Fixing the Housing System, Not Just Funding It: Why Scotland’s Regeneration Moment Is Now
- Katherine Gunderson
- 9 hours ago
- 8 min read
02 Feb 2026 — 8 min read
By Dr. Katherine Gunderson
CEO & Founder, Grand Bequest
Oxford University - Saïd Business School – EmpowerHer Award Recipient
Scotland’s housing emergency has been talked about, studied, and debated for decades. What has been missing is not insight—but coordination, scale, and system-level accountability.
That is why the Scottish Government’s recent announcement of More Homes Scotland, backed by approximately £4.1 billion of public funding within a wider £4.9 billion housing investment programme, really matters. It is a clear signal that government is no longer content with incrementalism. The gauntlet has been thrown down—not only to the public sector partners, but to the entire private sector, including data providers, financiers, and delivery partners to leverage this capital and act to ensure we do not ever find ourselves in this emergency situation again.
This moment must not become another cycle where funding flows primarily into speculative new-build development, while empty buildings decay, communities hollow out, and children remain in temporary accommodation. Scotland has an opportunity to fix the system that produces housing crises—not just subsidise outputs and hope for the best.
And here is how we at Grand Bequest believe that the entire sector must harness the innovative power of technology, financial leverage, and community collaboration to finally implement a coordinated solution that is bold enough to meet the scale of the housing supply problem head-on, in all councils across Scotland, and beyond.
Two Pillars, One Objective: Housing Supply at Speed and Scale
To meet the scale of the housing emergency, Scotland must clearly articulate all systems around pursuing two distinct but mutually reinforcing pillars of supply:
New Construction, which is essential for long-term growth, energy efficiency, and future-proofing stock.
Regeneration of Empty Buildings, which focuses on bringing vacant, underused, derelict, and stalled buildings back into productive use—quickly, locally, and with community intent.
*Retrofit of current building stock would technically fall under this pillar, but is outside the scope of Grand Bequest's focus on empty building adaptive reuse and new housing delivery for this blog's context.
These are not competing approaches. They are complementary and necessary to deliver the housing supply required. But regeneration of empty buildings has consistently been underutilised, under-measured, and under-coordinated, despite being one of the fastest routes to delivering homes, particularly in urban areas with existing infrastructure.
We believe, especially after inspiring debate and dialogue with real estate experts from 30+ countries at Oxford's Real Estate Program in Summer 2025, that this underutilisation is foundationally a victim to planning pigeonholes, perceived deficit risks v. real quantifiable risks, and a lack of dynamic data for decision-making and investment leverage.
In other words, the Built Environment as a sector has not previously "seen" regeneration as a viable, scalable option because it has significantly different system behaviour when compared to the perceived simplicity of the new construction status quo. And as a result of this blindness, the sector severely struggles to overcome the 'one building at a time' mindset due to a lack of system supports, but all of that must change, now.
And Scotland is the perfect place to show the rest of the world how to do it.
Regeneration Is a System, Not a Project
Regeneration fails when it is treated as a one-off project or headline case study. It succeeds when it is treated as a repeatable system. To create shared language, clarity, and accountability across stakeholders, Grand Bequest has spent years collaborating with leading researchers, industry experts, and communities to design the simplest system structure that every empty building will process through.
Here is the Grand Bequest '8-Phases of Empty Building Regeneration' Framework:
Bequest – Data capture, empty building identification, initial local sentiment capture, and preliminary prioritisation.
Basics – Data validation, empty building site visit, confidence scoring, owner outreach and assessment, and initial project team formation.
Feasibility – Technical, social, and planning feasibility assessed alongside community input. Drones and other innovative technology deployed onsite to gather single-source-of-truth datasets about structure, condition, and viability.
Finance – Capital structuring, leverage modelling, and the efficient blending of private, catalytic, and public funding pots for maximum social return on investment (SROI) to deliver regenerated empty buildings aligned with community needs and ESG targets.
Construction – Delivery of works with local supply chains towards maximum density and mixed-use adaptability of spaces.
Celebration – A Grand Opening celebration for every regenerated space, hosted by Grand Bequest onsite, that brings the entire community together to share in the accomplishment!
Exchange – Tenancy handover and operational onboarding.
Exit – Gradual withdrawal of development capital and debt, including the design of financial restructuring and shared ownership agreements, to leave assets without extractive pressures and healthy NOI (and, in community ownership whenever possible).
This framework is vital to provide the backbone to action. It provides the structure for milestones, metrics, and collaborations to form around and simplifies a complex weave of networks and ecosystems that project teams must fight uphill against today.
We do find it important to mention that this process embeds community engagement and anti-displacement design at the beginning, middle, and end—not as an afterthought. Understandably, this is just a high-level introduction and there is significant research, dialogue, and innovation under each Phase continuously underway. We are explicit about designing the 8-phase system to avoid as many of the negative externalities often associated with regeneration and development: displacement, extractive value capture, and gentrification. This is achieved through enabling structures and mixed-use density, including:
deliberate NOI allocations that make social housing and creative community spaces financially viable in schemes,
mixed-use, adaptable 24/7 spaces that maximise community benefit from the same footprint improving diversity and inclusion, and
blending catalytic and philanthropic capital for derisking and aligning project outputs to predefined impact targets.
Empty Buildings Are Not Liabilities
At Grand Bequest, we do not see empty buildings as liabilities waiting for demolition. We see them as assets at 0% occupancy that should be at 0% vacancy. We recommend that Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) and other More Homes Scotland partners align to this mindset and prioritise deployment into the infrastructure necessary to identify and highlight the regenerative opportunities across nearly every community in Scotland struggling with reactivating unused spaces.
Scotland already has thousands of empty or underused buildings, yet data on:
where they are (geospatially),
what condition they are in today,
how communities feel about them, and
what capital is available to unlock them
remains fragmented, inconsistent, or outdated.
This is precisely the information gap that Grand Bequest's platform, RegenerationOS, is being designed to close to help communities and councils through the 8-phases for all of their empty building opportunities. Because, until we all are able to collaborate dynamically, we will not benefit from the economies of scale and speed that a problem of this size requires.
The RegenerationOS platform will be publicly launched at University of Glasgow, in partnership with Urban Land Institute (ULI), DESNZ, Edinburgh Futures Institute (EFI), and DEFRA on March 31st. Event registration opening this month, watch ULI website for updates. The event is focused on "What does an Investment Ready regeneration project actually look like?" to dive into the details between what funding requires and what projects can reasonably deliver; more to come!
Three Metrics That Matter—Per Ward, Per Council
If Scotland, through the More Homes Scotland initiative, is serious about housing delivery, we must focus on clear leading indicators, not lagging headlines. After years of researching impact measurement and management in this context, and as Scotland's first property and financial technology BCorp, Grand Bequest proposes More Homes Scotland focus on three publicly shareable metrics for every ward across Scotland’s 32 councils for the regenerative pillar:
Empty Building Count (with Confidence)
A live, validated register showing all empty buildings in a ward, their regeneration phase, and local sentiment—explicitly acknowledging current data gaps and uncertainty.
Today, these details are across housing, economic development, and health sectors causing language challenges, data interoperability issues, and siloed approaches. A dynamic, real-time approach to local, regional, and national alignment is necessary.
Housing Needs Assessment (HNA) Alignment
What type of housing is actually needed in that ward—by tenure, size, and affordability—so regeneration delivers the right homes, not just more units.
Undeployed Capital Levels
A clear picture of available funding (including More Homes Scotland and other public and private pots), required leverage, and total capital needed to maximise Social Return on Investment (SROI) at project, ward, council, regional, and national levels.
When these three core numbers are visible, dynamic, and shared, coordination and accountability becomes possible—and excuses disappear and bottlenecks become identifiable and resolvable. RegenerationOS is foundationally designed around these three metrics, in addition to dozens of other building inputs on topics like biodiversity, circularity, housing opportunity, and community priorities.
The More Homes Scotland team can lead the sector by laser focusing on where the housing opportunities lie, what the housing needs are explicitly, and where the capital is flowing. The public investment must be used to derisk the systemic regenerative infrastructure for impact and inward investment; and, it must introduce strong first-loss mechanisms (a key role for Scottish National Investment Bank (SNIB) we would think) for dormant sites across Scotland to go from uninvestable to irresistible.
Why Speed Matters: Children in Temporary Accommodation
As of March 2025, 10,180 children were living in temporary accommodation in Scotland, the highest level on record. This is not an abstract policy failure. It is a measurable, ongoing human cost.
Regeneration can deliver homes faster than new construction alone, particularly in urban areas where buildings, services, and transport already exist. Every month lost to fragmented decision-making is another month children spend without stable homes.
We would like to boldly propose that Scottish Government and the More Homes Scotland funding allocation should have a specific action research priority on delivering family's housing as an exercise into rapid data capture (with appropriate GDPR protections and redactions of course), capital structuring, partner deployment, and tenancy timelines. This focus on 10,000 families needing 10,000 homes gives the industry and the governmental partners a specific, finite target that can be expanded as data, scope, and experience allow.
**We are specifically speaking to a housing supply challenge and supply chain infrastructure problem, and are aware and sensitive to the emotional and political layers associated with homelessness and temporary accommodation challenges. We work closely with industry leading partners like Shelter and Crisis (an investor in Grand Bequest), as well as local council teams, to ensure that we are respectful to the multi-faceted elements for unwinding this wicked housing problem; and yet, all the while, still energetically pushing forward towards a future where Scotland has an abundance of suitable accommodation for all, especially children as the future caretakers of these precious spaces.
The only acceptable target for the metric "children in temporary accommodation in Scotland" is 0. Capital, research, and resources should be concentrated on this specific focus as part of system design and collaborative dialogue for More Homes Scotland and inward investment framing. SNIB and others should also be held contractually and legally to this number for moral, operational, and financial reasons.
A Moment to Fix the System
The risk now is familiar: that £4.1bn becomes another round of speculative development subsidies, reinforcing the same structural failures that produced this crisis. This money cannot be a top-up for SNIB, or more of the same old approaches and behaviours that continue to overwhelm the industry into repeating small pilots and regurgitating "state of the market" reports. We must use it to take large, coordinated, bold action at systems level so Scotland not only addresses the housing emergency, but never finds itself in this horrible position again.
That requires acting at the speed an emergency demands and recognising that we need help from people inside and outside of Scotland to be successful, including inward investment partners, researchers and students, and industry experts from around the world to make Scotland the Regeneration Capital of the World.
Please feel free to reach out to Dr. Gunderson directly via LinkedIn here for feedback, collaboration, or investment opportunities: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katherine-gunderson-dba/.
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