "investors" on the other hand are making a killing. If you have cash buy now. As soon as the interest rate madness ends prices will skyrocket and you'll make a killing.
The housing crisis is only a crisis if you're not a property owner, and in most cases property owners de facto control governments if for no other reason than the fact that they tend to be older and vote more. This is true in the US and probably in the EU too.
Much of the EU has the added problem of there simply being more old people than young people, making this issue and some others, like the pension issue, much more hopeless than they would be in countries with healthy[0] population pyramids.
[0]: "Healthy" being a shorthand for "compatible with our[1] current economic system".
Basically every government policy over the last 20+ years is in the direction of increasing house prices and rents.
The good news is that if every policy is currently at "increase prices", any change will result in a decrease. Surely we must be approaching the peak now, what other things could they possibly do to restrict supply / increase demand?
(I guess the climate goals leave a lot of freedom to continue tweaking)
I'd expect it to be worse for the environment than owning. My apartment has an electric heat system older than myself instead of a modern, efficient heat pump because I rent (to be fair, I'm not sure how the math works out on keeping the inefficient but working current HVAC system over replacing it, environmentally, but if it breaks, the cheapest possible thing that fits will replace it). I can't improve the insulation because I rent. I could never have something like solar panels because I rent. These investments would save energy, but utilities are my responsibility so my landlords haven't been interested. The most I can do as a renter is replace lightbulbs with LEDs.
Plus, every time we're forced to move we end up making a lot of trash and burn a lot of fuel moving things.
I have a number of friends who moved to Europe while working remotely for US tech companies. I'd be interested to know how common this really is, but it could be a contributor to inflated housing prices there as well.
> but it could be a contributor to inflated housing prices there as well.
Unless they are moving in the millions it'll barely make a dent. There have been reports coming in from countries such as portugal stating that "nomads" are driving housing costs up, but those are the exception - if anything it helps the economy of that country.
Repeat that for three years and it's the basically this part from TFA:
> Nearly 900,000 people sleep rough or stay in homeless accommodation every night in the EU
Maybe, just maybe, that the EU should stop trying to absorb ever more people year after year because, obviously, there's an ongoing housing crisis and that there's simply no room at the moment to house all these people?
P.S: if I can add something to my already depressing comment... A huge number of the houses and apartments in the EU are way too big and way too old and people don't even have enough money to fix these so that they'd consume less energy. When the prices of natural gaz and electricity skyrocketed I had people around me with yearly bills raise of 4 000 EUR, 5 000 EUR and even one 7 000 EUR year-on-year. These are insane amounts for middle-class europeans. So the issue is not just "not enough housing" in the EU. It's also "way too old and way too energy-hungry housing which cannot be fixed anytime soon".