The European Commission and the European Investment Bank (EIB) have recently launched a landmark effort to tackle the housing crisis, committing over €50 billion across 2026-2027 and attracting €375 billion from national and regional promotional banks by 2029.

Despite these record sums, a €150 billion annual investment gap remains. Across many countries, closing this gap requires crowding in private capital at an unprecedented scale, particularly through the new Pan-European Investment Platform.

Private investment can help deliver new housing, retrofit homes and accelerate innovation, yet it also risks fuelling price increases or driving sub-standard construction. To ensure that public de-risking leads to long-term public good, private capital must be shaped by robust conditionalities.

Conditionalities, also referred to as safeguards, have featured prominently in discussions regarding the EU’s role in housing, but these have remained fragmented and polarised. This workshop changes this by bringing together a diverse range of decision-makers to build alignment on a set of conditionalities that can mobilise the required capital while protecting people and planet.

The discussion will focus on three key pillars of requirements which should apply to any housing project benefitting from EU or EIB funding:

• Environmental: minimum energy efficiency for new homes and improvements for retrofit;
• Social: long-term tenure protection, caps on post-retrofit rent increases, anti-displacement safeguards, holding periods by housing type, labour rights;
• Governance: disclosure and reporting requirements for funding recipients.

Together, these can play a crucial role in levelling the playing field between recipients, de-risking investment, and ensuring the capital invested by the EU reduces emissions and improves quality of life for its citizens.

This event is co-organised by the European Environmental Bureau, Institute for Human Rights in Business IHRB, Make The Shift, World Benchmarking Alliance, International Union of Tenants, and the Pre-Distribution Initiative.