Solving housing provision and reducing emissions by redistribution: a novel open-data approach for estimating housing usage with register-data

Vahnberg, J. (2026). Solving housing provision and reducing emissions by redistribution: a novel open-data approach for estimating housing usage with register-data. Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 8 10.3389/frsc.2026.1822089.

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Abstract

Decarbonizing construction remains elusive, which puts construction of new housing at direct odds with the goal of reducing emissions. One way to avoid emissions while still ensuring adequate housing provision is to increase the utilization of the housing stock. This can be done by redistributing and utilizing the low-use housing available, and there is a large potential of this underused stock in the Swedish context. 15–17% of dwellings lack permanent residents, and if used to provide housing, could stand for 80–94% of the estimated construction need for the coming 10 years. Combined with active rural vitalization policies, this potential is more than double. This is done by presenting a novel accounting-based method for estimating the share of low-use dwellings within a country, as well as its geographic location, tenure and housing type. This method has the advantage of being applicable to a wide range of data contexts, as well as being extendable to include more characteristics of the low-use dwellings. As such, the method not only lets us perform the type of estimation presented in this paper, but also makes them comparable across economies, as well as in future research compared and validate with other estimates.

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