Metropolitan Research Institute
Metropolitan Research Institute, Budapest
The construction of From Street to Home Association’s first two mobile homes is well under way – the work began on 30 March. The two mobile homes were delivered by truck to the building site in Soroksár, District 23 of Budapest. The Association’s colleagues, together with beneficiaries, professionals and volunteers have been working on connecting the units to the utility grids, and began installing insulation. A small selection of photos is published on the HomeLab website.
Client: UIA Secretariat
Duration: May 2018
Éva Gerőházi, senior researcher of MRI, carried out strategic evaluation of 26 UIA proposals in May 2018 in the theme of housing. The proposals came from different countries of Europe and aimed at implementing innovative housing projects to be elaborated by local municipalities and their local partners. The main strategic evaluation criteria to award the projects was Innovation, which is not easy to achieve taking into account that housing is a cost intensive sphere where any innovation may have a high risk in implementation. That may have been the reason which is why the projects have more innovation in combining the already tested pilot elements rather than creating a brand new mechanism or solution. The evaluation made it also clear that writing a proposal requires a clear vision of what should be achieved and a well-defined way of how to achieve it as without these precise ideas the proposal becomes a hard-to-follow set of activities which the evaluators cannot judge properly.
MRI director József Hegedüs and staff member Vera Horváth are co-authors of “Central and East European housing regimes in the light of private rental sector development”, chapter 2 in the edited volume “Tenancy Law and Housing Policy in Europe: Towards Regulatory Equilibrium”, recently published as part of the Edward Elgar (UK) Elgar Land and Housing Law and Policy series.
Metropolitan Research Institute was member of the consortium implementing the EU FP7 funded project TENLAW: Tenancy Law and Housing Policy in Multi-Level Europe between 2012 and 2016, led by Universität Bremen. The project undertook the in-depth assessment and comparative analysis of the housing policy environment and tenancy regulations (private, public, and intermediary tenure forms) in 28 European countries. The project was a significant learning opportunity for all participants, and resulted in the collection of an abundance of information on housing policy and legislation, as well as real life outcomes, pertaining to residential renting. The recent volume “Tenancy Law and Housing Policy in Europe: Towards Regulatory Equilibrium” contains a selection of the concluding research studies penned by the contributing researchers, selected by Dr. Christoph Schmid, project coordinator and editor of the tome. Chapter 2 on Central and East European housing regimes offers a comparative look at the conclusions drawn from findings in transition countries, based on the detailed information gathered through the project, and focusing on the regulatory questions and actual outcomes that appear the most crucial for the development of private renting: a tenure form with growing prominence, although often hidden in the informal economy.
Project duration: December 2016 – September 2017
Client: European Housing Partnership (EHP)
Metropolitan Research Institute was involved in the project “Overcoming Obstacles to the Funding and Delivery of Affordable Housing Supply in European Cities”: as housing policy advocacy groups have been becoming increasingly aware of the structural differences of housing affordability challenges and possibilities in old and new EU member states, MRI was commissioned to lead an expert team on affordable housing challenges in the eleven new EU member states in Central and Eastern Europe.
EHP consists of the representatives of five EU member states: Slovakia (coordinator), Latvia, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and Slovenia; and two observers, the Czech Republic, and Sweden. Together with a number of cities, networks, NGOs and EU institutions, they contributed to the European Union’s shaping Urban Agenda. EHP is committed to promoting investment in affordable housing: finding good practice in funding and innovation, and also by identifying systemic challenges which constrain the growth of the sector. Scottish Cities Alliance’s working group, led by Professor Ken Gibb (University of Glasgow), investigated the Western European experience of these issues, while MRI leads the research on Central and Eastern European states.
The project focusing on CEE countries, “Affordable Housing in Central and Eastern Europe: Identifying and Overcoming Constraints in New EU Member States”, is led by MRI’s senior researcher József Hegedüs. MRI’s own staff is supported by in-country experts Martin Lux (Czech Academy of Science), Anneli Kährik (Uppsala University), Richard Sendi (Urban Planning Institute of Slovenia), and Veronika Reháková of the project coordinator, the Ministry of Transport and Construction of Slovakia.
The volume “Private Rental Housing in Transition Countries – An Alternative to Owner Occupation?” is set to be published by Palgrave-Macmillan in 2018, although the online version of the 17 thematic and country chapters are already available on the publisher’s website.
Edited by MRI staff members József Hegedüs and Vera Horváth, and prominent researcher of the Czech Academy of Science Martin Lux, the chapters authored by leading Central and East European researchers and housing policy experts takes a look at private rented housing in selected new EU member states and other transition countries – a topic scarcely researched to date, largely hidden in the informal economy, and consequently often invisible to official statistics.
Iván Tosics gave a presentation with the title „The role of the urban areas in the Cohesion Policy post 2020” in the Local Event of European Week of Regions and the Cities in Lodz on 20 September 2017. The conference was attended by representatives of the largest Polish cities.
Tosics’s presentation for the event is available on this link (pdf).