the level of housing policymaking and the level of housing organisations. There’s been an increased focus on futures thinking and anticipation in business environments and across policymaking and strategic, and this work will explore how some of these practices – such as horizon scanning, strategic foresight, or scenario planning – might be relevant to housing organisations. In Northern Ireland researchers are exploring the Dublin-Belfast Economic Corridor (DBEC) to determine the extent to which current and local policy influences cross-border housing market dynamics, and how the DBEC concept may in future impact on policy and markets. We also have a number of projects focused on tackling issues of the climate emergency and housing. We have recently undertaken a three-year project exploring decarbonisation of the UK housing stock. In partnership with the Scottish Funding Council, we are undertaking a demonstration project evaluating the carbon reduction secured by high-quality Enerphit retrofit of an eight-property tenement block in Glasgow. A key aspect of this work is assessing scalability and replicability. Building on this work, CaCHE are part of an interdisciplinary collaboration with engineering science to address challenges to the wider use of air source heat pumps as a cost-effective, renewable source of energy for heating UK homes. You can read more about this work in a recent blog from our director, Professor Ken Gibb. Finally, CaCHE are looking to launch a new initiative around housing and equality, diversity, and inclusion (EDI). We are having extensive conversations with a number of partners and critical friends and will be launching over the summer with a series of activities, including blogs, videos, discussion, and a number of
research projects. The first two projects will be an evidence review of current understandings and response to ethnic inequalities in housing within contemporary policy and practice, and the second will explore the experiences of Romanian migrants in post-Brexit/Covid-19 Britain, focusing on their how their cultural values and inequalities of labour and migration-status shape their experiences of housing and home. To keep updated on all of our work, you can join our mailing list, where you’ll be able to stay in touch with what we are up to.
Time to regulate short-term lets? New research by UCL’s Claire Colomb and Tatiana Moreira de Souza looks at the growing problem of Airbnb-style letting in European cities. The research spans a dozen large cities, including London, across ten countries. The tremendous growth in recent years of shortterm letting has been fuelled by online platforms such as Airbnb. But, say the authors, a growing body of research has outlined the problems it brings: a decrease in the supply of long-term rentals, higher rents, and the displacement of long-term residents.
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They point out that while those impacts may not be numerically significant at the level of an entire city, the difficulty is that they are highly concentrated in particular neighbourhoods. That has put the social and economic fabric of those areas under pressure. But attempts to regulate the market are contentious and politically charged. Half of the cities studied have tried to limit or reduce the number of short-term lets by requiring owners to apply for a change-of-use permit. This could apply to the whole city or particular areas. But there have been challenges from owners, and
