Dear Passenger, welcome to 2050…

…where now more than 100,000 members of the EHC live in beautiful homes. Homes, that weren’t homes before. They were empty offices, factories, churches and shopping centres. Now, they’re filled with light and life. Not because one extremely clever organisation finally figured out how to make conversion projects become super cost effective at scale and then took over Europe. But because an unlikely coalition decided to work across borders, both national and mental, to turn the housing crisis upside down. And utopia into reality, together.

The Dual Crisis That Brought Us Together

In 2026, Europe faced two crises — intertwined, accelerating, and seemingly unsolvable by any single actor.

The housing crisis was pulling the continent apart. More than 80 million Europeans struggled with the cost of a home. Teachers, nurses, journalists, engineers — priced out of the very cities they kept running. Housing had become a source of anxiety rather than belonging.

The climate crisis demanded that we rethink the built environment. Buildings accounted for some 40% of Europe's energy use, yet the industry kept demolishing and rebuilding from scratch — the most carbon-intensive habit imaginable.yness - in hindsight!

And between the two sat an absurdity: millions of square metres of empty buildings. Vacant offices, idle industrial sites, churches without congregations. All standing there silent while people searched desperately for somewhere to live.

Yet, in the midst of the crisis, where fear was the dominant emotion for many citizens, right-wing populism thrived and the idea of a united, open-minded Europe began to fade from many people’s minds… an unlikely coalition of optimists started to form. And it all began with one question: How can we turn Europe's forgotten buildings into permanently affordable, cooperative homes — together?

The Coalition That Made It Possible

What emerged was something new: citizens and local cooperatives, municipal leaders and impact investors, building owners, developers, architects, technologists and materials innovators — actors who had never worked together at this scale, aligned behind one shared goal.

None of them could have done it alone. A cooperative without capital is just a dream. An investor without a pipeline is just money looking for a home. A city without partners is just empty land. An architect without a client is just drawings.

But together — reaching across the silos that separate the social from the private, municipalities from entrepreneurs, citizens from institutions — we created homes that none of us could have created alone.

What We Built

Cooperative homes for more than 100,000 people, in around fifty European cities. Former offices, retail rooftops, industrial halls, heritage buildings — transformed rather than torn down.

Every project was its own small coalition. An office conversion in Lyon brought together a local cooperative, a Danish impact fund, a German materials supplier, the city planning department and a Portuguese architecture studio. A church in Rotterdam united a Protestant diocese, a family construction firm, citizen co-designers and municipal financing. No two projects looked alike — but all shared the same spirit.

Funded by Impact, Owned by Residents

Here is the quiet revolution beneath it all: the way these homes changed hands over time.

Every building started the same way. Impact investors put up the patient capital to bring it back to life — choosing modest, steady returns over quick profit, because they believed in what the building would become. The people who moved in entered the building already as co-owners. They paid fair usage fees, never rent to a distant landlord.

And then, year by year, ownership shifted. As those fees and shared surpluses flowed back, the early investors were repaid and moved on to fund the next conversion. The residents — the people who actually lived there — gradually became the majority owners of their own homes. EHC kept only a small, permanent anchor stake: enough to hold each project true to its mission, never enough to own it.

By 2050, most of our buildings belong to the people who live in them. Capital opened the door; community walked through it and stayed.

Permanent Affordability

Cooperative ownership created an "asset lock" — a promise that these homes can never be flipped for profit, only passed on. The result is affordability that holds across generations. While open-market rents kept climbing in city after city, our usage fees tracked wages and inflation instead. That difference is why more than 100,000 people could stay close to family, work and the lives they were building — or move freely towards them.

This worked because everyone gave a little: investors accepted modest returns, cities and private owners released buildings on fair terms, and shorter-term stays helped cross-subsidise the long-term affordable homes at the core. A coalition held together by commitment.

Transformation Over Extraction

Every EHC home came from transforming something that already existed — no greenfield development, and well over a million tonnes of CO₂ avoided. Where we did add, we built with hemp, timber and reclaimed materials. Generous shared spaces let members live richly in a smaller private footprint.

The most sustainable building is the one that already exists.

Bridges Across Borders

Back in 2025, a rising chorus of populists declared the European project finished. Borders should close again, they said. Cooperation at this scale was naïve. People should stay where they were born and stop dreaming of something better.

We built the opposite.

Members now move freely between EHC homes across 20 countries. A teacher from Vienna can spend a year in Lyon. A developer from Berlin can relocate to Porto. A retiree from Amsterdam can winter in Barcelona — all within one cooperative community that values open doors and open minds.

What began as a housing solution became a lived experience of European identity. Not Europe as bureaucracy or abstraction, but Europe as neighbours. As shared meals and democratic assemblies. As a Polish member sitting on a local governance circle beside Portuguese, German and Greek neighbours — and discovering their hopes for their children were remarkably alike.

We showed that a joyful, affordable life in the city, rooted in community, is not a utopian fantasy. It is something we can build — together. Especially here, in Europe: still, for so many, a beacon of what democracy can be.

Part of a Movement

25 years ago, we set out to prove a model — one that could unlock a million cooperative homes across Europe, in a genuinely sustainable way. Have we got there yet? Well, there is still a looong road ahead. At first glance, our own contribution to Europe's housing puzzle looks modest. Maybe even tiny, to some.

But hey - “don’t be fooled by the rocks we ain’t got…” And don’t underestimate the ripple effects we’re already seeing in 2050. Far more citizens now understand the merits of cooperative housing and cooperative economics. We brokered thousands of partnerships across the continent. We showed that temporary living can enrich a city when residents and locals benefit from one another. We sparked conversion projects across the corporate real-estate world. And we helped shift a mindset — and the policies that follow it — so that adapting and transforming buildings, rather than tearing them down, became the new normal.

In the end, a million homes was never about one organisation. It has always been about an idea worth chasing together.

Now, back in 2026, one questions remains. What are you doing now?

A glimpse into (your) future