Social green: Study visits and Project Meeting in Alba Iulia, Romania

On 12-13 June, Nordregio participated in a Social Green study visit and project meeting in Alba Iulia, Romania. Social Green is an INTERREG Europe project aimed at greening the social housing sector in the European Union.

The study visits provided an opportunity for the partners and the participating local stakeholders from the partner regions to learn from each other. The local host, Alba Iulia municipality, showed their identified Good Practice examples, with an interesting example of a fund from the National Agency for Housing:

• Good practice: Green retrofit of collective flats in Alba Iulia
• Good practice: Social housing for citizens who have lost their home due to the legal retrocession processes

A fund that enables retrofitting for vulnerable tenants with the ability of tenants to buy their homes at reasonable prices after proving the financial capacity to do so after a few years which works as a revolving fund to retrofit other or construct new housing for vulnerable tenants.

In the following project meeting, the partners presented their drafted action plans, consisting of challenges, a vision, objectives and related actions to retrofit the social housing sector, a difficult challenge but at the same time important task for actors and policy-makers across Europe.

Nordregio is Lead Partner of the Social Green project, working with regional or local institutions in Croatia, Romania, Spain, Portugal and Estonia to develop among other things action plans that will improve investment and policy towards energy efficiency in the social housing sector. Another core focus of the project is to support the development of Regional Operational Programmes in Europe toward an increased focus on the social housing sector in general, and on energy efficiency in particular.

Social Green is an INTERREG Europe project and will run through 2021.