Empty offices become homes the residents own, at a rent that tracks cost instead of the market, in a network you can move within.
Across Europe, office floors sit half-empty while families refresh the listings app for the fortieth time. Every one of those buildings belongs to someone, and some owners want better than a quick sale.
Converting costs less than building new and keeps the carbon already locked in the concrete. Long-term homes on top, furnished flats for shorter stays below them, and a ground floor that never sleeps.
The residents form a cooperative of their own, and that cooperative owns the building, rising to about nine-tenths as the loan is repaid. A developer-operator builds and runs it for a fee, with no stake and no upside.
Residents pay what the home actually costs: the loan, the upkeep, a small capped return to whoever financed it. On day one that lands close to the market; twenty years on, the gap is the whole point.
The furnished mid-term flats and the café-and-desks ground floor earn near-market income. That surplus repays the patient investors and then funds the next building, never a landlord's margin.
Members of EHC get one vote each and no dividend. Anyone, member or not, can back the EHC Fund for a modest capped return; it is the only place a return is paid.
Two golden shares, one held by the residents and one by EHC, mean a sale needs two keys nobody will turn. Affordability here is the ownership structure itself, not a promise with an expiry date.
Once a building has paid its investors out, its surplus helps the next city start. Members move between cities and find a landing pad wherever the network already is.
That was the nutshell. Pick the door that suits how you like to learn.
Wondering whether offices really convert well? Read the adaptive-reuse deep dive.