Cold Homes and Housing Costs Are One Problem, Two EU Research Projects Argue

Eurostat puts 9.2% of EU residents in cold homes. Two EU-funded research projects now argue energy poverty and housing costs hit the same households.

Eurostat counted 9.2% of the EU population as unable to keep their home adequately warm in 2024, an improvement of 1.4 percentage points on 2023. The average hides a wide spread: Bulgaria and Greece both sit at 19.0%, Lithuania at 18.0% and Spain at 17.5%, while Finland records 2.7% and Poland and Slovenia 3.3%. Two EU-funded research programmes, profiled on 23 August 2026, argue that this indicator and the housing affordability indicator are measuring largely the same households — and that treating them as separate policy files is why neither gets solved.

The two programmes

PREFIGURE, led by Professor Michael Janoschka at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, studies 16 local initiatives across eight European countries that link affordable housing with energy solutions for vulnerable groups. HouseInc, coordinated by Dr Anne Kantel at the Fraunhofer Institute for Systems and Innovation Research, examines how energy costs, market structure, policy and climate change shape housing inequality; it has surveyed roughly 15,000 households across eight countries, part of a wider research sample of around 30,000 European households. Case studies in both projects include marginalised communities in Eastern Europe.

Empty homes next to unmet demand

One finding cuts against the standard supply narrative. Thessaloniki has 35,000 vacant homes sitting in a city with an acknowledged affordability problem. Vacancy on that scale is not a construction failure; it is a failure of the stock to be usable, lettable or heatable at a price the local market will pay. That distinction changes the policy answer — new permits do nothing for a unit that is already built and empty.

Why the green transition is the pressure point

The researchers' central warning concerns retrofit and decarbonisation programmes. Without deliberately inclusive design, policies aimed at cutting building emissions risk landing hardest on the households least able to absorb the cost. Their prescriptions are structural rather than headline-grabbing: municipal strategies should operate at neighbourhood and building level rather than treating households one at a time, programmes need long-term funding stability instead of annual grant cycles, and local authorities need cross-departmental capacity to run housing and energy policy together.

What a yield number leaves out

For anyone reading European rental markets, this research points at a gap between headline and net returns. A gross rental yield is a pre-tax, pre-energy, pre-compliance number. Greece, at the top of the cold-homes ranking, carries a 4.38% gross yield in Glopra's current data with a national average of $2,926 per square metre; Athens sits at $3,481 and 5.52%. Both of those figures also sit alongside an 18.07% effective rate on the standardised non-resident rental case, so the gap between gross and net is already substantial before any efficiency obligation is priced in.

Where retrofit obligations eventually fall on landlords rather than owner-occupiers, they show up in net yield and in capital expenditure rather than in the headline price per square metre — which is precisely the reason older, cheaper, less efficient stock can look attractive on a yield screen and disappoint in practice. The counterweight is that none of these programmes has produced binding EU-wide rules for private landlords yet; this is research shaping a debate, not legislation with a commencement date.

Sources: Cyprus Mail (PREFIGURE and HouseInc project findings), 23 Aug 2026 https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/08/23/the-hidden-link-between-europes-housing-crisis-and-energy-poverty; Eurostat, 9.2% of EU population struggled to keep their home warm, 2 Feb 2026 https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/products-eurostat-news/w/ddn-20260202-2