Αλλάζει σε «Reuse-Ready Athens: A Data-Driven Municipal Tool for Targeting the Renovation and Reuse of Existing Housing»
Σώμα (English)
- +Greece faces a housing paradox that the European Affordable Housing Plan's priority on renovation and reuse is precisely designed to resolve. The country combines one of the EU's most severe affordability burdens with one of its largest reserves of idle, ageing housing: rather than a shortage, the problem is one of allocation. This proposal argues that the priority is not only measurable from open government data but best acted upon at municipal scale, and it proposes a reusable municipal targeting tool that identifies the specific stock where renovation-and-reuse would yield the most affordable supply, steers existing policy levers toward it, and makes the whole intervention monitorable.
- +The evidence rests on three independent, openly available sources that cross-validate one another. The ELSTAT 2021 Census (Table A01) shows a national vacancy rate of 34.5% of conventional dwellings, of which 55% were built before 1980 - stock old enough to require renovation, not merely reoccupation. Eurostat EU-SILC data (Living Conditions in Europe: Housing, 2024) records a housing-cost overburden rate of 28.9% against an EU average of 8.2%, alongside elevated overcrowding (27%) and energy poverty (19%). Critically, the IMF's 2026 Article IV consultation independently estimates non-primary-residence stock at approximately 35%, corroborating the census almost exactly, and reproduces survey evidence identifying renovation cost as the single largest barrier (42%) to bringing vacant homes back into use. The coincidence of acute housing stress and a large, renovation-dependent idle stock is the empirical core of the case for the priority.
- +The municipal framing is both more actionable and more analytically honest. In the Central Athens sector, roughly one in five dwellings is simultaneously vacant and pre-1980, and 92.6% of that idle stock consists of apartments -dense, reusable urban housing- while the seasonal-home effect that inflates the national figure is minimal. The proposed tool operationalises this by constructing a composite indicator that flags areas that are concurrently high-vacancy and pre-1980 (incorporating worst energy-performance class where available), and then directing renovation subsidies (the "Εξοικονομώ" programme), vacancy surtaxes in high-demand zones, and measures to clear inheritance and compliance blockers toward those priority areas. This aligns directly with the IMF's recommendation to mobilise the ageing stock, delivering national policy at city scale.
- +The methodological contribution is an agentic-AI integration layer that renders these heterogeneous datasets interoperable. Joining the cadastre, census, the MIDA property registry, and the central credit registry is a schema- and geometry-reconciliation problem that has historically been prohibitively costly; an AI agent lowers that cost by proposing crosswalks, executing spatial matches, and surfacing ambiguities for human confirmation, while all reported figures are produced by deterministic, auditable computation - the agent orchestrates tools rather than generating numbers. This design keeps the tool reproducible and accountable, supports a published data-gap register, and makes the method transferable to any municipality or Cities Coalition for Digital Rights member using the same open datasets - turning an announced European priority into a measurable, monitorable municipal instrument.
Τίτλος (English)
- +Reuse-Ready Athens: A Data-Driven Municipal Tool for Targeting the Renovation and Reuse of Existing Housing