A room in a former dormitory building. Walls stripped down to bare brick, covered in decades of institutional paint that is now peeling in sheets. A cracked tile floor. Two pieces of Soviet-era furniture left behind by whoever was the last permanent resident — years, perhaps decades, ago. A single bulb hanging from the ceiling. This is where internally displaced people in Dnipro are living. Not temporarily. Permanently.
In the next room — or down the corridor, depending on the building — a shared hygiene block. Three sinks mounted to a wall with visible water stains spreading from ceiling to floor. A window blocked with an OSB board because the glass was never replaced. A partition improvised from metal framing and chipboard to create some semblance of privacy in a space designed for institutional use, not human habitation. No hot water. Heating that works intermittently, if at all.
What Collective Centres Were Supposed to Be
When the full-scale invasion began in February 2022, collective centres — repurposed schools, dormitories, sanatoriums, administrative buildings — were the right answer to the right problem. People needed shelter immediately, in large numbers, in locations they had not chosen and could not predict. Collective sites provided it. They absorbed hundreds of thousands of people in the first weeks of mass displacement and kept them alive through the first winter.
The operative word in that sentence is weeks. Collective centres were designed as emergency reception facilities. They were never designed as homes. The humanitarian architecture built around them — the CCCM cluster, the refurbishment standards, the NFI kits for shared spaces — was built on the assumption of short-term residency, with exit pathways to more appropriate accommodation opening up as the situation stabilised.
Four years later, those exit pathways have not opened at scale. The rental market in frontline-adjacent cities is expensive and discriminates informally against IDP households. The private housing stock is saturated. State social housing programmes existed before the war only on paper, and reconstruction programmes have not yet reached the scale or the speed needed to absorb the displaced population. People who moved into collective centres in the spring of 2022 are still there today — not because they chose to stay, but because there is nowhere to go.
Near the Front Line: Repair Is Still an Emergency
In Kharkiv and Dnipro — cities that sit within the operational reach of Russian missile and drone strikes — the calculus for collective centres is straightforward. People are there because they cannot go anywhere closer to where they came from. The collective site is not an inconvenience on the way to a better solution; it is the solution, for now, because the alternative is a village that is still being shelled or a city in occupied territory.
For these oblasts, the humanitarian priority is unambiguous: repair the facilities that people are living in to the minimum standard that human dignity requires. The Shelter Cluster's SN302A activity — Refurbishment of Collective Sites at USD 760 per resident — exists precisely for this. The conditions in the photographs above are not the result of insufficient funds arriving in Ukraine. They are the result of insufficient funds reaching these specific buildings, in these specific cities, for the people living inside them.
The argument for frontline-adjacent collective centre repair is also a winter preparedness argument. A building with OSB-boarded windows, inadequate insulation, and a partially functional heating system will fail its residents in January. The cost of emergency winterisation after a facility deteriorates further is greater than the cost of a systematic refurbishment programme now. And unlike many humanitarian investments, collective site repair has a measurable, immediate, and verifiable impact on the people who sleep there every night.
Refurbishment: USD 760 per resident — covers non-structural repairs, MEP restoration, window and door replacement, accessibility improvements, sanitation and hygiene upgrades.
Care and Maintenance: USD 330 per resident — ongoing upkeep, minor repairs, and functional maintenance to prevent further deterioration.
Both activities are available across all four HNRP 2026 Strategic Priorities, including SP1 (Frontline) and SP4 (Vulnerable Groups in collective sites). In-Kind modality only.
Further from the Front: The Transition Opportunity
In Dnipro, Zaporizhzhia, Mykolaiv, and other cities that sit further from active hostilities, the picture looks different — and the strategic question is different too. Collective centres in these locations are not emergency reception facilities waiting for the situation to stabilise. They are, at this point, failing substitutes for permanent housing. Continuing to repair and maintain them at scale without creating exit pathways is a programme decision, not a humanitarian necessity.
This does not mean abandoning collective centre residents. It means combining refurbishment investment with active programming to transition people from collective accommodation to something better — and using the legal frameworks that now exist in Ukraine to do it.
The opportunity that exists today — and that did not exist two years ago — is the convergence of two legal instruments that together create a genuine alternative to collective accommodation for IDP households. The first is Cabinet of Ministers Resolution No. 495 (2022), which establishes a framework for temporary housing for IDPs from rehabilitated municipal stock, with transparent vulnerability-weighted allocation. The second is the Law of Ukraine No. 12377 (13.12.2025) on the Fundamental Principles of Housing Policy — specifically Article 29, which formalises Social Housing as a legally defined, locally managed category of affordable accommodation for eligible citizens.
These are not aspirational policy documents. They are operational legal frameworks with defined eligibility criteria, allocation procedures, and management responsibilities. What they lack is the rehabilitation investment that would convert existing but substandard municipal stock into the housing units they describe.
The Resource That Already Exists
Every city in Ukraine has municipal housing stock. Buildings that were once dormitories for factory workers, Soviet-era technical schools converted to housing, apartment blocks that passed to city council ownership over decades of post-independence transfers. Much of this stock is in the same condition as the collective centre rooms in the photographs above — or worse. It is uninhabited, deteriorating, and generating no social value.
This is the resource. Not new construction, not modular housing systems, not the international housing grant that will arrive in 2028. It is the stock of buildings already owned by the municipalities where displaced people are already living. What is required is rehabilitation investment to bring these buildings to minimum habitability standard — and the administrative mechanism to designate them as temporary or social housing under Resolution 495 and Law 12377.
In Kharkiv alone, local authorities have indicated that the municipal reserve housing fund holds over 1,000 apartments available for this purpose. A rehabilitation investment of approximately USD 8,000–11,000 per unit — covering essential repairs plus a basic equipment package — would bring each unit to move-in ready standard. This is not a conceptual programme. It is a clearly defined intervention with a known resource base, an established legal framework, and an identified population of beneficiaries already living in worse conditions in the collective centres down the road.
Establishes a formal framework for municipal temporary housing funds for IDPs. Provides housing free of charge for one year, with mandatory extensions for vulnerable groups including persons with disabilities, elderly, families with children, and ex-combatants.
Allocation is governed by a nationally standardised vulnerability-weighted scoring system — protecting against arbitrary decision-making. Requires Memoranda of Understanding between implementing organisations and local authorities, with clear maintenance responsibilities.
Critically: this framework requires that housing be formally designated under Resolution 495 before allocation — creating a permanent municipal asset, not a temporary programme output. Every rehabilitated unit continues to serve displaced households after the project ends.
Old Dormitories — A Specific Opportunity
Former factory dormitories and institutional residential buildings present a particular opportunity that is worth naming specifically. These buildings were designed for residential use — they have room layouts, plumbing infrastructure, and heating systems that correspond to housing functions, even if those systems have not been maintained for years or decades. Converting a former dormitory into a designated temporary housing facility under Resolution 495 requires rehabilitation works, not reconstruction. The bones are there. The legal pathway is there. The beneficiary population is identifiable and assessed.
In Mykolaiv, a pre-identified former dormitory building in municipal ownership — currently unoccupied and deteriorating — exemplifies this opportunity precisely. A single building of this type, rehabilitated as a Type 2 dormitory conversion under a social housing programme, can accommodate multiple IDP households in a legally secure, municipally managed facility. It creates more stability than a collective centre, at lower per-resident cost than new construction, using existing infrastructure that would otherwise continue to deteriorate.
Ukraine's landmark Law on the Fundamental Principles of Housing Policy, developed with UNECE support, formally defines Social Housing as accommodation provided by state or local authorities to eligible citizens free of charge or at reduced cost, with priority given to the most vulnerable groups.
Article 29 establishes the statutory basis for local self-government bodies to form and manage social housing stock. Unlike Resolution 495 — which governs temporary IDP accommodation — the social housing framework creates a longer-term, institutionalised pathway to stable accommodation for households who cannot access the private market.
Together, these two instruments create a legal continuum: Resolution 495 for the transition out of collective centres, Law 12377 Article 29 for longer-term integration. The rehabilitation investment that activates them is the missing link.
What Needs to Happen — Two Tracks, One Strategy
The strategic picture for IDP accommodation in 2026 and beyond requires two parallel tracks operating simultaneously — not sequentially, and not in competition with each other.
Track One — Near the front line: Continue and expand collective centre refurbishment (SN302A) in frontline-adjacent oblasts where displacement is active and returnees are not yet possible. Kharkiv and Dnipro are the priority. Standards need to reach the minimum — functional sanitation, functioning heating, weathertight building envelopes, accessibility. This is not aspirational. It is the baseline below which humanitarian actors should not accept leaving people.
Track Two — Further from the front line: Shift investment toward activating temporary and social housing through rehabilitation of municipal stock — apartments, dormitories, and appropriate public buildings — under Resolution 495 and Law 12377. This is not an alternative to collective centre repair. It is the exit pathway that makes collective centre repair meaningful rather than permanent. A family that moves out of a collective centre into a properly managed temporary housing unit is a success. A family that stays in a refurbished collective centre indefinitely is a system failure, however good the refurbishment was.
The legal infrastructure for this transition now exists. The municipal stock exists. The identified population exists. The humanitarian organisations with the capacity to implement exist. What is needed is donor willingness to fund an activity that looks less like emergency humanitarian response and more like early recovery — because that, precisely, is what the situation in Ukraine requires four years into displacement.