Europe faces significant challenges in tackling vacant spaces, from identifying empty dwellings to overcoming complex legal hurdles, Housing Europe’s Research Coordinator, Dara Turnbull stressed at a FEANTSA roundtable discussion on reusing vacant spaces.
He pointed to the difficulty of detecting empty housing across Europe and the lengthy, resource-intensive legal processes that often make action against uncooperative property owners uncertain. Despite these obstacles, he proposed practical policy solutions from Housing Europe’s report ‘Tools to Deal with Vacant Housing’.
The discussion, which brought together representatives from NGOs, charities, and local governments, shed light on shared struggles but also highlighted some recent success stories in reusing vacant spaces to provide much-needed homes.