The other housing sector

Claire Roumet on why tough economic conditions have made policymakers more interested in social housing.

The social housing sector has a solidity that appeals to Claire Roumet, the secretary-general of Cecodhas Housing Europe, a pan-EU federation for social and co-operative housing providers. “Our base is 27 million homes,” she says. “It’s something tangible.”

The sector also demonstrates a pragmatic approach that comes with its social mission. “It’s not a sector where [contractors] want to invest for profits or be super-technologically advanced. It’s a sector where they want to build homes for people.”

Roumet had no particular connection with social housing before taking up her present role. Born in France, she studied economics in Paris, and then econometrics in Mainz, Germany, in the mid-1990s. Her interest was in studies that would lead to effective policy development, but she soon realised that jobs connecting theory with practice would be hard to find.

“I was astonished to find that policymakers never really have a prospective unit,” she says. “Even at the highest level, you have very few people doing prospective work to help design policy. So I thought: well, if I want to do policy, I have to do policy.”

Local social capital

She took a master’s degree in European public policy in Strasbourg and then came to Brussels, first working for the European Women’s Lobby and then for the European Commission on a programme dealing with local social capital.

When the job with Cecodhas came up in 2001, her mandate was to establish a presence in Brussels and to lead the federation. Roumet admits that it was a significant step up. “I had the luck to arrive at a moment when the organisation had to grow and I grew along with it.”

Cecodhas represents social and co-operative housing providers in 20 European countries, most operating with public support in the

form of indirect state aid. It is this financial side of the sector rather than the social goals that attracts the most attention from EU institutions. “What they look at is to ensure that any state aid given to the sector is not distorting competition, and that any public procurement is transparent,” Roumet says.

Unfavourable market conditions

The financial crisis has not been kind to the social housing sector, increasing demand while at the same time making it harder to secure funds for building. Public spending and lending has been cut back, and capital market conditions are highly unfavourable. But the attitude of policymakers has changed for the better. “No one now dares to say that the unaffordability of housing is not a problem,” Roumet says.

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That has opened doors in Brussels. “It’s easier for us to get on with policymakers now,” she explains.

“We spent a lot of years hearing that housing is not an EU competence. Today, it doesn’t matter whether or not it is a competence; what matters is how it impacts on economic stability.”

Even so, the lack of a social dimension to EU policy means that Roumet has to seek other ways of achieving the sector’s aims. One success has been in lobbying for the structural funds to be opened to energy-efficiency projects in social housing.

One of her priorities is to enlarge this opening in structural funding, and her organisation’s observatory is busy collecting data on how effective the first wave of projects has been. With the exception of three well-documented countries, research such as this in short supply. “If you want know about Sweden, the UK or the Netherlands, you have everything you want,” she says, “but for all the rest it’s a black hole.”

Ian Mundell is a freelance journalist based in Brussels.