About EqualHouse - From Housing Inequality to Sustainable, Inclusive and Affordable Housing Solutions

EqualHouse is a Horizon Europe funded research project designed to identify, analyse, and tackle the most significant dimensions of housing inequality across Europe, to clarify their scale, character, causes and consequences and to provide local, regional, national and European housing policymakers and other key stakeholders with robust, evidence-based guidance on how to address these inequalities in a sustainable, inclusive and affordable way. This analysis of solutions to housing inequality is uniquely comprehensive in terms of its geographical scope (it will encompass the EU27 and the UK and consider not only national but also supranational, regional and local locales of policy) scope of housing policy instruments examined (including not only established, widely used policy instruments, but also new, socially innovative responses) and, inclusion of issues not directly related to housing (including labour and energy markets and acute housing inequalities, that are usually examined separately from housing policies by researchers).

Rather than relegating the production of these solutions to the end-stage of the project and generating and communicating them in a ‘top down’ way to policymakers and implementers across Europe, EqualHouse starts by considering the needs and concerns of these stakeholders and involves them as partners in the design of both the research and in the co-creation of more sustainable, inclusive and affordable solutions to housing inequality. Furthermore, the identification, exploration, and refinement of solutions is integral to all stages of the research. In this way EqualHouse will not only identify more effective responses to housing inequality; it will also maximise the impact of these responses on housing policy and practice. To achieve these ambitious, innovative and important objectives EqualHouse brings together a team of experts which includes academics from a variety of European countries and disciplinary backgrounds (economics, geography, public policy, sociology, land use planning, urban studies and sustainable building technologies) and housing policymakers, and affordable housing and homeless service provider representatives. 

Several members of the EqualHouse team already collaborated in 2020-21 on the landmark Housing2030 project, which explored how policymakers across Europe can improve affordable housing outcomes. EqualHouse builds on this successful collaboration while extending it to include new contributors, who will bring new perspectives and knowledge.