New Tricks with Old Bricks - Liverpool’s homes dilemma

September 15, 2008 by OPPE News

Liverpool in the UK has thousands of empty homes, prompting environmental as well as investment questions, a group says.

The Empty Homes Agency says the city has 14,825 unoccupied properties which have “huge volumes” of embodied CO2 which would be saved if they were brought back into use.

According to the group all this would be wasted if new eco towns are built instead.

Officials are calling for houses which are empty to be put into use to both solve the housing shortage and help the environment.

Empty Homes Agency chief executive David Ireland said:

“The greenest way of providing new homes is to recycle wasted homes. Cities like Liverpool have huge potential for recycling their housing stock.

“I would far rather see resources channelled into regenerating homes there than building new towns in the countryside.”

In a report called New Tricks with Old Bricks, published earlier this year, the agency said that CO2 emitted as a result of building new houses was more than four-and-a-half times as much as the refurbishment of an existing home.

The same study showed that if the 288,000 long-term empty homes in England were re-used and upgraded to higher energy efficiency standards, the cost in carbon could be cut by 10 million tonnes.