A Predictive Model of Household Hazard Perception in Germany, Portugal and Ireland

The European Renovation Wave commits the European Union to a deep retrofit of its housing stock. The policy is desirable, but households unable to take part may be left behind, creating unintended inequalities. To help policymakers and renovation-programme designers anticipate and mitigate them, we surveyed adults in Germany, Portugal and Ireland (n = 264), quota-sampled on income, tenure and gender. Respondents rated the likelihood and severity of 13 hazards they could face if their home were not deeply retrofitted, including higher energy bills, energy poverty, damp and lost property value; the product of the two ratings gave a 1–25 concern score. A nine-step pipeline screened 111 candidate predictors with penalised regression, confirmed them with likelihood-ratio tests corrected for multiple testing and checked their stability by resampling. Higher energy bills were judged the most likely consequence of not retrofitting; energy poverty and cold or damp homes harming health the most severe. Concern was predictable from household characteristics for six hazards. Households spending least on housing had two to three times the odds of higher concern, in four hazards and overall. Renovation support should therefore prioritise these households and poor-quality dwellings; longitudinal, nationally balanced samples should test these findings.