1.
Bring back the lodger
Build a stepping stone to independence by opening up unused spare rooms

Whatever happened to the lodger? In the past, the gap between living at home with your folks and finding a place all of your own was often bridged by a period spent renting a spare bedroom in someone’s home – then suddenly everyone wanted to skip the middle bit. But being a lodger has much to recommend it. It can be affordable, prevents large houses from being occupied by a single person and often brings together a young renter with an older homeowner. Multigenerational living can be fun when it’s a choice.

The return of the lodger could also help to ease housing shortages and loneliness, as well as increase energy efficiency. Unlike major developments, opening up spare rooms requires no cranes, no concrete and no lengthy planning battles. It’s a nimble, low-impact way to help relieve urban housing stress.

2.
Build beautiful
Set rigorous design standards
and don’t be afraid to enforce them

As we race to build new homes in ever-more packed cities, beauty should not be sidelined. The places that we inhabit influence our emotions and the ways in which we interact with one another. While focus has rightly been placed on meeting environmental criteria, it’s time for cities to add stricter aesthetic requirements to their design codes too.

Done well, attractive new developments can enhance their surroundings and lift the spirits of their inhabitants. Just look to the neighbourhoods of Vauban in Freiburg and Nordhavn in Copenhagen: both are celebrated not just for their green credentials but for being pleasing to the eye too.

3.
Get into prefab mode
Make modular housing part of the solution

“Prefab” and “modular” need not be dirty words in the world of domestic construction. Faced with a housing shortfall of 3.5 million homes over the next
five years, Canada’s prime minister, Mark Carney, has pledged ca$26bn (€16.5bn) in financing for prefabricated homebuilders to help solve the country’s housing crisis.

According to the country’s government, prefabricated and modular housing can reduce construction times by as much as 50 per cent, costs by up to 20 per cent and emissions by up to 22 per cent compared to traditional construction methods. Modular construction also allows homeowners with an empty roof or a garden to scale up as their families grow and their needs change.

4.
Legalise backyard homes
Support gentle density and the era of the mid-rise

Many urban areas suffer from a binary choice: leafy low-rise suburbs or high-density tower blocks. Cities should also be investing in the middle-ground option: mid-rise, context-sensitive developments. From backyard homes and duplexes to in-fill developments, these options can help to create community-minded mixed-used neighbourhoods. Strict regulations and zoning laws have limited housing supply so it’s time to allow for low-to-mid-rise housing that can slip in alongside terraces and detached homes. It works, as the city of Auckland can attest. Now a decade into its Unitary Plan, it has rezoned more than half of the city’s residential land to let homeowners build up to three extra dwellings per lot. Same pretty street, more nice neighbours.

5.
Use it or lose it
Name and shame the owners of long-term vacant units

If homes are primarily seen as an investment, it will be impossible to fix the housing shortage. For too long, many have viewed property as a means by which they can hold an appreciating asset, often in a currency other than their own. And these so-called assets are frequently left empty. Some cities are beginning to fight back, cleverly using data to identify the scale of the problem. In 2023, Melbourne’s government examined water consumption and calculated that 100,000 homes in the city were unoccupied or underused, while Paris monitored census data and electricity usage, and found 262,000 empty dwellings. Both cities have seen calls to increase taxes on the owners of such uninhabited properties.

6.
Make transit the first stop
Compel developers to invest in better public-transport links

A move to the suburbs is not a social death sentence if you can easily zip into town on public transport. The building of big developments should come with an obligation on the part of the developers to improve local transport connections. Hong Kong’s MTR Corporation’s Rail 1 Property model is a good template. It builds high-rise residential and commercial buildings above metro stations, funding the transit system while creating vibrant, car-free communities. Another example is London’s Battersea Power Station redevelopment, which required a contribution of £270m (€320m) on behalf of the developers towards the construction of two new Underground stations.

7.
Encourage community power
Bend a few small rules in order to make a lot of big changes

Macro interventions in the housing market by the relevant authorities – at both the local and national level – are important but these take time and tend towards the bureaucratic. Nobody knows what’s better for a place than the people who live there. While order and basic structures are necessary, citizens should know when to break (or, let’s say, “bend”) rules too. Excessive regulation can slow change to a crawl. So, if you see an abandoned green space that’s overgrown with weeds or drowning in litter, why not lobby to turn it into a garden or vegetable patch? The hubbub of outdoor socialising brings life to the streets and can make an area safer, as long as it’s done responsibly. The same can apply to allowing children to play outside.Yes, even if it is a dreaded ball game.

8.
Turn nimbys into yimbys
Help locals to buy into planning decisions by putting more power in their hands

Inside every Nimby (“not in my back yard”) is a Yimby straining to get out. There is growing evidence that many objectors simply resent not being involved in the planning process and feel that building decisions are being made without
due consideration towards the potential concerns of the area’s residents. One possible solution for transforming Nimbys intoYimbys is to give members of the neighbourhoods involved the ability to sign off on – or even propose – new buildings or building extensions. If people believe that new homes could be available to previously priced-out relatives or friends, then objections might melt away.

9.
Properly regulate short-term lets
Don’t let Airbnb-style rentals rip the heart out of cities

The laissez-faire attitude to short-term rentals has hollowed out many inner-city neighbourhoods across Europe and provoked an electoral backlash. Spain has ordered the platform to remove 66,000 property listings for unlicensed apartments, while Barcelona plans to ban all short-term rentals by 2028. Airbnb counters that it isn’t to blame for housing shortages but it’s clear that the market needs more regulation. Amsterdam’s mayor, Femke Halsema, has proposed a novel solution. In the Dutch capital’s most rapidly gentrifying areas, the government will vote on whether to reduce the maximum number of nights for which properties can be rented out from 30 to 15.

10.
Train more builders
You can’t create more housing without enough construction workers

Countries suffering a housing crisis often announce ambitious building targets only to discover that they lack the required construction workers to achieve them. Importing foreign builders is often politically fraught so there has been a renewed focus on training young people, while making construction a more appealing and sustainable profession.

The UK’s Labour government recently unveiled a plan to build 1.5 million new homes by 2029. Faced with more than 35,000 unfilled vacancies in the building sector, it also announced a scheme to train as many as 60,000 construction workers. This £600m (€710m) investment will also include the establishment of new technical colleges, thousands of apprenticeships and more than 40,000 industry placements.