Warm Homes, Cold Realities : Housing Conditions and Energy Vulnerability in the European Union

Overview & Synopsis

Adequate housing - recognized by the United Nations as a basic human right encompassing access, affordability, and quality - and access to affordable energy are foundational to economic participation, health, and well-being. Housing is critical to inclusive growth, economic productivity, and household well-being. Adequate housing conditions are essential for health, with the need for more climate-resilient housing becoming more urgent due to climate change. The European Union (EU) has increasingly emphasized the importance of adequate housing through a growing set of resolutions, directives, and initiatives, while housing policy itself remains primarily within Member State competence. Against this backdrop of policy ambition and economic pressure, academic research and operational knowledge on the intersection of housing conditions and energy poverty in Central and Eastern Europe remain fragmented. The 4CEE countries present a particularly important and analytically coherent case study yet remain relatively underrepresented in the empirical literature on housing and energy poverty. The primary data source for this analysis is the EU Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC), which provides harmonized, cross-country microdata on income, living conditions, and housing characteristics for all EU member states. Drawing on EU-wide data to situate the 4CEE countries in comparative perspective, the report is organized as follows. Section I gives introduction. Section II examines housing tenure patterns, homeownership, affordability, and the relationship between housing and labor mobility in the 4CEE countries. Section III presents findings on housing quality, the aging housing stock, and energy efficiency challenges. Section IV analyzes energy poverty using three complementary categories of indicators and introduces the multidimensional energy poverty index developed for this report. Section V synthesizes the findings and presents a sequenced set of policy recommendations.