The social housing sector is facing a double-sided challenge: implementing a large renovation wave to improve the energy performance of the building stock, while maintaining affordable rents to make sure no one is left behind. But the renovation rate hardly reaches 1% due to several hurdles. Among them: 

• The cost of renovation combined with limited housing budgets, that may impact the level of rent and trigger a risk of ‘renoviction’
• Some critical gaps between the complex, fragmented financing tools available at EU level, and the needs of local projects and frameworks.

The SUPERSHINE project developed some integrated pathways for sustainable social housing renovation, tested in three lighthouse cities. From this experience, they designed a set of recommendations to support public authorities in their housing renovation policy, with the aim of reducing energy poverty and accelerating the transition to zero-carbon living.

SUPERSHINE’s policy brief provides public authorities with concrete recommendations to help bridge the investment and implementation gaps. These recommendations cover different dimensions:

• Financial mobilization: establishment of National Decarbonization Funds to de-risk private capital; development of Blended Finance Models; integration of Renewable Energy as a compulsory condition in financing schemes to mitigate the market emphasis on short-term returns
• Protection of affordability and social equity: setting up of regulations that tie the rent increases to net savings on energy bills
• Technical and administrative capacity: creation of municipal one-stop-shops to ease the renovation journey, capacity building programmes and skill certification schemes to address labour and skills shortage
• Data-driven decision support: adoption of life cycle assessment and life cycle costing to ensure that projects are both economically viable and climate neutral.

The final message of SUPERSHINE: it is a by integrating social protection, innovative financing, and technical expertise, that just renovation pathways can be achieved in the social housing sector.