Enabling Private Owners of Residential Buildings to Integrate them into Urban Restructuring Processes

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The project partner cities (Praha, Leipzig, Sopot, Bolzano, Celje, Presov) face severe problems in parts of their urban areas. Economic decline, vacancies and decay lead to social tension and segregation. Consequently these areas of privately owned housing have become unattractive to real estate investors. A downwards spiral of weak financial capacities and spreading decay has lead to market failure in housing, worsened by lacking capacities of private owners to take action (e.g. knowledge on financing possibilities, missing property concepts). In reaction and to break this downward spiral the EPOurban partners aim to sensitize, activate and mobilize private owners by consulting services. EPOurban partners identified private owners as key actors and together elaborated the concept of a consulting system to initiate private investment. Whereas public or private housing companies are usually able to take the adequate measures, single private owners often lack the necessary resources and skills. Their property remains as it is and fails to meet the new needs. As the majority of Central European residential buildings belong to single private owners, this poses a severe threat to social stability, economic growth and ecological effectiveness of Central European cities and regions. Cities are aware that they have to implement integrated strategies to meet the challenges of social and demographic change. They know that housing is a key element within these strategies. Yet they don’t have the possibility to act on the private sector of housing market. They are dependent on the private owners’ willingness and ability to cooperate and to invest. This is one of the most crucial bottlenecks of urban development. So much the worse that instruments are still missing to integrate private owners into urban restructuring processes. EPOurban wants to meet this challenge and foster successful housing market and urban development under the conditions of social and demographic change.

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