ALLIES: Online Meetings and a Digital Conference for Energy Efficiency

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Interview by Samuel Held and Julia Unverzagt, GIZ/EUKI

The key approach of ALLIES – Activating and Learning from Local Investment in Energy Savings is to involve citizens and local businesses on the regional level as investors and facilitators for energy efficiency projects in enterprises and municipal premises. The EUKI project establishes new types of measures and organizations to activate investments in cost-effective energy efficiency projects. Investments generate steady returns for reinvestment and provide citizens with tools to contribute to climate action as well as local economic and environmental sustainability. Katalin Herner, Executive Director of KÖVET Association, shares some insights on how to deal with the current crisis and talks about what she expects society to learn from these experiences.

Katalin Herner

Katalin Herner; photo: KÖVET

Ms Herner, you planned a final project conference in Krk, Croatia, for the end of May. When did you know that you would have to cancel it and what was your reaction to it?

The EUKI ALLIES Consortium found out about the necessity to cancel the Conference on Krk in March when preparatory measures had already been taken by all partners and registrations were going. We were disappointed but had to look at what could be done to arrange an online conference.

You decided to move the conference “Financing Local Energy Transition” to an online format on May 26. What can the participants expect?

Participants can expect to meet key project members online as well as a number of international presenters. Besides presentations about the results of the project there will be a panel discussion as well as parallel interactive capacity building sessions for all interested parties concentrating on three regions: the Baltics, the Balkan and the Mediterranean. We think it could even reach a wider circle of interested parties as online meetings could be easier than travelling far.

Many other organisations are confronted with similar challenges and consider online events. Can you give them advises? Which tools or programmes do you use?

These unprecedented times also provide, beside difficulties and challenges, many great opportunities. It takes a lot of effort to organise an online event, too. Cooperation between all project partners is essential as well as a strict schedule and to-do lists with deadlines and frequent checks. Currently we are using ZOOM and WEBEX for communication and organisation. We have been using these channels for some time now within the project so it was obvious that they will be good tools for a webinar, too.

About the project in brief

ALLIES plans to activate investments in cost-effective energy efficiency projects by means of local approaches involving citizens and local businesses as investors, facilitators and beneficiaries. By acting on regional level projects and benefits are made more tangible. Investments can generate steady returns for reinvestment and actually provide citizens with tools to contribute to local economic and environmental sustainability.

The ALLIES concept brings three pillars together with explicit regional focus:

  1. B.A.U.M. future fund model (national and regional funds transferable to international level)
  2. Energy saving contracting and
  3. Cooperative as a social business and means to foster regional development

Our concept builds on the REEG model of regional energy efficiency cooperatives as it has been developed by B.A.U.M. e.V. with governmental support. There are more than a thousand energy cooperatives in Germany to operate renewable energy installations, but they rarely focus on energy savings. Applying the REEG concept, their scope can easily be widened to include energy efficiency. Good guidance is available: www.reeg-info.de

In ALLIES, partners in the implementing countries are about to transfer the German experiences and find appropriate means and financing structures for their respective countries.

How does the cooperation within the ALLIES project work in these days? Is the work limited due to restrictions or do online meetings bring Europe even closer together?

In the course of our organisational and preparatory work, we are holding weekly or even more frequent online meetings. We find the situation challenging but there are also new ways opening up as we try different channels. We can communicate via phone, e-mail and video conferences, so communication is not limited, but rather very active and involving. We also use a lot of social media channels to promote the event. This hasn’t changed in the course of the project.

Which general consequences do you expect for climate action in Hungary and Europe?

In general, digital solutions are becoming faster and new communication channels are used even more frequently which has a positive side effect for the climate as travelling and GHG emissions are decreasing. We hope that some solutions will live on after the crisis. Also, we think that the situation has once more revealed the unsustainable state of our lives and hope that humankind will find new, sustainable pathways from now on.

Also, we think that the situation has once more revealed the unsustainable state of our lives and hope that humankind will find new, sustainable pathways from now on.

More about the ALLIES Conference

ALLIES Virtual and Interactive Final Conference: “Financing Local Energy Transition”
26.05.2020, 09:00-17:00 CEST
Please register by clicking on the link before 22nd May to receive the connection details.

These unprecedented times also provide, beside difficulties and challenges, many great opportunities.

COMMUNITY LAND TRUST BRUXELLES – enabling low-income homeownership

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Anemos Ananeosis / Wind of Renewal publishes good examples of european citizens’ and cooperative’s initiatives for helping people in need or in crisis. This is an article published here by the network Cooperative City. We are glad we have hosted in our WELCOMMON HOSTEL – some weeks ago – Joaquin de Santos and we were able to discuss about Community Land Trust Bruxelles.   

Photo: The social housing complex L’Espoir in Brussels. Photo (cc) Eutropian

The Community Land Trust Bruxelles was created in 2012 as an initiative of residents, activists and neighbourhood organisations. The CLT was founded as a reaction to the emerging housing crisis of Brussels, addressing the insufficiency of public tools to create social housing. With 9 homes finished and many more in the plans, the Community Land Trust created an instrument to help low-income families access home-ownership. In the same time, through retaining the ownership of land and using a governance structure involving future residents and organisations present in its neighbourhoods, the CLT excludes the possibility of speculation and individual financial benefits from rising housing prices.

“A stock of long-term affordable housing can provide security and independence for disadvantaged groups of society”

What is the context in which the CLT Bruxelles was created?

In Brussels we have less social housing compared to other European cities. 12% of the housing is social and they are owned by 30 different housing associations (now they are merging) who for the last 20-40 years have not built any homes. Until recently, they were not experienced in this, they were not organised for it and there was a lot of opposition from the neighbours wherever there were plans for social housing. Therefore, although there was a political majority to invest in social housing and they reserved a large budget to do, it took years before the first new homes were produced. For us this was an opportunity to come with another format and some of the people who were involved with the community land trust already had experience with the social housing project L’Espoir.

How did you build on the experience of L’Espoir?
The social housing complex L’Espoir in Brussels. Photo (cc) Eutropian

It is a very interesting project, although not on the legal or philosophical base because it is a very normal condominium: people who live there, they own their home and a part of the land. But it was very new that the future residents – poor migrant families – strongly participated in the project; we had a lot of positive attention with that and it helped us to prove that we were able to create well-functioning social housing projects.

When we started seeing that the social housing format we used there might be something that could work and could be redone, we also discovered that we needed public subsidies for it. For L’Espoir we had to find the subsidies along the way and we were lucky to find them. But we wanted to do it differently: especially when you work with low-income families, you do not want to expose them to that kind of risk, so we have to assure funding from the beginning. We also started wondering that if we ask for all that money, it means a lot of money to make affordable housing for low income families: 30-40-50% of the budget has to be subsidised, otherwise it is not possible. We had to find something better than just giving a grant.

There was also another problem. When one of these families leave the house, they can have all the value or the appreciation of their home. For some people it is strange to try to give ownership to really poor families but there is a strong culture of home ownership in Brussels and a housing policy that is historically based on helping people becoming owners. We have lot of instruments such as grants or social loans or tax credits. In the 1970s and 1980s, lots of migrant families bought homes in neighbourhoods like Molenbeek or Schaerbeek with these loans, and they refurbished them little by little.

All of these instruments are given to the home owners and when the home owners sell their subsidised home, the selling price also includes the appreciation of the home, which is not sustainable and not just. It worked for many years but once housing prices started to rise, there was no money left to help families in need and there was suddenly no stock of social housing. We were looking for a solution that could combine the advantages that offer homeownership for the owners (security, independence, the possibility to build capital) with the advantages of a policy based on building public housing (creation of a stock of permanently affordable housing for low income groups).

Why did you choose the format of CLT?

When we investigated, we saw that we could use cooperatives to create affordable housing, but in Belgium the statue of cooperatives, for different reasons, is not adapted to these kind of projects, so we were looking for alternatives. We heard about community land trusts in America, which was at the time a model not known at all in Belgium or in Europe. We heard about CLTs because the Champlain Housing Trust in Burlington received the World Habitat Award from the United Nations. We won a grant to visit the Champlain Housing Trust and the visit was very fruitful: they did not only have a solution for long-term affordability, but also had a governance system in place and interesting ways to integrate other functions than housing into their projects. The Trust had a lot of interesting elements that we loved. And as the Champlain Housing Trust was the first urban CLT in the USA that was supported by the authorities, we also met Bernie Sanders, who, as Mayor of Burlington in the 1980’s, made the creation of this CLT possible – it was a really inspiring visit.

Do CLTs in general receive public support?

In the UK, for instance, there are CLTs that operate without the involvement of public authorities, while other work with them. At the end of last year, for instance, the UK state provided a funding of £60 million to help CLTs and other community-led housing initiatives so there is some support by the authorities. We were also established with public help: in 2012 we were recognised by the regional government in Brussels in charge of housing and who also gave us the first grant to start our first project. And since then each year we receive regional subsidies to pay our team and to buy land. Public support, however, is not without questions: although there is a general appreciation of our participatory aspects and anti-speculative mechanisms within the public sector, there is also an ongoing discussion about how we should operate, if the CLT should own land or land should go to a public institution. For us, this is a very important issue. A CLT that does not own the land just would not work. If we manage to involve low income families in everything we do is also because we are the owners of the land and, as member of our board, they become co-responsible for the stewardship of that land.

How is the CLT organised?
General assembly of the CLT. Photo (c) CLTB

The CLT owns the land, the homes on the land are privately owned by their occupants and we use long term lease contracts to make this possible. But ownership in this case does not include the possibility to speculate with the property. The resale formula follows the typical CLT format: we appraise the home the moment people enter and when they sell it, we calculate the difference between the two, they can have 25% of the appreciation and the rest is taken from the resale price, so the new buyers pay the initial price without subsidies plus 25% of the appreciation, in case the market has gone up.

To ensure this, you have to find a way to legally separate land ownership from home ownership and in Belgium we have these rights since Napoleon, called the “droit de superficie” and “bail emphytéotique” that respectively allow for 50-year and 99-year lease formulas. We have to use it creatively to make it work for us: this legal system is not perfect for us and I think the legal will be more suitable one day, but by now, we have been working with these rights.

The Brussels CLT has a complex legal structure. We have a foundation that owns the land but a foundation cannot be democratically governed, although this is an important aspect for us. Therefore besides the foundation, we have an association in charge of all daily decisions and the two are strongly linked by the board members: it is one organisation with two legal bodies.
We receive subsidies from the region that help us buy the land. Then a part of the construction is paid with public money.

Who has access to CLT apartments?

First of all, to buy a home in the CLT you have to be eligible for social housing. This includes more than half of the Brussels population: although Brussels is a rich city, a large part of its population is poor. But within these margins there is a lot of difference. Those who are the poorest, who have the minimum income earn half of what those who meet the right to social housing. Therefore we had to find a pricing policy that makes it possible to serve all of these people: we set different prices according to income categories. The poorest group pays less than those who earn a little bit more for the same type of apartment.

As we work with public money we had to find a system that was very transparent and objective. In our approach we really focus a lot on the community within the building. In Brussels we do not build single family homes, it is always apartment buildings. Whenever we buy a parcel of land, we make a program, we see how many and what types of homes we can build, then we launch a call. Those who are interested can apply and the first family on the waiting list that fits the criteria will become member of the group. Once we have the plans and we know what kind of homes we will build, members of the group will decide between them who will get which home. The group is not composed by affinity, but by objective criteria.

And for us to make this work, for home owners with little income, mostly with less education, it is very important to work on the community, not just putting the families in the apartment, otherwise it would not work. This means that we decide whom to sell to long before the homes are built. We organise groups of future home owners for specific sites, the moment we buy the land.

The planning procedure takes a lot of time in Brussels, it takes one year, sometimes up to two years, between having the plans ready to getting the permit. You have to organise the tender, then you have to build, so it is at least 4-5 years between buying the land and when the homes are built. This means that there is already a selection criteria, people have to be ready to follow this process, not just to enter the group but to be active. Once a group is formed, it has monthly or two monthly meetings, and its members really become part of the process. Not everyone is willing to enter this kind of procedure. While in Brussels today there are more than 29,000 families waiting for a social home, we have 300 families on our waiting list.

General assembly of the CLT. Photo (c) CLTB
What do people on the waiting list have to do during these years?

Our waiting list is composed by our members and it is not just a formality. For us it is important because our members are invited to our general assembly and can get elected to our board, we can provide trainings for them. They start saving money (a symbolical sum of 10€ a month). Recently, we also started to organise other activities with our members: gardening on the building sites the years before the construction, a bike rental program, a monthly festival.

How does the CLT work together with a neighbourhood where it develops new homes?
Architecture workshop. Photo (c) CLTB

I think the way our CLT is governed it is a very interesting model to use at the neighbourhood scale. It is important to have different levels of decision-making and participation, bringing together the entity that owns the land and ideally also governs the neighbourhood with others: home owners’ organisations, cooperatives or tenants, organisations that are in charge of managing their homes, committees in charge of the public space, etc.

One of the positive experience from CLT is the idea of involving the neighbourhood and the residents in the board and the management of the organisation. It is not always easy but it really works. Sometimes in our board meetings we have unprecedented encounters: people who were never in this kind of organisation start speaking with government representatives for the first time. There is certainly a disequilibrium between a poor home owner and a well-educated Ministry officer but having a place where this discussion is possible is an important aspect of governing areas of the city. While in Brussels’ neighbourhood contracts citizens only have an advisory role, in our board they can decide about investment and sales, which gives them a much stronger role in this governance scheme.

Can you diversify your model and combine housing with other uses?
Inauguration of the first homes. Photo (c) CLTB

We do not only want to provide housing:

we want to make the city in a non speculative way. But as of today, we only have nine homes plus a lot of land. Apart from these nine homes, we have 90 more in preparation where we have the money for the land and the agreement to buy it. The first project of nine homes was only residential, because we bought an existing building where there was nothing else but in other projects, we try to integrate other functions. Our biggest project in the plans, with 32 homes, will also include a women’s centre at the ground floor, and almost each new project will include other functions than housing.

One of the difficulties for developing non-residential uses is connected to funding. The subsidies we get from the Ministry of Housing are for housing only, and it means that people who want to buy non-residential units in our projects have to accept the CLT conditions of not owning the land, not receiving the entire resale price, excluding significant financial benefits. We found an association to work with us on this, they believe in what we do and they prefer buying space in our projects to renting properties from private owners. We would like to develop economic spaces and studios for artists but we do not have the funding for this right now. We are currently thinking about adding a third legal body to the existing association and foundation, a cooperative that could work with private investors. We have gathered a group of people, universities and associations to work on this concept and we received funding for the next years.

Interview with Geert de Pauw on 10 March 2017

A resilient EU economy must be built on strong local communities

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By Dirk Vansintjan president of the European Federation of Renewable Energy Cooperatives, REScoop.eu.

The article was published here

 

The political and economic measures taken to revive our economy following the Corona crisis need to ensure long-term resilience of the system. Strengthening local communities will be the key to achieving this objective, says Dirk Vansintjan.

Over the coming weeks, EU leaders will be working on a plan to help rebuild the economy after the crisis brought about by the Corona virus. In a meeting among Heads of State last week, European Council President Charles Michel emphasised the need to “come up with a proposal to ensure we are able to cope with this crisis and to ensure the stability of the EU”.

The current situation is putting our society to a vital test: Are we equipped to develop responses to this crisis that will ensure the long-term stability of our societies?

I strongly believe that the answer can be yes. But this can only be the case if we ensure that the measures taken make our economies and societies more resilient in the long term. Whilst it is crucial to develop solutions that will revitalise our economy following this crisis in the short and medium term, we must not lose sight of other existing threats to our economies and our citizens.

Several experts have pointed out over the past weeks that human health and the state of the environment are inextricably linked – be it through the increased exposure to wildlife, or the threat air pollution poses to our health.

Corona crisis aside, we know that climate change is one of the most severe and urgent systemic threats to our global community. Unless we start integrating the environment into our economic decisions, all we are doing is putting a band-aid on the wound without treating the cause – and hence inevitably setting ourselves up for more crises of this sort.

One promising thing that has come out of the current situation is the evidence that it is possible for governments to allocate resources to solve urgent situations, where they were previously stuck in political disagreements. Our leaders must leverage this newly found level of cooperation to tackle issues such as climate change heads-on, so we won’t have to do it in crisis mode.

The measures taken after the economic crisis in 2008 mainly bailed out the big financial institutions without tackling some of the underlying flaws of our economic system, namely consumerism and the environmental destruction that goes with it, wealth concentration, and lack of democratic control at the local level. It left many citizens disempowered at the time, and once again today, those suffering the most from the economic crisis ahead will likely be the small businesses in our neighbourhoods. The solutions proposed today need to safeguard the livelihoods of European citizens.

A new balance between globalisation and the local economy

One very concrete way to move towards such a society will be to strengthen the growth of energy communities in Europe.

By investing in and operating clean energy technologies and measures, energy communities have been known to strengthen the social and economic welfare of their community whilst taking measures to reduce CO2 emissions and preserve the environment. They hence provide an economically sound model that tackles the exact challenges we need to solve to build a sustainable future for ourselves.

Don’t just take my word for it, let the examples speak for themselves:

For Belgium, researchers estimated that the energy transition will require investment between €300 and €400 billion up to 2050. But Belgian citizens together have about €278 billion of sleeping savings in banks, which could be invested locally. Such investment could create between 20,000 and 60,000 jobs, and save the Belgian economy up to €20 billion a year by avoiding the import of gas, oil, coal and uranium.

A German study reveals the return for the local economy and communities is up to 8 times higher if these renewable production facilities are owned by local citizens, local energy communities, and other SME’s. In particular, income from local renewable energy production can provide an indispensable basis to make the necessary investments in energy efficiency in buildings, and empowers citizens to get involved – thus strengthening not only our economy, but also our European democratic model.

In 1988, the small Austrian town Güssing had no significant industry or trade business. It is now thriving thanks to a consequent transition to local renewable resources. Instead of high unemployment, more than 1,000 jobs were created. An annual bill of €6 million for imported fossil fuels was turned into a revenue of €14 million from local renewable energy production.

Leading by example, the municipality reduced its energy expenditure by almost 50% through energy efficiency, and the citizens and businesses followed. Following Güssing’s example, more than 15 regions in Austria are now energy independent with regard to electricity, heating, and/or transportation.

How can the EU help strengthen energy communities?

The potential of local communities has already been recognised by EU leaders in the Clean Energy Package through the concepts of citizen and renewable energy communities.

As the EU works on developing follow-up legislation in the coming years, it must ensure to truly empower local communities. This can be done for instance by facilitating access to larger funding sources such as the EFSI investment tool and other EIB tools (such as ELENA or guarantees).

Citizens across Europe stand ready to contribute to and lead the societal transformation needed in our communities. We urge our elected representatives to make smart and courageous decisions that will enable humanity to move to a truly sustainable, healthy, and resilient way of life.

If we are to build a truly sustainable society for the long term and for future generations, we need to make these changes now. Let’s stay in the cooperative mode. There is no other way.