Genk

See you in Chicago.

Straight from Genk, Belgium, Robin Carlo, co-founder of Lennartsen Shoes.

Welcome to the ShoeCast and help me pronounce everything that I just mispronounced.

Hey, Ben.

We had at a certain point, I think, five Robins in our local friend group.

Not exaggerating.

So yeah, I'm here in Genk in my current house that I'm putting up for sale in about three days.

Running around, scrambling, doing small renovation jobs.

So you all know that the aim behind all these initiatives is to increase affordable housing, including through renovation and reuse of non-residential buildings and tackling short-term rentals.

Now, let's take a moment here in our conversation to listen to a field report, because we went to Genk in Belgium, where an EU-funded research project has transformed a social housing neighbourhood into one that creates more renewable energy than it consumes.

So let's have a listen.

As many as two out of ten households in Belgium are trapped in energy poverty.

They are unable to afford heating or cooling and have limited resources to invest in renovating their homes to make them more energy efficient.

In a neighbourhood called New Texas in Genk, Belgium, renovations are designed to cut bills, not corners.

We met Tina Engelo, researcher at the Flemish Institute for Technological Research, involved in the Horizon Europe open lab project in Genk.

So the New Texas neighborhood, it has around 140 dwellings.

Three years.

And Zeekenhuis Oost Limburg in Genk, Belgium, 100,000 square meters, gets cited by the design firm that worked on it with the line that orientation isn't a detail, it's essential.

Which is the whole argument in six words.

It is.