UN-Habitat Arena - Community-led housing in Europe – tools for cities beyond markets (WUF13)

Okay, I think we're just about to get started.
Um I welcome the audience to this session.
Today we are focusing on community led housing models, looking at it from community land trusts to cooperatives.
The key question we want to delve into today is really so much about how we can deliver affordable housing under budget constraints, as well as how can we ensure that public subsidies guarantee forever affordability.
My name is Juma Sgo.
I'm a program management officer at the L and Housing and Informal Settlement section at UN Habitat.
I'm happy to be your moderator today and with a very powerful set of panelists who will be able to help us unpack this idea.
So maybe without further ado, I will ask each panelist to, um introduce themselves and the little that you want us to know about you before then getting into the session proper.
Maybe we start from extreme right.
Hi.
Yes, it works.
Hi, everyone.
Really nice to be here at the panel.
My name is Anna Jokic.
I come from Mobile Housing, European Cooperative Society.
Mobile is a cooperative of pioneering housing cooperatives from Central and Southeastern Europe.
Our members are based in Croatia, Slovenia, Serbia, Hungary, and Checha.
And maybe just for a start to give a little bit of background.
How did we grow from the ground? Community led housing in our countries started really from bottom up.
Somewhere in the beginning of 2000, the first initiative started to grow actually as a result of the housing crisis, which was a result of financial crisis of 2008, collapse of h markets and the response slowly started to emerge where citizen initiatives, mainly starting from activist groups started to get together and actually look for possibilities to resolve housing in collective way.
So in response also to the lack of possibility to buy housing and also almost nonexistent rental housing.
Maybe just a little bit to picture what is special about this part of Europe is that all of our countries are former socialist countries where from 1990, across all the countries that I mentioned and many more in Eastern Europe, housing stock, which was a big chunk of it, about 50, 60% in some countries, maybe even more, was literally over a course of a few years in some places in the course of a few days privatized.
The state took over the housing and sold it to people that used to live in it, but this closed possibility for next generations to get to a through housing policies to affordable housing options.
Basically, we live in so called super ownership states where the housing is only done through the market and very tiny bits through social housing.
In this context, started to emerge housing initiatives that were looking for a different way different way of owning housing and also making it non speculative.
I'm speaking about rental housing cooperatives, which you cannot privatize your part or share in the cooperative, but someone else can replace you under the same conditions.
Why this is important in our context is because it offers a different model of ownership and as I mentioned, also non speculation.
Now, me personally, I come from Belgrade, from Serbia and we have started somewhere in the end of 2012, almost 14 years to prepare ground for new cooperative housing and in different mobile countries, initiative started to emerge somewhere around similar time or a little bit later.
Maybe that is enough for the first round and in the next round, I could tell more.
Thank you, Anika.
For the rest, just introduce yourselves first.
Hello, my name is Gordan Nas.
I'm coming from the European Alliance for Collaborative Housing.
This is alliance whose member and co founder is also Moba introduced by Ana and we are active in the policy and advocacy on the European level.
Me personally, I'm an expert on community sustainable finance and ethical banking, which is also very much involved in the debate of funding collaborative housing on the European level.
Hello, good afternoon.
I am Marcos Rose Pérez.
I am a member of the European Parliament belonging to social Democratic groups from Spain and I'm dealing with housing issues from the Reggie Committee.
Hello.
Good afternoon, everyone.
My name is Darcia Fidalgo.
I am from the International Center for Community Land Trust, and I'm here to talk a little bit about the Cova D Mora experience in Portugal, Lisbon.
I am not a European, actually, I'm Brazilian, so I am outside my context.
But of course, being a consultant for Cova da Mora Project, I have been able to know a little bit more about the context, especially the context of informal settlements in Europe.
And we are very used to think about informal settlements in the global South.
I'm from Latin America and of course, this is something that we have to deal with every day in our work as urban planners.
I'm also a lawyer.
But in Europe, it's something that maybe could surprise us and the experience of Covid Mora it's really interesting.
It's a community in the metropolitan area of Lisbon.
And they have been threatened by the government and also by the real estate market for a long period.
Now they are looking for a land formalization, which is something very new in Europe too, but in a way that could preserve the community.
So the community understand that receive individual ownership titles will not preserve them and instead will facilitate real estate eviction process mostly.
So they were looking for some possibilities, and they found the International Center for Community Land Trust and tried to work with this model.
So the idea in Cov Moto is to have a land formalization.
It's a very vibrant community with a lot of cultural aspects.
They are mostly immigrants from Africa.
They are trying to preserve their culture and their territory there and they have a strong stigmatization provided by the city, especially but also by politicians in the last months, especially in the last elections that faced by Lisbon metropolitan area.
And they are now looking for to formalize a community land trust.
The idea is to guarantee that the land will be owned by the community and that will be out of market forever, preserving the total, the community, the cultural aspects, and the houses will be held in individual ownership, guaranteeing that people will be able to sell to rent, but not considering the land valorization that will be a consequence of the community and the collective struggle.
So the land value will be forever held by the community, and they will be able to sell their houses considering the price that these buildings have.
So community land trust are a very well known solution in Europe.
We have examples in Belgium and France.
Now we are starting the work in Germany.
So a lot of countries are introducing the model, and the new here, the news that we have to tell to you today is the possibility to work with community land trusts in informal settlements in Europe.
So of course, COVID mota is not the only one informal settlement that we have.
And so consider the possibility of the community rust also to these kind of territories is something that we definitely need to discuss further.
Yes, probably we'll just go with the flow because Anna Fidalgo have already started talking about their experiences in their introduction.
So perhaps Green can just flow into this and also just give an aspect of your experience.
Yes, basically, the problems that collaborative housing is facing in Europe are very much the same as the problems of housing in most of the world.
It could be divided in three major sets and groups of the problems.
The first one being recognition and recognition meaning legal frameworks which are also then reflected in the public opinion, that would understand that community owned nonprofit actors are the ones who have the say and who are viable and who can deliver housing solutions on the scale.
Currently in Europe, we don't have such a recognition.
If we are looking to the collective housing models being that non profit cooperatives or community land trusts, it is very different from country by country, how they are treated and almost nowhere they have the whole structural support from the legal recognition, public recognition, funding mechanisms, and implementation tools to deliver.
The second group of problem is related to the capital, mostly to the land acquisition and to the finance.
If you look to the land acquisition, there are also no streamlined models, how the land could be given by public land could be given for use to non profit public actors like private actors like cooperatives and the community land trust and without land, there is no housing.
All development starts with the land management.
If you are looking to the capital part, to the financing part, we need to realize that market solutions cannot solve housing affordability problem.
It is just per definition that the financialization that is coming out of the market is treating houses not as a places where people are going to live, but as a commodity, as a financial commodity, and as it is for financial commodity, financial asset, it is never optimized for affordable living.
It is just the logic of all commercial profit oriented financial institutions.
So most or many of the actors in the field leave in an illusion that by doing something different, they would be more susceptible or more attractive to the commercial funding and commercial banks.
But the reality and it is the harsh reality is that they're never going to be attractive.
Why? Because they deliver nice solutions, but they deliver no so much profitable solutions.
That's the key of the problem.
The third part, is actually the implementation part, which means that the whole ecosystem needs to be developed that housing providers, non profit housing providers, community providers can find architects who understand how to design and implement this type of housing, which is not maximum price per square meter and the maximum square meters of flats per square meter of land.
But who are thinking differently, they need to find construction companies who are also more interested to work and engage in the long term contracts with the low stable margin than the most profitable contracts.
The whole ecosystem needs to be developed also to scale up the implementation and this experience is universal.
It's very much present in Europe with some exception, but I believe that it is also a challenge for most of the countries in the world.
Very well.
Understanding these experiences from A's perspective of a financial accelerator, you from the legal, also Fidalgo from the perspective of the Community and Trust, perhaps maybe we can go one step further to ask a second question about looking at all these experiences from a challenge and solution perspective.
If I gave you another round, of course, Marco, coming from the European Parliament, I will give you then now your time after the three presenters have actually made their peach on the challenges and solutions.
Starting with, what do you think are the challenges and solution from the perspective of the financial accelerators that you have spoken to? I will a little bit explain some people got flyers around.
We have established mobile accelerator.
It is a cooperatively owned revolving fund, which is meant to support pioneering cooperative housing projects at their initial stages.
What our members face is that these are small cooperative housing projects so far.
Our largest one is now in preparation.
It's a 50 students cooperative housing project in Budapest.
And the first ones were from seven people to 20 people trying to establish cooperative, get finance and live together.
The very first projects were done in such a way that there were no banks to support, and there was no government to support.
What did they do? They went and fundraised or let's say, fundraised from their direct community, meaning from parents, friends, friendly people who were ready to loan the money for us with a small cap on top of it, and of course, a little bit of their own money.
And with this, they could realize these projects which had a value of 250,000 euro somewhere in this range.
When it starts to get bigger, it's very difficult to continue to continue in that way.
So what we have started from the beginning of Moba Mobil was established six years ago as a solidarity organization for this sort of initiative.
It's transnational.
It's not local in one country, but it connects different countries.
We solidly decided to choose projects which are worth supporting as the first breakthroughs.
And with this, we establish the fund which is collecting finance for these first stages.
And for now, the function of it is to bridge the first few years, let's say three years in which the land would be for now the buildings would be bought.
We didn't build new ones because that's too large step with this.
But to buy building, to renovate building, community starts to establish the stable cash flow or repayment of the rent.
And with that, then we can go next to the next step to go to a another financing institution or to potentially a bank that would then at that point, recognize this and support it.
You understand the role now is this bridge fund.
Accelerator could potentially become something else.
Maybe if there is a next round, I can tell more about that.
But now our current project is support to the community led cooperative housing in Budapest in Hungary, where 50 students would live together.
What is specific is that we are in quite urgency because the student organization which had dormitories within a university, they are being privatized and they really have to move this summer actually.
It's quite urgent that we get finance for this project.
So audience, I hope you're keeping some questions for Anna on that Budapest story.
But while you think about it, perhaps Goren could also go with the idea of the challenges and solutions to the legal aspects that you were referring to.
Yes.
On the legal side, things are slowly moving.
The European Union has recognized housing affordability as one of the priorities of the top problems.
It has reflection in the first ever European affordable housing plan, which is explicitly mentioning collaborative housing actors as an actor in the whole story.
In my home country in Croatia, non profit housing cooperatives have been also explicitly recognized in the new law that has been adopted two weeks ago actually, quite recently.
Things started moving, but as I said, it is not enough.
We need to get the change in the whole ecosystem.
We still don't have financial institutions, we don't have banks, we don't have financial instruments who are aligned in their values, and their expectations in their mission with the mission of both public and non profit housing actors.
So that's kind of the next challenge that we need to overcome.
We need to support the development of community owned ethical banks, of public banks on local, regional, national levels that could actually serve as an intermediaries for multinational development banks and which is more importantly, engage private capital, non profit patient, citizens private capital, and leverage it in the same way as the market actors do.
Because if you just think about it, market actors have all the supports or the clients of all the commercial banks in the world.
If you would be just having different class of the banks with the same ability to leverage and scale up capital, we would be playing totally different story because nowadays, it requires conscious decision to invest in mobile, in some impact fund to donate to our housing organizations, while commercial actors have capital passively available by just having the whole infrastructure built.
The next challenge is to build financial infrastructure in order then to come up to the last problem of the scaling up implementation capacity.
Fantastic.
Fidalgo, the Lisbon story.
Well, I think all the community led housing initiatives face the same challenge.
Of course, we need funding, we need more government support.
But work with informal settlements make this challenge even bigger actually because we need more funds, because we need to make upgrading.
We need to mobilize the community, and we need to have a long term work to guarantee that the community will remain mobilizes that they will remain leading their own territory.
For us, I believe that I will echo my colleagues, but the challenge is even greater.
It's even bigger.
The solution, of course, is to count even more with the governments.
Actually, it is important to highlight that social housing is a government obligation.
All the countries in Europe are signatories of the honor of the UN resolutions, the UN documents.
And it is really important for the governments also to understand that community led housing could be a more economic way to provide social housing because they tend to be long lasting.
They tend to count with the help of the population, the health of the groups, the help of the community in the stewardship, So I think raise awareness about this economic aspect could be really important to guarantee this government support that we need so badly.
Excellent.
Now, before I turn to the European Parliament, I think we're really privileged to have this great set of diverse speakers who are basically presenting to us experiences across Europe.
We're looking at this with a perspective of expanding community led housing solutions and trying to make this go to scale with much needed stronger support from the political side.
Now, this, of course, includes not just raising awareness, it's also about adapting policies and regulations and improving access to funding and institutional support.
So many of these initiatives, I daresay, remain very small in scale.
Am I right? But many communities are facing barriers of similar nature when trying to develop these projects.
You can from the audience either attest to this or not.
But one of the elements is these complex legal and regulatory systems which Goran is speaking to also.
The difficulty of accessing land which Fidalgo is also trying to speak to and the limited financing opportunities that Ana's experience is also alluding to.
If I may ask Marco.
From what perspective is the European Parliament coming in to aid the scaling up of these experiences just as part of what your intervention could be? Yes.
First of all, I want to thank all the speakers for presenting your initiatives and the things that you have been doing with this cooperative housing initiative, some community led housing initiatives.
I think There is one message coming from your presentation, very clear.
Community led housing is no longer just an interesting experiment.
Community led housing should be part of the solutions for the housing crisis or the housing emergency that we do have in all over the world, but especially in the European Union.
And during a lot of years, we had to recognize that the European Union and many member states has not been sufficiently supportive of community led housing initiatives.
Maybe maybe because there was not a struggling problem with housing across the European Union and more or less the market was functioning, public social housing was functioning.
The initiatives were isolated, were small, and were sometimes even looked as a mixture of suspicious because they are not functioning like the market is, they are not functioning with the rules of the market, and they are not giving profits to the owners and they are not giving some legislator may have seen them these initiatives like, with a little bit of awareness.
No, this is not the classical initiative.
But now the situation has changed.
Very clearly.
Since we started this term in the European Parliament in July 2024, we knew very clear that the housing issue was an emergency, not a crisis, just an emergency.
In the whole European Union, people cannot afford people with jobs, people with two jobs at home, with the two members of the partner working with salaries cannot afford a house.
This is an emergency.
And we started to change some things.
First of all, the Euroan Union till now has never looked to the housing because it was said that we don't have competencies.
And what? What if we don't have no competencies? We don't have competencies in education and we do Erasmus for 35 years.
We do not have competencies on a lot of things and we do a lot of things.
We can do more.
We ask Ursula Von de Leyen, if you want to be vote via our SD group, you have to address a European commissioner on housing for the first time in the history.
We do have a commissioner.
We do have an affordable housing plan that we ask it also to the president.
And in this new affordable housing plan for the European Union, community led housing initiatives are recognized.
We also did in the parliament, a mi review of the ERDF, the European Regional Development Fund.
During 35 years, the cohesion policy has not financed affordable housing.
It was not one of the objectives.
The only financed social housing for a special situation with the European social Fund.
But we ask, and I was the rapporteur, the initiator of this initiative, we asked the European Commission to modify ERDF fund cohesion fund and to incorporate affordable housing in its objectives.
We achieve it, and a lot of countries have reallocated funds from their objectives to build affordable housing buildings to public houses.
Now, we have to go further.
We have to recognize that community led housing initiatives had to be incorporated into the public funding coming from the European Union.
But we are now in the precise moment in which we are debating our mult annual financial framework for 2028 2034.
We have three key funds in which we can incorporate affordable housing as an objective because don't forget that the European Commission has not addressed a fund for housing, which is Okay.
I will not mention my thoughts about that, but we are asking they have provide an affordable housing plan, and they don't provide a housing fund.
Okay.
We had to fee from other funds.
We have the European Competitiveness Fund, we have the European Social Fund, and we have the European Regional Development Fund.
I am the rapporteur of the European Regional Development Fund, and we are going to propose to spend at least 10% of this fund to housing.
Let's see what happened then in the negotiation.
This is my proposal, not the final outcome.
We are going to propose to incorporate in the objectives community led housing initiatives to be financed by public money because it's the only way to upscale these small initiatives.
And I do believe that these kind of initiatives had to be part of the solution.
There is no one solution for the housing crisis.
We need multi disciplinary solutions and multi level governance solutions, but one of them has to be this, and we have to work for upscaling.
And this is what we are going to do.
We have the we have proven results.
We have the security and we have trust in this model, and we have to incorporate this as one of the 100 solutions or whatever number of solutions that you want to incorporate, but one of them has to be community led housing initiatives.
Fantastic Marco.
He's offered us a great opening and noveel approach.
The European Union is embracing community led housing solutions.
I think what I'll probably do is allow the panelists to start thinking about the questions to Marco, whether they're good or critical.
But before that, I'll turn to the audience and allow you to pose questions to the panelists before they actually interact amongst themselves as we head towards the conclusion.
Please introduce yourself and then pose your question.
Thank you very much.
I'm Mino Lujamo.
I'm an urban lawyer from Mexico.
I've been really interested in community led housing models for a while now.
I studied mostly the Bag and model for Germany, and I was recently asked to consult on a group that was trying to do it in Mexico City and very very rapid.
I mean, the consultation was like 2 hours long because they quickly realized one constraint that I think you haven't talked about, and I think that it's in the core of the problem of maybe why we are having trouble scaling this up, and it's that community led housing is very time consuming.
I would like to maybe pick your brains on what I mean, is it a problem of design of the models? Is it a problem and how have you been able to tackle that problem? Is it it precisely when you read about group, and one of the criticisms that I've read is that it's mostly a model for, like, the super rich because the super rich have time and they can do it.
They can participate.
They can spend a lot of time doing this kind of participatory process that you need in order to have good results with this model.
So I'd like your comments on that.
Thank you.
Very interesting panel.
Yeah.
Just quickly to Fernando from Brazil at ETH Zurich.
Two questions do you have known any policy that combine community led housing with public owned housing? I think this is something that could be interesting to understand, maybe also because you have thoughts.
Then the second one, if you have some cooperatives that are promoting some social diversity policies.
If you also public regulations to incentivize this kind of strategies.
Very good.
Who goes first? Yeah, actually, both questions are absolutely valid and right.
When we are saying about the community led housing, there is a variety of models.
There is no one single model that we can talk about.
Of course, looking from the European perspective, most models have this kind of the criticism that they are for wealthy people who just want to do some of the expensive but tailor made way of housing available for them.
However, what we promote is that this affordable housing needs to be socially inclusive as much as possible.
Because of its design in which the private entities, because housing cooperatives are private entities are responsible for the large part of funding, they require a core of social groups that have revenues on their own.
It is not per definition possible without subsidies to be also a social housing.
But it can be made socially inclusive.
It could be made that by design, it is open for various participation in which a part of the subsidies coming out of the solidarity among cooperative members when they also then contribute to offering and allowing housing opportunities for people from the disprivileged groups, or it could be done in the partnership with public sector, with municipalities, with non profits, with foundations, philanthropists to make it much more inclusive.
As anything else, when it gets streamlined by having clear legal recognition, clear funding mechanisms, plenty of best practices and good examples, role models, da, it will become much easier and accessible to much broader and wider social groups.
Any other comments? Maybe I can end.
Our experience within mobile is not the one that you were telling about.
It is that first it came from emergency for people who could not afford and could not imagine even that how they could afford to get to housing on the market as is.
That was the first characteristic, let's say, of people who joined this.
The second one is that at this stage as Gordon is explaining, there has to be some other also motivation.
Majority of people who join these pioneering groups and projects have also motivation to make a breakthrough and also maybe I would even say ideologically believe that we need different forms of housing.
They are ready to make this step.
But there are conditions needed then for others to come to, let's say, join the movement.
What we have, for instance, now in Checha as example, there are four houses that have been bought a by these groups which may have more of this, let's say, conscious idea that there should be a different model and now they teamed up with a fifth project, which is on a way form the Roma community settlement which is under threat to be demolished and they became a part of this network where it's some combination of cooperative and community land trust actually that they want to develop.
You see that already in a very small number of iterations of projects after just a few years, it comes to a different group of people.
There is, at this stage, at least in our case, people who are ready and able to spend that time, but later on, there is possibility opening up for others.
I think that this is very important to keep in mind.
Maybe Bao Group are also different model which you were speaking about that's still based on private ownership, individuals who can invest their money and sell their share, et cetera.
What we are speaking about is a model which keeps the ownership in the community and basically therefore is not interesting for those who want to be there and maybe with the idea to later sell their part and speculate.
So maybe that's part of the answer.
Fidalgo? I will not repeat my colleagues, so I believe the second question is already answered, but I want to talk to you from Mexico.
Well, I think you said that community led housing is something that takes time and you are right, definitely.
But informality also takes time.
Precarity also takes time.
I Moba said, we need to think about new forms of housing independently of those now liberal form of thinking about productivity.
We should think about the formation, we should think about lasting and community led housing are much more lasting than social market housing, for example.
We need to guarantee that the community will be empowered, that we will build citizenship, and it will take time.
We should maybe abandon this productivity paradigm and start to think more about formation, about something that will last for generation, about building a future, and definitely building a future takes time.
Very well.
Are you satisfied with answers? Yes, no? I just sort of identified, I know a contradiction between us saying that we need a lot of diverse solutions for housing and, you know, like one size doesn't fit all and now you're saying that community led housing is just cooperatives or CLTs.
I don't think that's the case.
I think that we do need a lot of models because that's the way that we're going to scale up.
Maybe in, for example, in Mexico, there are some people that would like cooperatives.
Because but I think cooperatives is a very ideological thing, like, people who want to live in a cooperative have a certain ideology.
In Mexico, for example, private property ideas are super strong.
That's why I started Ba Group and because I thought was the model that better fits what the majority of people are thinking about when they want to build a home.
I think that yeah, we shouldn't be just focusing on a couple of models.
We should be expanding our way of looking at this.
Yeah.
Very well.
He deserves a star.
Do you have any follow up questions, but you're satisfied.
Yeah.
Okay.
One other question.
Forced me.
It's Ped R from Gmitk housing in Finland.
It's a good segue from what he was talking about.
Actually in Finland, there is the housing cooperatives, a very generalized model, but that doesn't reflect at all, in my opinion, what you guys trying to do in terms of community housing.
The cooperative housing, I think, has a different approach and I agree with you, there should be more models.
But what I am concerned now or my question would be, is what you're doing is amazing and that's why I've been addressing you and I think it is fundamental.
The financialization of these different models is something that is lacking.
But the other end of the game is all the legal part, which when you have cooperatives or group of people getting together to do something, it's going to be very shaky and it requires time, as you also talked about.
If something goes wrong, if there's some nasty city official that makes a problem and goes to court and it comes expensive, all the cooperative just falls down.
It makes the old model quite difficult to to resist over time and therefore goes back to 0.0.
I think what we would need also not talking about the EU parliament, housing is a right since 1948, but at the same time, we're talking about affordable housing.
Isn't that a contradiction? How come it should be affordable if it's a right? I think we should pick up on those legal things and fight a battle that probably could go to court and maybe earn more rights to housing.
Well, I think that this question raise up the central question of the situation, especially in Europe, but I think in all over the world.
Do we want housing to be an investment tool, a financial facility, or do we want housing to be a fundamental right? This is the main question.
And as of today, housing is just an investment or financial facility.
When things go well and there are more benefits in other sectors, housing is not so much under pressure and it is more or less the market functioning and people more or less can afford to a house.
But now, when the other sectors are not giving profits so quick as housing sector, all the money is being put into housing market and expelling households and expelling them.
It could be by Airbnb or this short term rental model.
It could be by creating economic activities in normal buildings of housing buildings.
It could be by expelling tenants and increasing the rental cost or it could be whatever.
But the situation is people do need a house.
And you mentioned adequately, do we need changes? Yes, we need changes.
But the problem or the problem, how can we harmonize the fundamental right that we adopted in 1948, if I am not wrong, not a fundamental right, a human right, which is different because in different member states, housing is recognized or as a fundamental right or only as a right, for example, in my country, is recognized as a right, but not a right, a fundamental right.
How can we provide people to get this right effective? This is the main question now.
So we need changes in our legislation.
What are we doing now in the European Parliament? We are promoting some changes in the things that the European Union can legislate because there is no competencies on urban planning, no competencies on housing building, no competencies on construction sector.
But we do have competencies in internal markets.
So we can try to regulate certain rental.
For example, we can try to regulate state aids for housing sector.
We can try to regulate the two or three things that we are competent for and we are doing.
Now we have to go one by one member state by member state, country by country and try to start working on changing regulations.
For example, in my country, there is an article in the Constitution that says the administration can fight against speculation, must fight against speculation, but we have never fought against speculation in housing speculation.
It's the only speculation that this is forbidden in our constitution, but we need to make this effective and we do need to start changing our rules.
Up and also at local level.
If we don't change the rules at local level, community led housing initiatives are difficult to manage.
We need new rules, new urban rules and new construction rules for providing the adequate circumstances in order that these initiatives that now are pilot projects or just experiences become more general, but incorporated into different models.
Very well.
It's always said yes.
It's always about how we try to navigate these regulatory and legal frameworks.
Of course, the questions of more and new forms new models is being the question in front of us.
We have been talking about public housing, market enabled housing.
Now we're moving in to think of the complementarity of community led housing and also that's just not enough.
And so the conversation goes on and on and on, just building from what we heard in the dialogue this morning on the global housing crisis, asking what really is the plan to really ameliorate and eventually get us into this housing adequacy.
So in conclusion, we don't always have enough time to do anything, but at least I'm sure we have advanced some narratives here that make sense and that present community led housing as a promising solution and one that we can prioritize in terms of long term affordability and collective stewardship.
I would just like to turn to the panelists maybe to ask one last question or give a last comment amongst themselves, and then we can conclude.
Who do I give? Probably Marco, you had a very interesting query or question to one of them.
You could use this moment to ask them a question, but you could also ask Marco the same question.
Who do I get started with? Anna? I can ask Marco, of course, when you're already pointing to it.
Some of the risks that you already said Marco in the debates, there is no dedicated fund for housing, even though if you look the size of the problem and the issue and the criticality across Europe, it would probably be very sensible to think about it.
But also at the same time, European policies are moving towards the greater flexibility for the moving reallocating funds from one post to another post, which in theory could also bring more to the housing, but could also dissipate even this urgency that we have because energy transition, climate adaptation, defense now, most recently, they are all top priorities emerging.
What can be done and how we from the practitioner sector could support the parliament to try to avoid those deviations in reallocating funds to something else and not housing.
Okay, this is a very good question.
We have done our work.
Three weeks ago, we adopted in the plenary in April session of the plenary in the European Parament our interim report about the MFF proposal coming from the European Commission, and we ring fence the different funds in order to avoid this transferal from one fund to another fund or from one issue to another issue.
Now we have to negotiate our proposal.
With the Council of the European Union, with the member states, and with the European Commission.
But we sent a very clear message.
We adopted by a huge majority of the four pro European groups, a huge majority that said, no, ERDF, European Regional Development Fund has 307 billion, European social Fund has 124 billion, Competitiveness fund has this amount of billions.
We reinfanced all the funds in order to avoid this merging of national and regional partnership plans with agriculture, cohesion policy, defense, tourism and fisheries all together and up to the member states to dedicate these funds for whatever they want.
No, we send a clear message.
We don't want this proposal coming from the European Commission.
Now we have time to negotiate and let's see what happened.
But I hope that the vision of the European Parliament is also more or less shared by some important countries in the council that at the end of the day, at least we have an improved solution better than the proposal from the European Comssion because the European Commission intended to convince us, we need simplification.
This was not simplification.
This was mixes of everything and giving a huge power to member states to decide wherever they want to invest money or not.
But if we have a housing crisis, we should try to earmark money for housing crisis.
And this is our position.
Let's see what happened at the end.
Yes.
Any other question? Great.
So, ladies and gentlemen, as we come to the close of this, of course, this event is linked very much, as I said, to the Work of U and Habitats Brussels Office on an EU funded project that we call Urban 2030 and really which explores the indicators and data that relate to urban development and community led housing has been picked as one of the solutions or the go to ways that we want to go forward with governments around and some of the ideas and lessons that are coming from this session today, I think we want to integrate or reinforce in our projects, including in our project, including really focusing on this most common community led housing models on the community and Trust and the housing cooperatives, but as well, really looking at how we focus on community led housing more than just about affordability and encouraging more and more of the active participation of residents directly in the planning, in the management, and in the governance of their homes and their communities.
We also hope that we can move more and more of the conversation of community led housing solutions as response to the local needs of local inhabitants and protecting housing from speculation and keeping it aligned to community priorities.
I thank you all for being with us.
We can continue the conversations bilaterally.
Thank you very much for being here.