 Sleep, sustenance, sex, my favorite things in life, all require shelter. Having somewhere safe and affordable to live is the literal foundation of our existence and yet, everywhere across Europe, it's getting less and less affordable. When I see homeless people on the street, I really can't imagine how you can survive like that. We want to have them integrate in the society. Just because you say that everyone has to have a home to live, that doesn't have to mean that it is free. That feels like quite an elementary expectation. Now it's worth like 30 million euros. We could sell it and all become rich, you know? The good conscience is the one thing that these huge real estate management agencies don't offer. This is nothing we want to have, I think. We really have to work against that. So you want oligarchs to pay more? Yeah. Okay. I would just really decommodify housing completely. Welcome to Standard Time. I'm Mereika Kingopop, your host and the editor-in-chief of Eurazine, the online magazine presenting this show. Eurazine has a network of more than 100 cultural journals, whose publishing we present to a global readership. We're also proud co-founders of the Display Europe platform, showcasing diverse content from across Europe in 15 languages. Now a home isn't just a roof over our heads. It's a necessity and many of us think of it as a basic human right. As a millennial, I've had ample time to understand that I will never own one myself. Today, building wealth through wages is only available for a very select few high earners. The only tenable means to settle down seems to be inheritance. But what if your ancestors, like mine, didn't leave you with a countryside villa or a downtown loft? Across European cities, real estate markets have turned into a hotbed for speculation. From 2021 to 2022, in a single year, residential property prices increased by more than 9% on an EU average. But some countries experience the brunt of this rise. For instance, house prices rose by over 20% in Estonia, Czechia, Hungary and Lithuania, closely followed by the Netherlands and Slovakia. Okay, so I won't be able to buy an apartment or a house, but that doesn't mean I can't rent one, right? Wrong. The rental market is in even more turmoil and those affected by it tend to be more vulnerable financially. In Estonia, prices more than doubled since 2010 and in Hungary, Poland and Ireland, the rise for rent was over 75% over the past eight years. In Berlin, rents shut up by around 50% over the same time period and they have rent control regulations in place. In 2021, 17% of the EU population lived in overcrowded households. Nearly 7% were unable to keep their homes adequately warm and 8.3% experienced explicit housing poverty. That means they spend 40% or more of their whole household income only on housing. Homelessness is increasing and a great many political actors abuse this situation for fear-mongering against those who are forced to sleep in the streets. The public hatred against the visibly poor has roots reaching back at least 500 years of European history. And real estate ownership is becoming a political watershed in many countries again. This is especially notable in England where the most likely determining factor of a voter's party reference is whether or not they own a home or have passive income from real estate. But there are solutions. Many European countries have a lot of experience in social and supported housing from the 19th and 20th century. As the Industrial Revolution brought great masses to urban centers, this pressure ignited public housing, first as tenement blocks and boarding houses. Many of the historic city centers we admire today were actually built under this pressure. But housing investment exploded threefold in the aftermath of the world wars, as nations had to find rapid solutions for large numbers of people displaced by the war and for those who lost existing homes in the destruction. And that's where housing projects were born. They may not be the greatest tourist attractions, but I for one loved those concrete monstrosities. I spent most of my childhood in the concrete jungle of Örökesvöld, a 1980s mega-project housing 10,000 inhabitants on the eastern grazing pastures of the then-expending Nyeret Hässe, my hometown in the northeast of Hungary. I fondly remember those big ol' stretched-out playgrounds, the dark staircases and especially having a roof over my head as a child. I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone. I live in a similar concrete blockhouse here in Vienna, where I rent an apartment built in the 1950s. I have to say it hasn't disappointed me. I can wash my person in there, sleep without freezing to death. Sometimes I even walk around naked without bewildering small children or attracting police attention. But as firm as many of these projects still stand, social housing is not as popular as it once was. Many nation-states subsidize middle- and upper-class wealth-building instead of solutions for the poor. But there are remaining devotees. Finland, for instance, has introduced a method to cut the Gordian knot. The policy of housing first deals with homelessness by, well, providing homes to the unhoused. What an ingenious idea! You can read about this and much more in yours in Focal Point room temperature. In many other countries, municipalities and NGOs are at the forefront advocating for more humane policies, innovating in technology and in ownership structures, and some of them even build their own houses. And we have their colleagues with us today. Ekker Out is the editor of the urbanist magazine Deriv, whose collective is behind the Urbanize Festival. They build this housing block, Bikes and Rails, here in Vienna, a project whose apartment units cannot be monetized. We'll talk about what this means with LK in just a minute. And in true Eastern Europe style, we have two ladies from Budapest who will be crashing on my couch tonight, here in Vienna, after the stock. It's not like we have a budget for hotel rooms or anything. Lenke Palfi and Adi Achurek are the colleagues of the NGO From Streets into Homes, pioneering the housing first method in Hungary. They help rough sleepers move into affordable rental housing. They also advocate for affordable rental housing provision to become the institutional national policy solution to homelessness. So let's curl up on the couches of Bikes and Rails and talk shelter. I would like to start the conversation by asking the three of you to clarify what housing first as an approach as a methodology means. We can see in Hungary in the institutions that deal with homelessness, the main process that they follow is the staircase model, which means that hierarchy of shelters from the ones that are very low threshold and you can only spend a night there. And then there are the ones which are for longer term, but two years maximum. And as opposed to this, housing first says that housing should be given to every human. It has to be applied to the special needs of that person and it has to be provided for however long that person needs it. For some it might just be a year or two, but for some people this might mean that they need it till the end of their lives. Could you tell me about what are the exact sort of services and support that you provide in your daily work? Yes, so when we start working with our tenants, usually we start social work before they move into a municipality owned or a privately owned social housing agency flat. We want to help them integrate in the society by organizing these community events and like self-help groups maybe or like community groups. We have like a women's group, we have a group for like new tenants and old tenants to help each other out. Our social workers go to trainings so they can help our tenants deal with their trauma. Peer support is pretty important and it's something that we only recently started to do in our organization. Elke, your focus is very broad in terms of imagining and understanding cities but this staircase model applied in many cases in dealing with homelessness or an approach to housing poverty. This sounds like a 16th, 17th century approach to thinking poor people have to work to become sort of worthy of having housing. Is that completely mistaken or is that really somehow this prejudice included there? No, I'm sure you're right. This is stupid because living on the street puts you under such a stress that go along with this like drug abuse, alcoholism in many cases comes from, you know, it's not automatically like that your alcoholism puts you on the street. It can also be the other way around to cope with this stress. So I think it's very important and actually more and more countries I think go into this direction of the housing first programs. It's an NGO in Vienna. They run a housing first program and it's scientifically, you know, so the universities are in as well to do research on it, how it works and to really monitor it and as it seems the results are brilliant, like overwhelmingly brilliant more than they expected. So just get back on track and can like get into what you would call a decent life again through giving them like a company by social work, but just providing housing for them. I always think when I see homeless people on the street, I really can't imagine how you can survive like that, you know, to have a room of your own, you know, or a flat or apartment of your own where you can lock the door and it's your home and there you are safe and you know it is like an essential part of human life, I think. I agree. I really prefer having places with like a toilet to use so that I don't have to do this in the street or as you say, just having a door that sort of delineates a personal space that feels like quite an elementary expectation. So I often wonder why our societies don't think that people should be entitled to this. What I've noticed pretty recently is that when you just describe this model to someone they very often misunderstand it either on purpose or like actually just because you say that everyone has to have a home to live that doesn't have to mean that it is free from streets to homes, associations, all of our tenants pay for their housing and I would guess it is the same ratio of their income as most people on the market do. So it's actually a completely fair model. Sir, can we stop there? Because I think that being poor is really expensive, right? So how does this play out when you are living in housing poverty? What's your experience? One thing is that you cannot make long-term investments in any part of your life, be that your home improvements or electricity or gas bills or anything. Many of our clients have these meters that you have to put money in and then you have the electricity until it runs out and it is also a more expensive system. So I think most things are cheaper when you can invest in them for a long term and that is something that they cannot do. Also their health, the conditions that they had to live in made it a lot worse than the rich persons and like being unhealthy is obviously a costly thing. I think the government funded a research lately that showed that the housing first model is not effective, which I don't know how they did because also in our organization. I have a couple of guesses how the Hungarian government comes to its data points. So even our success rate is somewhere around 90-95 percent, but obviously it's very... Resource intensive? Resource intensive, yeah. This is EU speak for costly, right? But not really like expensive, like insanely expensive but needs investment and presence, right? I think there is like this concept in people's head that it's more expensive to run this program but if they spend this amount of money into like housing first programs, there would be like more people who would get out of homelessness. Now let's talk a word about who made this discussion possible. We owe a big thank you to our partner journal, Deriv and the housing project Bikes and Rails here in Vienna who are housing us right now. If you are around, check them out and now back to the conversation. Elke, your scholar obviously studying this, we also have personal experience with this particular housing project. Please explain to us how this works with bikes and rails that it cannot be monetized. Bikes and Rails housing project, it's a project that was completely planned and also is still self-organized by a bunch of people who got together. We were like 30 grown-ups and around 14 kids. We really wanted to make sure that we can sustain affordable living here. One of the models we found, we knew it before because in Germany it's actually active. It has been implemented in the beginning of the 90s. It's a special legal construction. The people who live in it have got complete control over this house. So there's no third party who makes money with the house which keeps rents really low. We sort of copied this model, this German model. In Austria it's called Habitat and the model is like every housing project is autonomous but is also part of sort of a roof organization, the Habitat. And this roof organization actually has got only two tasks to fulfill. One task is to sort of check beforehand when projects start to support them on one hand but on the other hand also check if they have got a solid financial plan, development plan, whatever. And also help projects with that, you know, to go through that. And the other task is okay, we built this with 5 million euros. That's what it costs more or less, this house. But now it's worth like 30 million euros. We could sell it and it all become rich, you know. And so in a case like that, the Habitat would say, no, it's not possible. You can't sell it. And what comes out of this construction is that you actually live in a house. You pay rent. You also pay from the very beginning. You pay a very small amount in the beginning of your rent goes to the Habitat to make it easier for next projects. On a long perspective, you really can build up with these autonomous housing projects. You can sort of build up a whole pot where you can finance other housing projects like that as well, which actually starts to happen in Germany in the moment. It's sort of like an evolution of the old-timey Sparkase logic and the Gemeindebau sort of meeting in the middle, but in like the 21st century to my understanding. So what's the main difference? Can you maybe explain what the Gemeindebau is because it's so sort of iconic of Vienna? Yeah, the Gemeindebau is a very special type of social housing in Vienna. It came out of Red Vienna in the 1930s where the Socialist Party took over power and started a huge housing program right away because it was an incredible need of decent housing in Vienna at that time. Only a few years they built 60,000 homes for people which were at that time like really luxury homes, they had running water, they had a bathroom, toilets. And this was embedded in a complete idea. Red Vienna was not only a housing program, it was a program to change society into a direction of fairer society. They implemented kindergartens. And the laundries, like the general laundries, which is, let's be honest, the invention of the general laundry and the shared laundry spaces is a really big change. I mean the whole program was actually to make it possible for women to take part in society, to start working on their own, have an own income. It wasn't only like the day-to-day needs, but it was also culture. I think that's very important. They really followed this slogan, bread and roses. You know, it's not only about bread, it's also about having access to education, having access to culture, to theater, to cinemas. So it was a really empowerment program for the workers, for the working class. So this is the basis of the Vienna Gemeindebau. The difference is probably that Habitat really comes out of the squatting scene in the late 1980s, where squatters in Germany... Now I'm even more interested. No, squatters in Germany, just some people, actually in Freiburg, just got together and sort of like, hey, okay, you know, we are squatting. We are always in this precarious status. When the political program or the government changes, we are forced out again. But we do need space for subcultures and for different models of society, etc. So they actually went into the archives and found a lot of material from the very, very first, on one hand, the Settlers movement in Vienna, which was like, build your houses on your own after the First World War movement. And on the other hand, from the very early cooperatives, you know, where cooperatives weren't like big tanks and companies as any other company, but still a very democratic and empowering sort of form of organization. And out of this, the Mitzvah-Sahson-Dekat was sort of, you know, sculptured or sort of thought up. Yeah, quite, I'm very happy that they did this work in the 80s, because I still think it's a brilliant model. Can I just have a very profound question as where did the initial capital for this whole building come from, for this whole construction? I mean, 5 million euros. That's not some crowdfunding type of thing, I guess. Yeah, it's a good question. And this is actually, we follow sort of a solidarity financing model in the habitats. The costs were exactly 5.5 million, actually, and it's a big number. None of us had this money, I mean, clear. The city of Vienna in sort of new urban development areas, they give away a small amount of plots to building groups, like we are, to housing projects, for half the price. And what we had to do is bring up a concept that does more than just say, hey, we have this nice architecture and we will build nice flats, but you have to think up or bring up a concept that will sort of cater the surrounding area, you know, and in our case it was, it's called bikes and rails, because we are near the station, rails and bikes, because we sort of are a hub of climate-friendly mobility. We have got a cargo bike sharing model here. We've got a bike shop in the house, et cetera. Yeah, we briefly stole one of the cargo bikes waiting for a pair to bring us lunches. Yeah, and so we won this. It was the first step that was important, because that's a big part of the costs of a housing project. And then we decided that we will do like social housing. And if you do that in Vienna, you are obliged for a loan from the city of Vienna, which is quite cheap. And then we did a campaign, and we are still actually, we are in a permanent campaign in a way, because we are asking people to lend us money. People just borrow, like, give the house the money for a certain amount of time, and they can choose their own interest rate between zero and 1.5 percent. And so we did a big campaign. We went out, we sort of lobbied for the model, we made workshops, a lot of lectures, end and end. And in the end, managed to raise 1.5 million euros by that. And then we have got a bank loan, which is another 2.5 million. But these direct loans, these private loans, they are very, very important for us. This direct loan model just means like you have some money on your bank, you don't need it in the moment, maybe not for the next two or three years. So you give it to the project, it goes into the spot, and when you need it back, you get it back again, and somebody else puts its money in, and so it flows through all the time. That's insane. But the thing is, you build up this parallel structure, but so do you. Your NGO is pioneering a social sort of, how would you translate it into English? Like real estate management, housing management agency? Well, the concept itself, the program we call social housing agency, we wanted to buy some apartments of our own in the near future as well, and try to apply it for like a social bank loan, and the interest rate was 18%. So that's not going to happen anytime soon. So whoever wants to, they can support from Streets to Homes organization, and the link is in the show notes, and the QR code is going to be on the screen. So please do, and you can also get the latest issue of Deriv, which deals with homelessness in a very broad sense, mainly in German, sometimes also a little bit in English. But let's check this out, and I'm pretty sure that on Eurozone, we're going to be grabbing some articles from you if you allow us. So what does the social housing agency do? It deals with private property, right? It involves private property, mostly the apartments of people who move the road, but they have their apartments vacant at Budapest. We are responsible for that there will be no harm done to the apartment, or if there is, then we will fix it. So you are the guarantor towards the owner? Yes, in a way also that we guarantee that even if the tenant is not paying, we will take responsibility to pay the owner and help the tenant out with whatever their financial issues are, so that next Monday they can pay again. When applied on a bigger scale, it really can take out private apartments from the market pool and bring the prices lower. For the owner, it's worth it because they don't have to do with a lot of paperwork, they don't have to worry about the state of their apartment, or the rent coming in, or the bills being paid. They can just lay back and also have a good feeling about themselves that they are doing something good. So having a passive income with a good conscience, basically. The good conscience is the one thing that these huge real estate management agencies don't offer. What investment property offers is passive income without you doing much, just by this and it's big in Vienna and elsewhere where the rents are just through the roof, because these developments also drive prices up. And then basically the owner most often doesn't even see the property, like ever in their life. They never meet the renters. We have an article detailing this, which we published in collaboration with Deriv that you can find in the show notes. And this completely removes this human element of seeing the tenant as a human person that you may feel empathetic to or have a connection with. It just makes them very quickly replaceable. And I believe this is this sort of quick commodification that you already mentioned, right? Yeah, it's just housing has been for decades. It's a human need and housing sort of fulfilled this need. And since the 1990s housing became this commodified. It became a commodity like any other commodity. And people are making, it's not like houses, meanwhile houses, many houses or big emo projects are not being built for to host people in there and to give like flats to people, but only to park or make even more money. You know, I mean there are housing store money, right? Like this is the type of investment that became especially popular after the financial market crashes of 2008. And people just don't trust investment products, which I mean fair game in a lot of ways. But this also results in a lot of apartments just not being available. Like in Budapest, for instance, we have an especially high ratio of apartments that are not used for housing, either because they're being used as offices, but also very often that they're just standing there empty. And I understand that the social housing agency is offering a model to deal with this, right? So this is kind of the invention or sort of the crux of the service that you want to offer to the owner some kind of a shortcut that is more humane, right? How do you find these clients? We also try to start like working together municipalities that have like apartments that could be rented out. So we want to help them find the best way to use their property. And we have like two or three municipalities in Budapest that own people in their own district to help us and start their own housing agencies. We also have tried to pull in like companies and like other NGOs that have more money to buy homes as an investment, but also they give us the right to choose out of the tenants. So we have like more homes in our housing agency. The whole idea behind this agency, I think, was that we had to do something with the fact that more and more average people who were previously middle class, they cannot rent on the market anymore. So yeah, housing poverty is not limited to a small proportion of the population. Although I would argue that's big enough a problem to deal with, even if it's not the whole middle class. But now most of the middle class is very much affected. And also if any of the viewers have a couple of apartments to offer up for rent through this agency, please let us know. You both have brought up the social work element and how peer support for people living in housing poverty or previously unhoused people is just so incredibly important because you don't have to invent hot water. You don't have to invent everything. These people understand each other's problems and have a really good grasp of what the others are dealing with. What would be the community aspect for a housing unit like this that you want to introduce that you think city planning, urban planning has to keep in mind? For us it was clear in the very beginning that we wanted to provide more than just beautiful flats for ourselves. And also although the situation in Vienna is still quite good compared to other cities like Budapest. Actually nearly all the bigger cities and even middle cities as well, you know, it's just a huge problem. We just thought it's very necessary to provide space for initiatives where people can meet and talk to each other and sort of find out that they probably share the same views but also maybe the same problems. We wanted to have the café as a very open and welcoming space like a sort of living room space as you said but also our community room which is for the house, for the housing community but it's used meanwhile by external users who do all sorts of things here like political groups who meet here, social workers who are doing yoga here. To come down and talk to each other. We have got a sort of music school. We had exhibitions here from external people already so it's just an open space for people to use and I think that's very important because with this commodification of space not only for living but also for nearly for everything, for working together, for culture, for sort of civil society engagement. I think it's a real danger also for democracy in our society as a whole. If we haven't got any space to meet anymore everything breaks apart and this is nothing we want to have. I think we really have to work against that. We have the magic wand. You can make one sweeping wish for something to be realized as of tomorrow. I mean talking of housing I would just really decommodify housing completely. I think housing should be accessible for everybody to look for a low rate as a human right and it also has to be democratized like tenants who live in the house should be able to like also organize how they want to live together. Okay let's build this up. So beyond that what would be your wish Adia? That all all municipalities owned flats that are vacant now would be turned into social housing. Okay just like that. Yeah okay like that. For me I think it would be to have some sort of regulation in which everyone has to pay for their housing according to their income in an all sort of the equal ratio and if I can dream of something bigger then this could be applied to all sorts of things like healthcare and bills and food and everything so. So you want oligarchs to pay more? Yeah. Okay I can get on board for that. But they don't like it's still this is still not enough because obviously they don't pay rent. But we already have housing decommodified so I think you know yeah that's a good point to start. Thank you ladies so much. This program is brought to you by Eurazine. Your go-to place for engaging rates from over a hundred partner publications across dozens of languages. To support our work and enjoy special benefits visit patreon.com slash Eurazine and become a supporter starting at 3 euros a month. This talk show is a creation of Display Europe a new content sharing platform that respects your user data. We cover politics culture and more so keep an eye out for that across 15 languages. We also say a big thanks to Bikes and Rails for providing the venue for this episode. This program is co-funded by the European Cultural Foundation and the Creative Europe Program of the European Union. Please note that the views expressed here are those of the authors and the speakers. They do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the European Union or their European Education and Culture Executive Agency. Even though in the question of housing we think it would be pretty great if they shared our position.