Client: Estonian Ministry of Finance, with partner TalTech
Location: Ida-Viru County (Kiviõli, Püssi, Kohtla-Järve), Estonia
Year: 2020
Sector: Shrinking Cities · Data Proxy · Housing Policy
When the Ministry of Finance started receiving unwanted, donated apartments in East Estonia, it triggered a search for a reliable way to actually measure building vacancy — solved here with an unlikely data source: electricity bills.
In 2018, the Ministry of Finance began receiving dozens of unwanted apartments donated by their owners in East Estonia — a genuine surprise, given interest rates were low and national housing prices were rising 5.7% year-on-year. The debate on shrinking cities was already open, but this was the turning point that opened a new line of investigation into the relationship between demographic decline and the built environment.
A year after that surprise, SPIN Unit and TalTech launched a research pilot for the Ministry of Finance in Ida-Viru county, aiming to design a methodology for mapping shrinkage and assessing its risk to socio-economic development. The core challenge: finding a reliable data source to understand vacancy at the individual building level.
The team tested all available data sources and ultimately produced a method for turning electricity consumption data into a meaningful proxy for building-level vacancy rates — cross-validated against population register, building registry, business registry, and debt records. The findings also fed into a landscape/townscape analysis guide and municipality-specific adaptation strategies for Lüganuse and Kohtla-Järve.
Delivered as a set of Estonian-language technical guidelines and case-study review documents in early 2021, alongside municipality-specific strategy decks.
- Building vacancy reached an alarming 25% in the pilot area, with vacant buildings clustering geographically rather than being evenly spread.
- Areas with rising vacancy were disproportionately historic housing stock with cultural and architectural significance — tying demographic decline directly to heritage risk.
- The electricity-consumption proxy method proved robust enough to later scale from two municipalities to a full national dataset in 2022 — the first time flat-level electricity data was gathered nationwide in Estonia.
- Vacancy concentrated in specific Soviet-era apartment-block typologies, visible clearly once electricity data was mapped by building type and district.
Gave the Ministry of Finance a genuinely novel, validated method for measuring housing vacancy — one that went on to underpin a national shrinking-cities study two years later, and directly informed adaptation strategy documents for two municipalities.