New pathways to provide affordable homes within environmental limits

A network-building project mapping the policy, financial and technical interventions that can provide affordable homes for all, while protecting and enhancing our environment.

Latest updates


HDCE Welcome Meeting

We recently held an online meeting to introduce the project and host some initial discussions on housing affordability within planetary boundaries - thank you to everyone who joined us!

HDCE Network

If you’d like to join our network to stay updated or otherwise support this work, please sign up below.

Project overview


Why?

What?

Who?

When?

Join!

Resources

Introduction to Homes that Don’t Cost the Earth (Animation: Imaginatrix, Bathuan Bintas)

Introduction to Homes that Don’t Cost the Earth (Animation: Imaginatrix, Bathuan Bintas)

Why?

We are in a housing affordability crisis.

2024 saw a record average increase in private rental costs of over 9% across the UK.

320,000 people are homeless and 112,660 households living in temporary accommodation – a record-high.

In England, house prices are almost 9 times annual disposable incomes, the widest gap for 150 years.

To make ends meet, people are living in poor-quality and cramped conditions, which is undermining health and wellbeing, burdening the NHS and suppressing productivity.

But the focus on building more homes for private sale or rent **isn’t working.

We now have more bedrooms per person than ever before — and more housing space per person than in the mid-1990s — yet this growing surplus of housing has done little to improve affordability.