Home swapping as instrument for more housing sufficiency!

Abstract

The current ecological challenges with an urgent necessity to reduce consumption of energy and resources call for a reconsideration of many aspects of current (western) lifestyles. Since housing is one major source of energy and resource consumption, the development of a sustainable housing provision is of upmost importance. Unfortunately, the public debate is constricted to efficiency and consistency measures, based on technical improvements, which do not question norms and values leading to necessary lifestyle changes. Such a one-sided approach will fall short for various reasons – the most important being the ever-increasing per capita housing space that cancels out efficiency gains. Instead, discussions on an environmentally sound housing provision should consider the concept of sufficiency, leading to a reduction of the physical building stock due to a decrease in per capita consumption. Despite acknowledging the necessity of a reduced per capita living space, the academic debate remains quite limited without offering appropriate systematic strategies. Thus, this paper takes up the instrument of home swapping to discuss its holistic value, adding to the debate on sufficiency strategies in the field of housing. It is shown that home swapping has enormous potential to reduce per capita housing space by better allocating living space.

KEYWORDS: :

• Sufficiency
• housing
• home swapping
• housing provision
• downsizing

Introduction

The general criticism of resource and energy consuming lifestyles of western societies, which neglect the finite planetary system and planetary boundaries, is based on the Club of Rome’s ‘The Limits to Growth’ (Meadows et al., 1972). Since then, only little has changed and discussions on how to pursue an environmentally sound development path still remain, even though the discussion has gained momentum due to ongoing crises. This way, global financial crises, intensifying climate change related natural disasters and the dependency on fossil fuel and its countries of origin have raised the awareness of the impacts of our unsound economic system (Schulz, 2012) and given rise to global ecological movements (Svensson & Wahlström, 2023). To achieve a development that respects planetary boundaries, first and foremost, efficiency and consistency strategies are heavily discussed in the political arena. However, they are criticised for several shortcomings: first and foremost, their necessary but still pending innovations (Linz, 2004; Metzner-Szigeth, 2019) which do not allow for a timely reduction of resource and energy consumption. Sufficiency, however, is discussed as a quickly available response that reduces consumption and production to ensure the necessary energy and resource savings (Kanschik, 2016). When it comes to reducing ecological footprints, housing plays a vital role, since the building sector is responsible for almost one-third of global energy use, half of the global energy demand and one-fifth of global energy-related CO₂ emissions. What is more, its share might well double by the middle of the twenty-first century (IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], 2015, 2018).

Although housing is seen as one of the major sources of the negative environmental impact of human activity (Sandberg, 2018), it is, at the same time, considered ‘“low hanging fruit” when cutting carbon emissions (Nelson, 2019, p. 10) offering ‘immediately available, highly cost-effective opportunities to reduce (growth in) energy demand’ (IPCC, 2015, p. 677). Reflecting the general discussion, focussing solely on efficiency approaches in the housing sectors will fail, since the achieved efficiency gains are nullified by the ever-rising per capita living space. Thus, sufficiency measures resulting in a downsizing of personal living space are necessary (Lorek & Spangenberg, 2019). Even in its latest report, the IPCC urged for more sufficiency, in the building sector, stating that ‘the projected increase in electricity demand can be avoided through demand-side mitigation options in the domains of infrastructure use and socio-cultural factors that influence electricity usage in industry, land transport, and buildings’ (IPCC, 2023, p. 29). The debate on such measures remains, however, quite shallow, while contributions rest on stand-alone approaches like tiny houses, micro apartments, flexible building solutions or a call for sharing approaches and, thus, neglect systematic approaches that structurally transform housing provision in a sufficient way on a large scale by questioning current regulations and processes. Hence, the present paper introduces the instrument of home swapping, initiated by public actors, as a distinct measure for a more sufficient housing provision, since it has the ability to contribute to a downsizing of per capita living space.

Based on a literature review on sustainable housing consumption and downsizing, this paper argues for the integration of the yet undiscussed instrument of home swapping into the debate on housing sufficiency and downsizing, taking a strong normative stance in arguing for a reduction of per capita housing consumption ‘that leaves building new housing to a last resort’ (Schneider, 2019, p. 18). Since no empirical evidence on the instrument has yet been published, the author discusses the instrument by taking up the ongoing public debate in German municipalities that introduced the instrument.

The paper at hand is structured as follows: after outlining the inadequacy of solely focussing on efficiency and consistency strategies (section two), the need for more sufficient measures, particularly in the field of housing (section three), is outlined. Section four discusses the value of home swapping for the debate on housing sufficiency and downsizing, briefly outlining its current obstacles. Finally, section five concludes with a clear call for both an urgent integration of home swapping into the academic debate on housing sufficiency and a swift implementation as an integral component of a future sufficient housing provision on local and national housing markets.

From efficiency to sufficiency

While efficiency, consistency, and sufficiency offer three different approaches to achieve an environmentally sound development that respects planetary boundaries and aims for a reduction of energy and resource consumption (Schäpke & Rauschmayer, 2014), these versatile options have not yet been reflected in public debates. Instead, a narrowing to efficiency and consistency measures can be observed, resulting in strategies focussing on technical innovations, thereby decreasing the input of energy and resources (efficiency) and ‘using nature-compatible technologies that take advantage of ecosystem matters and services without destroying them’ (Linz, 2004, p. 7) (consistency). At a first glance, this seems plausible, since particularly efficiency is ‘considered to provide reductions in energy use without corresponding inconvenience or loss of amenity’ (Lorek & Spangenberg, 2019, p. 287). Following these strategies, politics can avoid the use of tabooed ideas like ‘personal sacrifice’ or ‘austerity’. However, those strategies are more and more negatively assessed for their insufficient and, yet, only slowly appearing impact on energy and resource consumption. Efficiency measures are criticised for their rebound effects where efficiency gains and the resulting financial scope lead to even more production and consumption (Schulz et al., 2020) – a correlation that can be observed throughout the history of humankind (Alcott, 2015). These rebound effects do not only occur with regard to individual consumption behaviour but also as global rebounds where countries can consume more, e.g. fossil fuels, since efficiency gains and less consumption or even abandonment in certain countries result in lower world market prices enabling other countries to consume more. Even if rebound effects ‘only’ consume 10–30% of efficiency gains (Heyen et al., 2013), the idea of a complete decoupling of economic output and resource consumption is unrealistic, and only possible in relative terms, i.e. with resource consumption increasing at a slower pace than economic output.

In this respect, the strategy of consistency must receive critical attention. Although a transformation to eco-friendly technologies and green energies certainly follows the road to a more environmentally sound development, the newly created structures, e.g. wind parks or biomass power plants, create further environmental burdens, since they are not free of charge and require additional resources (e.g. rare earth elements) and energy (Kanschik, 2016). Moreover, and this concerns first and foremost land-intensive renewable energies, these new structures require additional and mostly unsealed green spaces (Paech, 2010). Similar to the approach of efficiency, one major problem of consistency arises from the innovations that are necessary to develop scenarios in which consistency can fully substitute current conventional and fossil fuel based technologies: they lie far in the future and, thus, are not a timely solution for the unpostponable transformation of economic structures and principles (Linz, 2002; Metzner-Szigeth, 2019).

This critique should not be interpreted as a call for cessation for efficiency and consistency approaches, since they are a vital part on our way to a more environmentally sound development and can even been seen as complementary to sufficiency approaches (Erba & Pagliano, 2021; Linz, 2004). However, both approaches will fail to realise the necessary energy and resource savings without an integration of sufficiency measures (Kopatz, 2015). Sufficiency proponents, thus, urge us to ‘adopt a lifestyle of material simplicity (“sufficiency”) to reduce resource consumption to a level that respects the earth’s ecological capacity’ (Kanschik, 2016, pp. 553–554). Against the publicly widespread perception of individual sacrifice and restriction, sufficiency should rather be seen as a system innovation that must draw on various elements: (1) values and guiding principles, (2) behaviour and lifestyles, (3) technologies and products, (4) material infrastructures, (5) social and temporal structures, (6) markets, (7) research, education, knowledge, and (8) policy instruments and institutions (Heyen et al., 2013). This framework clearly indicates that a sufficiency approach that solely relies on personal consumer behaviour will not be satisfactory. Rather, a distinct sufficiency policy is needed that tries to change system structures and not only people (Schneidewind, 2017). Particularly in the field of housing, the change of structures that enable people, embedded in those structures, to follow a sufficient lifestyle is of upmost importance (Hagbert, 2016; Sandberg, 2018).

Sufficiency in housing

The sufficiency approach is relevant for the housing industry for several reasons. Due to the special nature of housing at the intersection of an economic good (e.g. very high production costs) and a socially relevant basic need (e.g. strict building regulations) (Kitzmann, 2023a), the sector is seen as rather conservative. Particularly the construction segment is not known as a sector that swiftly introduces new technologies (Bröchner, 2010; Nam & Tatum, 1988). This underlines the insufficiency of the efficiency approach which will not be enough to provoke the necessary energy and resource savings in a short and medium-term perspective. In this regard, energy savings in buildings are even lower than theoretically predicted due to individual behaviour of occupants (Santin et al., 2009). Although rebound effects cancel out only 5–15% of efficiency gains in housing (Nässén & Holmberg, 2009), the efficiency approach remains tilting at windmills due to the ever-increasing home size In Germany, the average housing unit size rose from 81,4 m² to 92,0 m² from 1987–2020 (an increase by 13%) with per capita space increasing from 34,6 m² to 47,4 m² (+37%) in the same time period (Destatis [Statistisches Bundesamt], 2021a). Given the fact that about 70% of a household’s energy consumption is used for space heating (Destatis [Statistisches Bundesamt], 2021b), the relative energy savings per square metre due to efficiency measures (in Germany 9% from 1995–2005 – Kopatz, 2015) are confronted with an increase in absolute energy and resource consumption associated with rising building and flat sizes. This development gets even more daunting when we follow Krausmann et al. (2020) who point to the fact that even if material stocks could be stabilised in today’s industrialised countries, the energy and resource consumption of emerging and developing countries to reach a similar level of per capita consumption ‘would require enormous amounts of raw materials and represent a huge driver of additional GHG emissions far exceeding any climate-change mitigation goals’ (p. 8). A further driver adding massively to rising energy and resource consumption in absolute terms can be seen in demographic changes, particularly the increasing number of one-person households with simultaneously rising per capita living space (Bradbury et al. 2014; Liu et al., 2003). Besides the additional consumption of energy and resources, the cancelled household economies, where sharing of common facilities by household members is no longer possible, result in an increase in per capita emissions − 9% from 1960–2010 (Fremstad et al., 2018).

With these developments in mind, it is not surprising that scholars argue that ‘sufficiency concepts may become the best – perhaps only – chance to ensure that climate targets can still be reached’ (Lorek & Spangenberg, 2019, p. 288). However, sufficiency should not only be considered an individualistic task for households to cut down on energy consumption, but rather as a systemic undertaking of downsizing. In this respect, Santin et al. (2009) found that the individual consumption behaviour of occupants is less relevant for space related energy consumption than the number of heated bedrooms, again highlighting the relevance of building size. This minor importance of households’ energy consumption results from the fact that energy is not ‘a key issue in their everyday lives and they did not really care much about reducing their energy consumption’ (Palm, 2013, p. 70). Since ‘(…) house size is the largest determinant of domestic energy consumption’ (Ellsworth-Krebs, 2019, p. 23), any sufficiency debate on housing would fall short if it remains an individualistic approach, not considering so-called invisible energy politics ‘(…) and thus would overlook the institutionalised dynamics of energy-demanding practices’ (Royston et al., 2018, p. 128), which prevent an environmentally sound housing provision. Here, new solutions and strategies for sustainable housing are needed (Hagbert, 2016) – first and foremost with regard to downsizing per capita living space. Its importance is widely acknowledged (Bierwirth, 2015; Cohen, 2021; Kopatz, 2015; Sandberg, 2018), yet not sufficiently considered as Nelson criticises ‘little attention to the per capita space in new “sustainable” homes’ (Nelson, 2019, p. 11).

The most popular approaches, and widely reflected in academia, are tiny house developments (e.g. Ford & Gomez-Lanier, 2017; Shearer & Burton, 2019) as well as micro apartments/micro living (Cohen, 2021; Ferreri et al., 2017). Both forms, although downsizing individual living space, are critically assessed due to negative side effects. First, tiny house residents tend to spend their savings on housing expenses on travel and leisure (Penfold et al., 2018) to ‘live “life to the fullest”’ (Mangold & Zschau, 2019, p. 13), thus increasing resource and energy consumption in other spheres of life only to shift the personal economic burden. This shows that if living space is reduced too drastically, living functions are relocated outside the home, which, in turn, leads to rebound effects (Hagbert, 2016; Sandberg, 2018). The rise of micro living, furthermore is seen as a process of rebranding formerly precarious housing conditions as a marketable mode of housing (Harris & Nowicki, 2020). Besides these very specific critiques to those approaches, further problems in the debate can be identified. First, these approaches are discussing new housing developments, while the existing housing stock is neglected (Ferreri, 2019). This is problematic, since new housing makes up only a marginal share of the entire housing stock. Hence, those approaches lack the necessary scalability in reducing future per capita living space, which is why ‘policy makers also need to address possibilities to downsize within the existing housing stock’ (Sandberg, 2018, p. 163). Generally, Savini’s critique of the current focus on micro-scale developments refers to the lacking reflection of general planning schemes, missing ‘a critique of the institutions, regulations and governing approaches that anchor city-regional development’ (Savini, 2021, p. 1080). In the face of current global challenges, the need for large-scale solutions is crucial, urging research beyond housing forms and living arrangements (Trainer, 2019). Apart from that, more systemic approaches, strategies and instruments that go beyond stand-alone solutions need to be incorporated in the discussion to transform ‘the social and political organisation of society, and the forms of energy demand that follow’ (Royston et al., 2018, p. 129). In this regard, rather radical approaches are introduced by degrowth scholars which suggest measures like ‘distributive institutions’ (Xue, 2019, p. 187) or maximum per capita housing space (Nelson, 2018; Xue, 2022) to stop overconsumption. Although those approaches target the problem at its core, they seem to be too radical to be realised within the near future. Therefore, they might not be readily available solutions to reduce housing size-related energy and resource consumption. Here, solutions ‘without being overly missionary in our approach’ (Nelson & Schneider, 2019, p. 263) are necessary to have a perceptible effect. Within this context, the introduction of home swapping as a widely accepted instrument could be a proposal inspiring voluntary simplicity (Alexander, 2015) among citizens willing to downscale their housing consumption and thus lead to a downscaling of housing production, since less living space is needed.

Home swapping as sufficiency instrument

The strategy of home swapping has, so far, only been debated in the field of tourism (De Groote & Nicasi, 1994; Forno & Garibaldi, 2015). Andriotis and Agiomirgianakis (2014) distinguish the tourist home swap in three forms: (1) two parties mutually exchange their housing units temporarily to spend the vacation in the other party’s home at the same time; (2) one party temporarily provides accommodation in their secondary home; (3) the hosting party provides hospitality while present. The latter two, however, refer to peer-to-peer accommodation (Casado-Diaz et al., 2020) like Airbnb or couch surfing, which are based on sharing practices rather than swapping (Phua, 2019; Schuckert et al., 2018).

Home swapping in the field of housing, understood as a direct exchange of housing units between two households that is not based on house-hunting but on social interactions, is hardly existent. This is surprising since home swapping itself is by no means a new instrument on housing markets. Already in the 1920s, it was an instrument of the German command economy on the housing market after World War I, which was even regulated by a specially established institute for home swapping (Institut des Wohnungstausches) (Roquette, 1927). During the Cold War, home swap markets, mostly in unregulated forms, developed in socialist countries, as a response to the absence of market mechanisms (Schulz, 1991). Besides these approaches, born out of necessity, Austria even enshrined home swapping in its rent law in 1981, and is thus considered the vanguard of home swapping (Born, 2019). Disregarding home swapping in the academic arena might be a result of the instrument’s historic appearance, mostly as a measure on non-functioning housing markets, and thus, not in line with the current neoliberal housing agendas.

Only recently, first contributions have started to discuss home swapping in the field of game theory as a response to highly regulated rental markets (Eriksson & Sjöstrand, 2007) or as a possible strategy for a degrowth-oriented housing provision (Kitzmann, 2022). A thorough examination of the value of such a housing instrument as a sufficiency measure to downsize housing is, however, still missing. Most scholars reflecting on solutions regarding a sufficient downsizing of per capita living space either do so by discussing the above-mentioned new housing approaches (Cohen, 2021), sharing approachess (Bierwirth, 2015), regulation of developers (Ellsworth-Krebs, 2019) or discuss rather physical aspects of housing units like ‘multifunctionality of rooms, reduced flat and rooms sizes by adapted building standards’ (Bohnenberger, 2021, p. 175). “If home swapping is mentioned at all, it is usually only incidentally or indirectly in single clauses. Thoughts like ‘cooperative houses are an interesting model which often allows easier change of flat size’ (Lorek & Spangenberg, 2019, p. 289) or naming ‘tenants’ rights to sublet or swap flats’ (Bohnenberger, 2021, p. 176) can be found in several scholarly publications, but remain undiscussed. Only Thomas et al. (2015) address home swapping as an instrument for limiting per capita living space by reflecting on possible measures like information platforms or financial incentives for people moving from large to small houses/flat. Still, deliberations do not move beyond a mere enumeration of ideas and do not discuss the value of home swapping as a central part of housing provision.

It is argued that home swapping has a massive potential for a sufficient housing provision. Therefore, it deserves more attention in the academic debate. The textbook example of the home swap idea to better allocate living space is the following: a widowed lady living alone in her four-room flat swapping with a young couple with two children that desperately wants to spatially upgrade from their two-room flat. This example clearly highlights that the contribution of home swaps to a reduction of per capita living space is, first of all, an indirect one: a single home swap does neither change the aggregated floor size of the two flats nor the number of household members included in the swap and, thus, does not reduce the per capita living space immediately. Instead, the benefit of home swapping lies in the reduction or even avoidance of new housing construction due to a better allocation of living space in municipalities as a whole. Allowing the four-person household to move to the bigger flat of the older lady takes the market pressure off the four-room flat segments. Hence, the necessity for new construction in this segment is reduced and fewer flats have to be built, avoiding a further increase in per capita living space. The fact that home swapping schemes particularly target older people originates in the fact that the current ageing society, particularly in western societies, results in an increasing over-consumption of housing space due to ageing in place. Clark and Deurloo (2006) showed that 65–80% of households over 60 years are overconsuming living space in the Netherlands. Looking further ahead, the future demographic development is even more daunting: In 2018, the number of 65-year-old people or older exceeded the number of under five-year-olds globally, this ratio will be 2:1 in favour of older people by 2050, who will then even have surpassed the 15–24 age group (UN [United Nations], 2019). Consequently, overconsumption due to ageing in place will increase tremendously. Not only the size of home but also the fact that older people consume more energy, particularly for space heating (Liao & Chang, 2002), calls for action. Since this is the largest source of households’ energy consumption, home swapping measures as part of a sufficient housing provision are becoming even more relevant and the quantitative potential is significant: 20% of people between 60 and 85 perceive their housing situation as too spacious with 1/3 of owners and 1/10 of renters being overburdened with their current home size (BMVBS [Bundesministerium für Verkehr & Bau und Stadtentwicklung], 2011).

To deal with ageing and overconsumption of housing, several municipalities have launched home swapping measures. Singapore, a city-state where planning occurs under constant scarcity of land, invented the ‘Silver Housing Bonus’ scheme in 2013, to incentivise senior households to downsize and move to smaller flats (HDB [Housing & Development Board], 2022). Furthermore, several German municipalities started home swap offers, particularly addressing older people: the German capital Berlin, experiencing an extremely tense housing market, established a digital home swap meet in 2018 together with its six own housing companies (with a total of 333,000 housing units) (Die Landeseigenen [Die sechs landeseigenen Wohnungsbaugesellschaften Berlins], 2018). In Hamburg, Germany’s second largest city, the city-owned housing company SAGA (136,500 housing units) has launched a home swap meet, particularly addressing senior citizens willing to downsize (SAGA, 2023). Similar initiatives can be found in Potsdam, Berlin’s neighbouring city, or Munich, which both introduced home-swapping schemes in 2020 (Landeshauptstadt Potsdam, 2020; LMSGW [Landeshauptstadt München – Sozialreferat Gesamtplanung Wohnen], 2021). Even though evaluation studies are still lacking, these measures indicate that home swapping could be a state-led initiative to inspire voluntary simplicity in citizens willing to downscale their housing consumption and, thus, lead to a downscaling of housing production. A study on downsizing potentials in Milan and Oslo indicated that a decrease of per capita living space from 40.8 to 39.0 m² (Milan) and from 50.5 to 44.2 m² (Oslo) ‘will nullify the need for new housing construction’ (Mete & Xue, 2021, p. 21) until 2030. Hence, home swapping with its redistributive approach must be an integral part of housing strategies to downscale housing production by downscaling housing consumption. In this regard, the home swapping offer in Vienna generally limits the rooms-per-person ratio to 1:1 in a new flat, and allows maximally one room more than people living in the household (Wiener Wohnen, 2020).

Discussion

‘As a starting point for a sufficiency policy it is advisable to address products and actions which have high potentials for environmental benefits (“big points”)’ (Heyen et al., 2013, p. 20). This paper clearly outlined downsizing of housing as a big point, since it contributes to massive energy and resource savings. Hence, it deserves more attention from scholars and in political discussions (see also Hagbert & Bradley, 2017). Within the growing debate on housing sufficiency, home swapping could be one distinct instrument, since it can lead to an overall decrease in per capita living space by more efficiently allocating the existing housing space to avoid new construction.

Although systemic empirical evidence on the success of the instrument’s current implementation is lacking, (see Kitzmann 2023b) a restrained public discourse emerged in German municipalities that introduced home swapping schemes, allowing for a first brief assessment of the instrument’s barriers. The fact that the instrument falls short of expectations is mainly caused by the general unwillingness of older people to relocate. Within this context, the emotional attachment to the flat and to the neighbourhood combined with a high financial and organisational burden counteracts a personal reduction of living space (Falletta, 2021; Lauterbach, 2019). And even if older people are interested in downsizing, the very detailed image of their future living conditions, which goes beyond neighbourhood and number of rooms, reduces the number of possible swap units tremendously (Laufer, 2019). The result is a distinct mismatch of supply and demand of larger flats: the majority (up to 80%, depending on municipality) of offered housing units are smaller units from families that want to increase their living space, whereas the supply of larger flats does not meet this demand (Leiß, 2020; Mieder, 2020). Even financial incentives do not seem to enhance the willingness to swap: in Berlin and Munich, the municipal housing companies forgo the usual surcharge for new tenants, allowing the new tenant to keep the net rent of the previous tenant (Die Landeseigenen [Die sechs landeseigenen Wohnungsbaugesellschaften Berlins], 2018; LMSGW [Landeshauptstadt München – Sozialreferat Gesamtplanung Wohnen], 2021). This, however, might often be a drop in the ocean, since older people, sitting on decades-old rental contracts, still would have to pay higher or similar net rents, as the more frequent change of tenants increases net rents faster in smaller flats. The municipal housing companies in Berlin even introduced a swap bonus of up to 2,500€ (Sethmann, 2018), which has, however, already been terminated due to its lack of impact on older people’s willingness to move.

This shows that financial inducements might only be a minor aspect of a possible incentive scheme that should rather aim at support structures accompanying older people throughout the whole process of moving to a smaller flat: explaining possible advantages of downsizing, identifying possible swap options, emotional support with sorting out household goods and finally organising the final relocation. Although this will be time and resource consuming, such measures are necessary in order to achieve a redistribution of unequally distributed housing space and to help avoid more drastic legal frameworks like a maximum per capita housing space or under-occupation charges like the British ‘bedroom tax’, which was even considered a policy failure as it has not solved the problem itself and even caused several unintended consequences (Gibb, 2015; Moffatt et al., 2016).

Moreover, home swapping, like every (voluntary) downsizing approach, must be embedded in a shift of cultural norms and consumer housing choices. First and foremost, the notion of housing as a positional good (Charles, 2019; Kuhlmann, 2020) and symbol of wealth led to a bigger-is-better attitude causing a significant over-consumption of housing space in the latter half of the twentieth century (Nelson, 2019). Although Hagbert reports on a general willingness to downsize ‘irrespective of specific aspects of demographic variables’ (Hagbert, 2016, p. 295), the challenging task will be to illustrate the advantages of downsizing to the older age cohorts that have been socialised with growth-oriented norms and values for decades, competing for housing arrangements beyond their physical needs. Although such a mission seems challenging in the first place, Ayalon et al. (2023) point to a growing solidarity between generations with regard to climate change, indicating an openness to measures that promote ecological sustainability.

Since new constructions, which home swapping aims to counteract by better allocating the available living space, are not only driven by the need to relieve overcrowding at a given stage in family life cycles, other drivers for growing per capita housing consumption have to be targeted as well, the propensity for secondary homes being one of them. Such developments could be discouraged by more holistic approaches like increasing property/land taxes (Larsson & Müller, 2019). The fact that municipalities, however, depend on these taxes and, thus, are in constant competition for investments, calls for a general reconsideration of our growth-oriented taxation system and a more degrowth-oriented development (Savini, 2021). Moreover, this example also suggests that, as promising as home swapping might appear, it can only be one, piece in a broader framework of policy measures leading to an impactful downsizing of living space.

Conclusion

Since novel strategies to downsize housing consumption are required but not sufficiently represented in academic literature, particularly regarding the existent housing stock, this paper discussed the value of home swapping for more sufficient housing provision. Although only indirectly able to decrease per capita living space, home swapping offers an enormous potential for a sufficient housing provision by redistributing housing space. Instead of solely focusing on micro-scale developments like tiny houses or micro apartments, the discussion on sufficient housing must acknowledge the importance of systemic measures for a large-scale transformation towards a sufficient housing provision. If home swapping can enfold its potential to become a ‘key point’ (Heyen et al., 2013, p. 20) within a broader agenda to downsize per capita living space, thereby providing a more sufficient housing provision, remains to be seen, since a proper evaluation of home swapping instruments is lacking. The recent dynamic of launching municipal home swapping schemes, however, illustrates the current necessity for interventions into current local housing markets. Even though these measures are mostly motivated by a desire to relax stressed housing markets, scholars should take up this newly emerging instrument to thoroughly evaluate its functionalities, implementation models, and, first and foremost, its ecological effects. Despite a general willingness to downsize, ‘this openness appears to also be conditional and surrounded by norms and apprehensions’ (Hagbert, 2016, p. 298). McArthur and Stratford (2021) confirm the insufficiency of leaving such a challenging task of pursuing a simpler lifestyle to households only, since obstacles remain within the system. Hence, research on this new instrument should be dedicated to barriers for households, generally willing to downsize, to participate in home swapping. Only if individual obstacles to downsize are addressed (Ellsworth-Krebs, 2019), can such a new instrument, that comes with a notion of ‘sacrificing’ personal prosperity, be executed successfully.

Acknowledgments

I acknowledge support by the Open Access Publication Fund of Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest is reported.