Hello, everyone. Welcome to FAP stocks, a podcast of the Foundation for European Progressive Studies. Today, we are meeting to discuss a country that has been in the heart of minds of many Europeans for many months, Ukraine, which is fighting a defense war against brutal Russian aggression. But today, we want to take a very important angle and focus on the housing policy, which is something of one of the
biggest pillars and priorities for the progressive European family. And today with me is Vita Schneider, a Ukrainian expert, and someone who is both well versed in theory, but someone who is a practitioner by heart, doing a lot of field research in Ukraine, working, cooperating actually both with academia,
civil society, and the authorities on working on the housing policy in Ukraine. So in that sense, someone who publishes, but as we tend to say, someone who talks the talk and walks the walk of the housing policy. Vita, welcome. Welcome to Brussels. And we deeply appreciate the fact that you managed
to come to Brussels and speak to us today. And I think as an icebreaker, the first question, I would like to ask you a bit to explain what have you been doing in your line of work and actually sketch a bit for us the situation, pre full scale invasion in Ukraine. So our viewers and listeners would
better understand what was the situation in Ukraine. Yeah, sure. So actually, pre full scale scale invasion, I was working a lot with the social housing system in Ukraine, we did, we had a project in Sedos, Ukrainian think tank on overviewing what does Ukraine have in public housing system. Is there any social housing, temporary housing shelters? Well, we found out that there is nothing. And then the full scale invasion started. So, and there came a lot of different
projects to Ukraine. And then the need to analyze the housing systems became even bigger. And then they became also working on the renters, private rentals in Ukraine. But pre full scale invasion, the Ukrainian system was mostly dominated by homeowners. It's the result of the mass privatization that happened in the 90s. And maybe the listeners are familiar with the central and eastern European countries like Poland, Romania, Hungary, which also had the same
privatization. But apart from that, they also had the restitution of housing when previous owners returned and claim the rights to housing, Ukraine didn't have that. So 95% of people in Ukraine lived in housing they owned as of 2013. And then the data is a bit vague, but it largely remains same. And this also means that the private rental market is pretty small. It was before for around 4% before. And then maybe I'll explain that it became much, much larger. But
also it meant that the social housing systems were underdeveloped. They were not in the focus of the government, despite the existence of the law on social housing. So unfortunately, this was the situation. And maybe those who even follow Ukraine more in depth, they might ask why it wasn't in the focus. The war started more than a decade ago. The internal displacement also in relative numbers
was huge. And in that sense, so since 2013, you will while you were observing the war unfolding in eastern regions, the annexation, illegal annexation, sort of violating international by Russia of Crimea, it led also to two different migration challenges that you got has to face with, which internal displacements obviously one of the biggest ones. So I'm just thinking how you
see these priorities, have they shifted with the full scale invasion? How does the government see housing policy maybe in comparison to many others policies that are so significant, be it education, health care, currently, of course, it's the military that defends etc. So how what's your view on it? Yeah, okay, well, it's a very complex question. But to start with, since 2013, indeed, there are many IDPs in Ukraine internally displaced people. And this was the first time that Ukraine
experienced this. So, yeah, unfortunately, the government didn't come up with any comprehensive housing program for them. So the foreign governments supported the creation of so called collective sites or temporary housing in containers, and sometimes in senatoriums. But this mostly remained in the east of Ukraine, East South Ukraine, near Kiev also. But the Western regions didn't experience the mass inflow of IDPs since 2014. And another program was aiming at continuously
supporting home ownership. So IDPs that were more wealthy, that did have savings, the state supported them with purchasing flats. And this was called affordable housing program. And I want to stress that this is very different from what in Europe you understand, and affordable housing, right? So I don't want to confuse these two. But this is how it was.
Maybe we can jump on this immediately. And you can just also explain to everyone who's now listening to this discussion, actually, about the European practices, also in terms of affordable housing. We all know that the channeling of funds and support for Ukraine is quite huge. So there's a lot of actors perhaps willing to support Ukraine. I'm just thinking now also with your view on how you describe with the challenges the government faces, or perhaps it's drawbacks and certain policies.
Have they been looking to you to get some knowledge, experience best practices? Or maybe if we would put you in that position of a relevant ministry, what would you say are good practices to look at also considering the current situation with the full-scale workers, very sad that some of the cities completely disappear and everything is destroyed. And I think rebuild reconstruction is hardly impossible. So you, in that sense, so if anything that you would like to sort of put out
with Europe as a good practice. Another complex question. But yeah, so to start with, it's not only EU that supports Ukraine and gives funds. So it's not only up to you to, you know, suggest policies. So far, with the full-scale invasion, Ukraine launched, government launched a big program, Yevgen Novolyne, which is aimed at compensating people who lost their housing that was either damaged or destroyed. Well, one problem with that is that not everyone had legal documents
for the housing. Another problem is that it's only for deoccupied areas. So people who lost their housing in occupied areas cannot claim the compensation, but also it's aimed at primarily supporting private construction businesses, developers. So there can be no purchasing housing in cooperatives or building your own housing if you own the flat or like social housing, none of that. And I believe that this is a huge problem actually because around 10%
of housing stock has been destroyed or damaged as of February 2024. And this affected around 2 million households. And the outcomes of Yevgen Novolyne are thousands of families. So it's uncomparable. And there is no viable financing for this program either. So in my opinion, what should be done is instead prioritizing homeowners, despite we recognize that really these people lost their homes. And Ukraine is this situation, a mass home ownership. But the
tendency structure is shifting. So more and more people start to live in rentals. More and more people don't know what they want to do if they want to move to Europe or elsewhere. If they want to move within Ukraine, what if it becomes worse in the energy system? And they want to have this freedom of movement. And it's not really smart and sustainable to finance the private housing for
some, for a minority minority of people. It would be much more sustainable to develop social housing, maybe social rental housing, but also to establish the rental regulations. So the market is more safe and stable and comfortable for people. And they can allow themselves more long term, middle term arrangements on the private rental market. And this is the way that you can support more of the affected households than just granting
the full homeownership to some. Also considering that these homes, unfortunately, they can also be damaged later, right? So. And just building on that, because I think you touched on that critical issue for the Ukrainian society as the whole. People are moving within the country, but also outside the country. And very often, I think from that progressive perspective that is being discussed,
the question of community building or trying to bring community together. And sometimes the housing policy is also mentioned as perhaps an instrument that can help in this community building process. Because again, personally, you can hear maybe from some interviews on the field in terms of like a field research, if you read it, tensions that erupt, as you say, homeowners, which rent and then or even families that move to other family members.
I'm just thinking if you notice this connection or link within the discussion of the housing in terms of the future community building, trying to manage the current situation difficult with during the war, but also thinking of how we invest in community, our own community and build these that can sustain communities again with people probably from the East might never be returning to the previous homes they had, etc. So if anything in that regard that you would like to
share, I think that would be also extremely interesting to hear, because I think that social aspects sometimes is overlooked over infrastructure and that focus. Yeah, it is actually a huge problem. So if you look at stats, 60% of IDPs live in rental housing. And most of them, I did a lot of fieldwork interviews, most of them report that they face discrimination of some kind, that they face evictions, that they face rapid price increase, and the state does not support them
in any way. We don't have any regulation for that. And also the homeowners feel like they have rights to do so, like there are others who will come. And also the IDPs are now in this very precarious situation when they're always on the move. And homeowners are projecting on them all the scary things that might happen. The furniture might be destroyed. We don't know of what opinions these people are or something like that. But also since the displaced people
know that a lot of landlords currently live in Europe and rent out their flats. And usually it also means that they would rent out the flats in euros or in US dollars. And these displaced people, they don't get salaries in euros, right? So all of these little things in the housing, they create clashes and conflicts. And what should be done, we should support these displaced
people. I think the municipalities should openly say that, no, this cannot happen like asking for rents in the foreign currency, for example, or no, this cannot happen, the evictions, it's even in the constitution, you cannot evict a person like that, or promote the rental agreements that everyone knows that they should exist, they should be signed, they're totally valid also in courts. Like the support should also come from municipalities and from the state.
Another thing is that what we see from the projects, like housing projects that are now appearing in Ukraine, they're usually meant to house a huge number of IDPs in the village, creating this ghettoization. So one of the last ones was meant to be built in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast in a village for 1000 people. And there should be housing for 800 IDPs. And there are practically no social infrastructures large enough to accommodate all of that.
And they would live in housing blocks next to people who live in their own homes. And this project didn't work out in the end because the local population was against it. And I also understand that because sometimes these projects just put people in random places without previously considering what does the local population think. what would it mean for them? Would it mean more hospitals or schools or kindergarten? And if it doesn't, then, you know, I think this...
You haven't noticed, maybe from my side, just to... You haven't noticed that much involvement, I mean consultation and getting the local population being involved if these initiatives are set up, if we choose an A, B, C, W, or near-el-Weef, or whatever, and then it's just being set up. It's not that it's a comprehensive that you ask the locals, you try to understand how we should live together one another.
Yeah, often it is like that, that, you know, maybe the obelisk level and maybe the municipality, they say, "Yeah, we have this piece of land somewhere, now we have the summer gated communities, Ramadas, and sometimes the central city makes the main decisions for them, you know, for the smaller villages around."
So it's not always very participatory, and that's a problem because these finances and efforts, they could have found a better place, really a sustainable, nice place to develop, but then it's not happening. And I think one of the biggest problems is also how uncoordinated the effort really is. We know as housing researchers that there are different projects popping up. There is no proper legislation to accommodate them. Many of them call themselves like social housing.
However, it's not possible to have social housing like they do it. So I believe that they probably have some internal agreements like municipality, a donor, and the state maybe. But I doubt that this is a sustainable model. And in order to have a sustainable model, we should develop the proper housing legislation. And this is what's going on right now, the drafting of the law on housing policy. And that's a good thing that this drafting started.
Although looking at the draft, there are not many new things there. For example, about the private rental market, it's I think four points about that. And the good thing though is that this law on housing policy is aimed at halting privatization. And this is very important for establishing social housing system, that the municipal and state housing couldn't be privatized anymore. It's necessary because if we build social housing now, put people in there can get privatized in five years.
So this should be stopped. Another thing is that the law will create the institution of social housing operators. And this is a model that exists in Europe. For example, in Austria, it exists too. Basically, the municipality can be housing operator, but also the limited profit companies can be housing operators. And then they manage the housing, they can receive the subsidies, they can receive the lower tax, they pay lower taxes, they maybe can receive the land cheaper.
So this is very important to have the housing operators. This is a good thing that is happening. And I'm just thinking, maybe it's always a good thing to have in these kind of discussion a bit of understanding on what the external actors, those partners that want to support you can do.
So obviously, I think you mentioned that legislation is a good first step, but it needs to get improved and then it needs adoption, etc. So I think that's already one area where all those who are listening to us and perhaps also on the level of decision making individual countries, of the EU or EU, other partners would like to support Ukraine.
But maybe also asking you if you see anything else from your personal experience, obviously it's going to be subjective based on your own research that you did. Anything that you feel that the partners, maybe in our case, let's look at the UND to Europe, any areas that you would feel that the contribution that can be offered would be very useful, tangible, something that can really benefit Ukraine, again, coming back to these good practices.
You already mentioned, I think, ghettoization and isolation is something that many European countries have grasped in the past and have made these mistakes. So it's good to understand them and maybe also on these good things that have happened and you would see as to some extent transferable, it never won one-to-one, but anyway, maybe some practices.
Well, yeah, considering I was talking about this more or less uncoordinated effort and I think it would be very, very helpful to maybe look into the direction of Finland. They have this ARA housing agency and this is the national agency for housing that kind of collects different housing projects, initiatives, but also produces policies, produces analysis, produces data.
This is very important for Ukraine right now to have database policies made because we still have very low understanding of what is going on on the ground. The government largely doesn't do much surveys. Most of the data we get as researchers is from the large humanitarian organizations, UN, International Organization of Migration, like this, but not the state, although they are people most interested in this, right?
So it is very important to have this national agency, a housing agency, that would suggest changes or for something that could learn from experience, but it could also teach municipalities how to do social housing, for example, or how to do land policy. This is very, very important and this already exists in Europe and it took a long time in Europe to develop also. Another thing is maybe from post-Second World War policies, which were successful here.
It was a similar thing, large-scale destruction, a lot of renters, and the Europe started to implement the regulation on rents. First of all, as rent freezes, so it's a war, it's a crisis situation. We should freeze the rents at the level where they are now for them not to go higher because the demand is high obviously, but these people cannot pay. We need to provide some social security in terms of housing for people, right?
Also, there is this mechanism of rent caps and it exists now in many European countries that for the housing with this specific conditions, location, facilities it provides, there comes some rent cap. The rent can only increase if there are some improvements made to the house. This is logical because with the start of the war rent, it increased just because of the demand. Nothing else stopped it and it shouldn't be like that. That's the huge crisis situation.
I talked about social housing operators a bit, but I also want to say that there is this newer practice of social rental agencies. I believe it might have a lot of sense in the Eastern European countries with mass home ownership regime, so you cannot in Europe talk to developers, to owners of the residential buildings. We don't have that. We have individual owners. It might make sense to develop social rental agencies that would take on them the responsibility for housing.
They would rent from homeowners and then they would rent out to people who need that. Then you can subsidize this housing social rental agencies. The government could give them money or the municipality could. It would be so much easier both for homeowners, for people who rent. There would be less discrimination, less evictions. They could do everything according to the legislation which should be developed.
Another thing that I also want to suggest that exists in Spain and in France, among European countries, is the additional tax on vacant housing. This is another thing that has to be stressed. Ukraine actually doesn't have to build more. We have vacant housing and a lot of it, and it's housing from people who left the country. I understand that it might be not a popular opinion, but this is a vacant housing.
Ukraine is in a huge need for housing its people, for them not to return back to occupied territories or shell territories, conflict zones. We need to house them and Ukraine has to show them that they have the support. The tax on vacant housing can either push homeowners to rent it out, or maybe even to sell it. Maybe they can use this money here to sell it. This will make the homeownership more affordable because more supply would help. Yes, this is extremely comprehensive.
What I would like to do nearing the end is to explain to the listeners and viewers that you have written an excellent policy brief that is within the framework of a serious and political series called Progressive Ukraine, where this housing policy is being addressed. Everyone who wants to get more detailed overview can definitely go and read it. We would wholeheartedly recommend doing that.
We hope to have you on board with once these activities are progressing with FAPS, but maybe it would be interesting as this roundup. Also to hear where everyone who has listened to you today and got this interest in understanding better what is happening in Ukraine, the long to medium term perspective, where they can find your work, maybe watch it, read it.
I know that you have been doing different things within this context, but again, having that intellectually stimulating conversation that we had today, if someone is not satisfied and would like to get a bit more, and wants to have someone who is really in the field and talking to people, to individuals who are facing all these challenges, if rounding up you can also tell us basically what you plan to work on and what kind of sort of where we can read and listen to you, etc.
Well, so my main activity now is that I'm a researcher in Ukrainian NGO New Housing Policy, and we produce a lot of analytics and reports. With my colleague we wrote an academic paper, but it gives a good overview of the World Time Housing Policy in Ukraine. It's called Continuity and Change.
And then in the New Housing Policy we also had the paper analyzing Austrian experience with limited profit housing associations and how it can be translated to Ukraine, so we even like drafted how it can look like in Ukraine this law, and what changes have to be done in tax policy, land policy, social policy, things like that.
And also we had a PBL report where every year we have a conference and analyze what changes happened during that year in Ukraine and what more alternative housing policies can be implemented. So we work on that as well. And another thing is that I'm also co-founder and activist of Renters Union in Ukraine, and we currently work also with the International Union of Tenants, which is based here in Brussels as well.
So I think it's a very important thing to do to develop the Renters Movement in Ukraine, so maybe you can also check us out.
Thank you so much, and I would like just to end again to recommend everyone going finding the Progressive Ukraine series and Vita's sort of analytical materials in particular, but I think it's for FAPS, we hope to continue promoting the Ukrainian expert voices, all those who are witnessing and researching and analyzing and have a deep understanding of the context, and continuing also emphasizing the social aspects.
And we understand that the battlefield is extremely important, and as the war progresses, the state security and the questions of defense are so crucial. But we would like here today also, I think in our conversation, to show that it's very important to have the social aspect, the human security, the dignified social contract, that individuals who also fight on the battleground, they can return to homes, they can have a home.
Those who fled Ukraine or had to flee Ukraine would want to return to that. So I do hope that we transmitted this message, and again, thank you so much Vita for coming. Thank you for having me. I think it's to be continued, and we hope to have you with FAPS and future activities. Thank you so much. [Music]