Contemporary Housing Struggles: A Structural Field of Contention Approach

Full text

Contemporary
Housing Struggles
Ioana Florea · Agnes Gagyi
Kerstin Jacobsson
A Structural Field of Contention Approach

Contemporary Housing Struggles

IoanaFlorea • AgnesGagyi
KerstinJacobsson
Contemporary
Housing Struggles
A Structural Field ofContention
Approach

ISBN 978-3-030-97404-6 ISBN 978-3-030-97405-3 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3
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Ioana Florea
Department of Sociology and Work Science
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Kerstin Jacobsson
Department of Sociology and Work Science
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden
Agnes Gagyi
Department of Sociology and Work Science
University of Gothenburg
Gothenburg, Sweden

To the memory of Chris Pickvance (1944–2021)

vii
We would like to dedicate this book to Professor Chris Pickvance, who
passed away in autumn of 2021. As an urban sociologist and one of the
first scholars to lead a comparative research project on housing move-
ments in Central and Eastern Europe just after 1989, Chris has been a
great inspiration for our work. He also generously commented on our
draft manuscript as part of our advisory board. We are also very grateful
for the support of the other members, Professor Margit Mayer who also
generously commented on our manuscript, and Professor Judith Bodnar,
with whom we co-organized a workshop on semiperipheral housing
financialization that informed our understanding of our cases. In addi-
tion, we would like to thank Professor Abby Peterson for her support and
comments on earlier versions of our text.
Writing this book has been a genuinely collaborative work, and our
author names are listed in alphabetical order. We also had the support of
local collaborators in Hungary and Romania, researchers, activists, col-
leagues, and friends alike, as well as people whom we met for the first
time during interviews and to whom we are also grateful. is work
would not have been possible without their help.
Preface

viii Preface
e research on which this book is based was generously funded by the
Swedish Research Council Formas (contract 2016-00258), which also
enabled us to publish this book in open access form. We hope it will
attract many readers!
Gothenburg, Sweden Ioana Florea
Agnes Gagyi
Kerstin Jacobsson
January 2022

ix
Contents
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing
Contention in the Sociopolitical Complexity of Structural
Crises 1
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach 21
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention in
Bucharest and Budapest 43
4 Housing Contention in Budapest 87
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest 127
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles:
Comparative Lessons 167
7 Conclusion 201
References 207
Index 237

1
© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_1
1
Introduction: Embedding theAnalysis
ofHousing Contention
intheSociopolitical Complexity
ofStructural Crises
In recent decades, the economic crisis, the nancialization of real estate,
and the neoliberal restructuring of cities have aected households and
provoked citizen mobilizations in cities around the globe. In particular,
the Great Recession that followed the nancial crisis of 2008, and its
procapital management by states, spurred protests that became a signi-
cant aspect of postcrisis politics in many countries (e.g., Flesher Fominaya,
2017; Gerbaudo, 2017). Many of these protests focused on urban spaces
and property relations—from the widespread protest technique of public
square occupations to squatting or broader mobilization against housing-
related inequalities and the use of housing needs as a basis for capital
extraction (e.g., Fields, 2017; Ishkanian & Glasius, 2018; Martinez,
2019; Soederberg, 2020). Housing was also at the center of new postcri-
sis solidarity initiatives and the solidarity economy developing in urban
contexts (e.g., Kawano, 2010; Patti & Polyak, 2018). On the European
continent, Southern, Central, and Eastern Europe were the regions most
aected by the crisis (Becker & Jäger, 2010). In this book, we turn our
attention to two cities in Central and Eastern Europe that were strongly
aected by the nancial crisis and the eects of the nancialization of
housing: Bucharest and Budapest. In empirical terms, the objective is to

2
see how this crisis—as a case of structural tensions and transformation—
was politicized by multiple actors engaged in the issue of housing in these
local contexts.
We know from previous economic crises that exceptional environmen-
tal conditions may lead organizations and groups to set aside ideological
and status dierences (e.g., Borland, 2010), enabling the formation of
unusual alliances and cooperations. Indeed, it has been pointed out that
the 2008 global nancial crisis created the conditions for forming multi-
group and cross-class alliances (e.g., Brenner etal., 2012; Mayer, 2013;
Flesher Fominaya, 2017; Greenberg & Lewis, 2017; Kanellopoulos etal.,
2017; Lobera, 2019). In one of the more optimistic accounts, Marcuse
(2012) envisioned that the crisis would enable alliances between “the
deprived” and “the discontented,” that is, between the impoverished and
people otherwise constrained from exploring the possibilities of life.
However, looking back at the decade following the Great Recession,
we note that the nancial crises and neoliberal restructuring of societies
not only provoked anticapitalist, new leftist, and solidaristic movements
but also saw the rise of right-wing and sometimes neo-nationalistic ones.
Many countries—in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe alike—face
increased social polarization and divisions along class as well as urban–
rural divides, with citizens at both ends of the ideological spectrum mobi-
lizing. is also complicates the situation in the case of housing-related
movements, as the politicization of housing-related tensions can arise
through alliances with people with multiple political inclinations. A
closer look at the local contexts in focus in this book—Budapest and
Bucharest—clearly reveals the ideological complexity of contemporary
housing contention. In both cases, we see mobilization by dierent con-
stituencies, with dierent agendas, occupying opposite ends of the ideo-
logical spectrum, new leftist solidaristic movements as well as conservative,
neo-nationalistic ones. We also see a continuously changing landscape of
alliances and conicts among them. Against this background, this book
argues that we need a way of analyzing contemporary social contention
in its complexity. is book is intended to oer one by developing what
we call the “structural eld of contention approach.” We focus here on
contention in the sphere of housing.
I. Florea et al.

3
To capture how the local politicization of housing tensions relates to
the broader context of the crisis, the book argues for attention to pro-
cesses beyond short-term local movements, which is necessary to under-
stand how structural and political factors interact in a complex eld of
contention. is includes analyzing housing struggles in the two cities,
not only in the context of postsocialist transformations and postcrisis
economic development but also by seeing how housing conditions are
shaped by long-term processes of localized structural integration into the
dynamics of nancial markets and global competition.
Applying this approach to the two contexts of Bucharest and Budapest,
we direct our attention to housing activism and protest in the decade fol-
lowing the nancial crisis of 2008. Disparities between the rich and poor
are particularly salient in the housing sphere, but housing is also a eld in
which multiclass alliances have emerged in various parts of the world
(e.g., Mayer, 2013; Polanska, 2016; Florea, 2016; Martinez, 2016).
Moreover, there is evidence that anti-eviction and anti-debt protests were
a key component of the anti-austerity movements arising in the wake of
the Great Recession (Romanos, 2014; Barbero, 2015; Della Porta, 2015;
Hamann & Türkmen, 2020; Martinez, 2016; Sabaté, 2016). In the
buildup to and aftermath of the 2008 nancial crisis, the nancialization
of housing—that is, the transformation of housing into an investment
asset directly exposed to global market uctuations—made housing a
main driver of social inequality, and therefore at the center of postcrisis
social and political contention (Aalbers, 2016).
However, studies of the post-2008 housing contention wave so far
have tended to focus on politically progressive solidaristic movements,
for which the researchers had much sympathy. ese were movements
that addressed the outcomes of the crisis in the same analytical frame-
work as academic analysis did, namely as criticisms of the neoliberaliza-
tion of the global economy and local urban development (e.g., Mayer,
2007, 2016; Harvey, 2012; Mayer et al., 2016; Grazioli & Caciagli,
2018; Lima, 2021) and/or a social contestation of the eects of housing
nancialization (e.g., Aalbers, 2016; Fields, 2017; Di Feliciantonio,
2017; Wijburg, 2020, to mention but a few studies). However, because a
closer examination reveals greater ideological complexity in housing
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

4
contention (e.g., Reichle & Bescherer, 2021), it is increasingly urgent to
develop an analytical framework that can address housing contention in
all its complexity.
erefore, the book seeks to make a twofold contribution to current
debates on housing mobilizations and movements. First, it oers an ana-
lytical approach that can account for the structural and ideological com-
plexity of contemporary housing struggles and movements, interpreting
them in terms of their embeddedness inlocal structural (socioeconomic
and sociohistorical) and political contexts. Second, it eectively illus-
trates the practical gains of this approach through a comparative study of
housing contention in two European capital cities: Bucharest and
Budapest. Both cities (and countries) were severely aected by the nan-
cial crisis of 2008, which spawned and strengthened a variety of housing
movements. ese were characterized by dierent constituencies, alli-
ances, and agendas. In some cases, they occupied opposite ends of the
ideological spectrum. is book oers a complex analysis of housing
activism in these two cities, exploring relations between structural (socio-
historical) and contingent factors (such as shifting political constella-
tions), in addition to emerging solidarities and antagonisms, the
dissipation of solidarity, or the lack of interaction among diverse actors in
mobilizations around housing.
Studying Contention inIts Structural Context:
TheStructural Field ofContention Approach
Our distinct contribution is to develop an analytical approach that
embeds the study of contention rmly in a structural context. We use the
notion of contention to refer to politicized struggles and contestation, in
these cases around housing. We follow Tarrow in acknowledging that col-
lective action can take many forms—institutional or noninstitutional—
but it becomes contentious when “it is used by people who lack regular
access to representative institutions, who act in the name of new or unac-
cepted claims, and who behave in ways that fundamentally challenge
others or the authorities” (Tarrow, 2011, p.7). As McAdam etal. (2001,
I. Florea et al.

5
p.5) put it: “e contentious politics that concerns us is episodic rather
than continuous, occurs in public, involves interaction between makers
of claims and others, is recognized by those others as bearing on their
interests, and brings in government as mediator, target, or claimant.”
We propose that an approach is needed that allows us to analyze the
complex and changing relations between multiple actors and their broader
environment in an integrated way. As Chap. 2 describes in greater detail,
the approach developed in this book derives inspiration from but develops
Nick Crossley’s notion of a “eld of contention” (e.g., Crossley, 2006a, b,
2013). Crossley proposed an understanding of social movements as elds
of contention, emphasizing rst the numerous groups and agents who
interact within the internal space of a “movement” and the relations, alli-
ances, and conicts between them as they unfold over time, and second,
the embedding of social movement struggles within multiple dierenti-
ated contexts of struggle (Crossley, 2006a, b, p. 552). Building on
Crossley’s work, our approach then adds to the notion of eld of conten-
tion the structural factors that generate the contested conditions through
long-term processes, while constituting the conditions of group formation
and struggle. We call this the structural eld of contention approach.
e two cases analyzed in the book demonstrate that attention to pro-
cesses beyond short-term local movements is necessary for understanding
how structural and political factors interact in a complex eld of conten-
tion. Housing conditions, policies, and struggles around housing are
shaped by long-term processes of localized structural integration into the
dynamics of nancial markets and global competition. We conceive of
structural factors as elements of the eld of contention that both produce
conicts and shape relationship formations within those struggles and are
acted upon in collective struggles. We claim that for a deeper understand-
ing of post-2008 housing contention, and for a relevant assessment of the
politics of its various forms, this perspective of a structurally based and
complex analysis is essential. We argue that this approach requires a lon-
ger historical perspective and attention to the details of local constella-
tions of socioeconomic and political development, rather than “catch-all”
analyses of social contention in terms of neoliberalization and nancial-
ization, even though these processes are no doubt part of the story as well.
e pressures from such processes, and the way in which the conicts
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

6
stemming from them play out, depend on the long-term trajectories of
integration in the global economy of the cities and their respective poli-
ties (e.g., Kloosterman & Lambregts, 2007; Wiest, 2012).
Moreover, unlike approaches that trace the trajectory of a single move-
ment or compare movements with similar agendas, the structural eld of
contention approach proposed here does not start from a focus on coher-
ent movement agency (or identity) to then investigate its relations with
external factors. Instead, it traces connections between various forms of con-
tention and aspects of structural transformations that they address or to which
they are structurally linked. Such an approach allows us to grasp multiple
modes of politicization and their interactions, as well as to place their
dynamics within the broader context of structural trends.
In the empirical study of structural tensions and their politicization in
the local contexts of Budapest and Bucharest, we let ve foci of atten-
tion—or research questions, if one prefers—guide the analysis. e rst
concerns how structural and political processes in the longer term of late
socialist and postsocialist transformations conditioned the emergence of
movement actors and their interactions. e second considers the rela-
tion between actors’ structural positions and their movement agenda or
politics, with a special interest in the conditions for making or unmaking
cross-class coalitions or alliances. e third concerns how highly visible
forms of politicization and what in Chap. 2 we conceptualize as “political
silences” are related. e fourth concerns intermovement relations and
how they shift over time. e fth focus is on the connection between
how movements politicize structural issues and the multiple scales
through which those issues develop, considering the structural and politi-
cal processes at the local, national, and transnational/global levels. ese
ve foci are investigated following changes across time, from 2008 to the
present (2021).
Methodology
e empirical research for this book was conducted between 2017 and
2021. In mapping the long-term structural and political contexts of
housing politics of the two countries, we relied on authors’ previous
I. Florea et al.

7
knowledge of the local contexts, a systematic overview of secondary lit-
erature on postsocialist structural transformations and housing politics,
and collaborations with local researchers specializing in these elds.1 In
both Hungary and Romania, we reviewed the housing policies of the
periods immediately before and after 2008, and analyzed them in the
context of local structural and political pressures of the Great Recession.
In mapping relevant actors of housing mobilizations after 2008, we
started from authors’ preexisting knowledge of local housing movements,
initiating participative observations and interviews with the most visible
and signicant actors, following their connections and references to other
(movement or institutional) actors, and adding new actors highlighted by
our contextual research.
In the case of Hungary, 17 in-depth interviews were conducted, indi-
vidually and in focus groups, with a total of 32 people, including move-
ment organizers and participants, NGO workers, experts, and politicians
whose work had relevant connections to movements or the tensions they
addressed. e main movements that the interviews focused on were
forex debtor activism, leftist housing groups, and cohousing and collab-
orative housing organizations. Interviews were conducted with institu-
tional, political, and expert actors who had direct connections with the
housing conicts addressed by movements, as well as with NGOs that
worked on the same issues. Interview guides were semistructured and
prepared according to previous desk research on the background and his-
tory of each actor, including work by the experts interviewed. Information
shared in the interviews was followed up by examining the materials
mentioned or shared by interviewees. is was particularly important in
the case of the forex debtors’ movement, where the connections between
legal, nancial, and movement aspects could not have been mapped
1 Most importantly, with András Vigvári (on forms of informal housing as a reaction to post-1989
crisis waves), Zsuzsanna Pósfai (on the dynamics of housing nancialization before and after 2008),
Csaba Jelinek in Hungary and Mihail Dumitriu, Veda Popovici, Eniko Vincze, and George Zamr
in Romania (on postsocialist housing and urban development policies), and Ioana Vlad (on the
interconnectedness of housing and labor policies). e results of collaborations included collective
publications (e.g., Cărămida special issue, 2019; Florea & Dumitriu, 2018; Gagyi & Vigvári,
2018; Gagyi etal., 2019; Gagyi etal., 2021; Vilenica etal., 2021; Vincze & Florea, 2020; Vişan
etal., 2019; Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019; and Zamr et al., 2020), as well as the international
conference e nancialization of housing in the semi-periphery held at CEU, Budapest, in 2018.
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

8
otherwise. For the main actors, new developments were followed through
personal contact, their movements’ communications, and media stories,
as well as through follow-up interviews where necessary. ese methods
were supplemented by participant observation at movement meetings
and demonstrations.
In Romania, a total of 19 interviews were conducted with 36 people.
First, 12 in-depth interviews were conducted with individual movement
organizers and participants, focusing on leftist housing groups and heri-
tage protection groups, respectively. In 2019, a series of three group
interviews with a total of eight people were conducted with organizers of
the labor movement as it started addressing housing issues. A series of
four group interviews were conducted with institutional and political
actors at the municipal and national levels (e.g., the National Agency for
the Roma, Members of Parliament), focusing on initiators of legislative/
policy changes related to housing issues and representatives responsible
for social and housing policies. For bank debtor activism, we followed a
book with 100 life stories published by one of the debtor associations
(Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF, 2018), and the social media page
and blog of the most deeply involved and vocal lawyer, Gheorghe Piperea
(www.piperea.ro). In addition, participant observation was employed
continuously throughout the research process, during almost weekly
internal organization meetings and public events (including protest
events) of the leftist housing groups at episodic events of NGOs and
experts involved in housing, and at protest events of the labor and anti-
corruption movements. As in the Hungarian case, new developments by
the main actors were followed through personal contact and observing
movements’ communications and media presence (covering those of the
leftist housing groups entirely).
After mapping the eld of housing actors in both cities, we spent a
considerable time discussing the comparative aspects. is involved
reviewing connections between housing activism, political changes, and
the broader eld of post-2008 demonstrations. For this latter aspect, we
conducted additional research based on secondary literature, media cov-
erage, and background discussions with the actors involved. e com-
parisons helped us avoid jumping to general conclusions from local
constellations, while checking the relevance of our approach in grasping
I. Florea et al.

9
relations between crisis processes and mobilization. Our comparative
ndings inform the presentation of our empirical cases in Chaps. 4 and
5. In line with the structural eld of contention approach, this presenta-
tion considers not only the organization and agenda of the most visible
and politicized actors but it also takes the broader structural and political
transformation (introduced in Chap. 3) as a basis, placing various actors
within that frame. While maintaining focus on movement and civil soci-
ety organizations, this approach also allows us to notice less visible and
“silent” (politically unexpressed) instances of housing struggles, while
revealing multiple dimensions of relations between actors, beyond the
direct relations of coalition or conict. e presentations of the two
empirical cases necessarily dier in their narratives owing to dierent
constellations of local contention elds, yet the chapters share a common
basic structure because of their shared approach and questions. Against
the background of a broader structural and political transformation, they
trace the development of diverse agencies and problem representations
around housing issues during post-1989 structural changes, covering
politically visible contention as well as what we call “invisible struggles”
or “silences,” that is, areas of structural conict that do not gain political
expression.
In the analysis of actors and their problem representations, one main
aspect to which the chapters pay attention is how actors’ positions reect
a class dimension of housing struggles; that is, in the specic ways actors
are aected by structural shifts and policies, in the availability or lack of
specic resources (such as expertise or political connections), or in the
dynamics of cross-class relations in intragroup and intergroup interac-
tions. In analyzing the development of housing struggles, in addition to
relations between housing groups, we consider actors’ relationships with
other political initiatives and national-level politicians. ese are a den-
ing factor that shapes eld dynamics through both the structural aspects
of policies and the ideological eect of political coalition formation or
conict. After this parallel presentation of the two cases, in Chap. 6 we
draw lessons from the comparisons that we found particularly relevant
from the perspective of the analytical approach oered in this book.
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

10
The Book’s Contributions
e two cases in this book introduce a comparative, in-depth analysis of
contemporary housing conicts and mobilizations in Budapest and
Bucharest. Besides adding Eastern European cases to better-known
Western and Southern European ones in the study of post-2008 housing
conicts, our case choice also has implications for the analytical stakes
beyond the region. Our in-depth, contextually embedded, and compara-
tive treatment of the two cases allows us to address several theoretical and
methodological aspects of international debates.
As we observed, studies of the post-2008 housing contention wave
have so far tended to focus on movements that address the outcomes of
the crisis in the same analytical framework as academic analyses. is
means that social movement studies (and arguably, general progressive
political thinkers) struggle to understand nonprogressive responses to cri-
sis eects. e more complex contextual relations that often link progres-
sive and nonprogressive actors, or politically active and politically silent
responses, are made less visible in research agendas that focus on the con-
ditions and potential of progressive mobilization. Our studies of
Hungarian and Romanian cases reveal housing mobilizations to be a
complex and dynamic eld of actors on the wider spectrum between pro-
gressive and nonprogressive responses and between visible and less visible
aspects of housing conicts, changing over time as actors interact among
themselves and with power structures at dierent levels.
In addition to showing how housing movements after the 2008 crisis
develop in a dense sociopolitical context and how they rely on long-term
dynamics of housing politics, the comparison between the two cases
makes additional contributions to the conceptualization of movements
related to crises. On the one hand, the broader structural factors condi-
tioning housing movements in Romania and Hungary are very similar,
including privatization processes after 1990, very high levels of home-
ownership, large proportions of a precarious population, housing depri-
vation levels among the highest of all EU countries, and a strong impact
of post-2008 austerity measures (after previous waves of austerity starting
in the early 1980s). On the other hand, the local sociopolitical
I. Florea et al.

11
constellations wherein these broader structural conditions exist and are
governed dier signicantly between the two cases. For instance, while in
Romania the most visible post-2008 demonstrations (against corruption)
allied with the liberal-technocratic elites who were gaining dominance, in
Hungary the post-2008 period was marked by the rise of a conservative
regime that became known as a prime example of postcrisis illiberalism.
ese dierences remind us not to jump to direct theoretical conclusions
from each case but instead develop conceptual tools to show how similar
structural processes are manifested and addressed by local social actors,
how dierences in the political eld are related to other layers of socio-
economic struggles, and how both are integrated into the same broader
crisis process.
When comparing our two cases of housing mobilizations, we highlight
how similar positions and structural backgrounds of integration into
global processes are manifested locally in dierent institutional and polit-
ical environments. Specically, we trace how the mobilization of dierent
groups is embedded inlocal structural contexts of housing development
and policy, how movement groups’ politics relate to dierent modes of
national-level politicization of the crisis, and how dierent class bases and
movement strategies in the two cases interact within those constellations.
e point of the comparison is not to produce a general theory of an
Eastern European type of housing nancialization and related mobiliza-
tion but to demonstrate why a structural eld of contention approach is
needed to understand how the global process of nancialization becomes
manifest and contested in specic local contexts.
Concerning the analytical approach, we aim to contribute to more
general debates with a renewed focus on the relevance of in-depth con-
textual analysis. In addition to individual case studies or comparative
studies based on specic datasets (such as numbers of demonstrations),
we maintain that a contextual understanding of the long-term embedded
dynamics of local politics is also necessary to understand mobilization in
times of crisis. e politics of the crisis does not start from the moment
of crisis but it is built on preexisting institutional, political, and structural
trends. e dynamics of dierent mobilizations do not stand on their
own but depend on the interrelations through which these preexisting
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

12
conditions change in response to a crisis. is is what we refer to as the
“eld dynamics” of the structural eld of contention.
In relation to ongoing debates, the book brings an additional distinct
contribution to several streams of literature. Owing to the housing crisis
and resulting contention waves since 2008, we have seen a global boom
of literature on housing contention (e.g., Watt & Minton, 2016; Fields,
2017; Martinez, 2019; Dhananka, 2020; Stavrides, 2020; Dolenec etal.,
2021, to mention but a few studies). e book speaks to this interest,
expanding the horizons of existing approaches theoretically as well as
empirically.
e theoretical contribution of the book relates to a major question of
social movement studies after 2008. e post-2008 movement boom
shifted the focus of social movement studies; how movements’ own
frames and politics relate to structural factors became a recurring key
question (e.g., Künkel & Mayer, 2012; Hetland & Goodwin, 2013;
Della Porta, 2015; Mayer etal., 2016; Lancione, 2017; Stoiciu, 2017).
Ours is a grounded, complex argument over how this connection can be
pursued empirically in relation to housing movements, with conclusions
that concern the theoretical conceptualization of contention, even beyond
the issue of housing.
Moreover, our case studies illustrate the need to unpack the abstract
concepts of gentrication and nancialization as well as the relationships
between these processes and the social movements that react to them,
which we see as less unilinear than the present literature suggests.
Another new focal issue to which our book responds is that of nonpro-
gressive countermovements to neoliberal crisis management. In light of
the new wave of right-wing mobilizations, social movement studies and
general political thought strive to understand nonprogressive responses
to crisis eects. Our book provides an empirically based theoretical con-
tribution to this question, with case studies from the Eastern European
region that recently attracted attention as an international example of a
right-wing backlash (e.g., Rupnik, 2007; Buzogány & Varga, 2018; Ban
etal., 2021).
Moreover, the book also responds to a longer tradition of critical dis-
cussion of the development of civil society in Eastern Europe. e debate
on postsocialist civil society in the region has recently turned in a
I. Florea et al.

13
nonnormative empirical direction to which we have contributed previous
research (Jacobsson, 2016a; Jacobsson & Korolczuk, 2017). Additionally,
the book responds to calls for approaches to studies of civil society and
social mobilization in Central and Eastern Europe that are more sensitive
to the region’s global integration (Gagyi, 2015; Císař & Navrátil, 2017)
as well as a general turn toward taking non-Western movements’ thought
and contexts seriously in theorizing about social movements (Jacobsson,
2016b, 2016c; Cox etal., 2017; Baća, 2021).
Moreover, the book makes a distinct contribution to what has been
called a comparative “(re)turn” in urban studies (Ward, 2008; see also
Kantor & Savitch, 2005; Kloosterman & Lambregts, 2007; cf. Pickvance,
1986, 1995). Kantor and Savitch (2005) identied the lack of compara-
tive urban frameworks as an obstacle to systematic comparative research,
arguing that most middle-range urban politics theories are not easily
transferred across national cultures and that the challenge is to nd con-
ceptual tools that can accurately address the same problem in dierent
contexts. Our approach is intended to oer such conceptual tools and
illustrate the benets of this integrated analytical approach. In this way,
the book is a novel contribution to comparative urban analysis, including
what has been discussed as “comparative urbanism” (e.g., Dear, 2005;
Nijman, 2007; McFarlane & Robinson, 2012; Tuvikene, 2016). e lit-
erature on comparative urbanism calls for the systematic study of dier-
ences and similarities between cities or urban processes (Nijman, 2007),
imagining new “ways of working across diverse urban experiences”
(McFarlane & Robinson, 2012, p.765). While scholars in comparative
urbanism have criticized the tendency to study “most similar” cities and
called for comparison across radically diverse contexts (McFarlane &
Robinson, 2012, cf. Kantor & Savitch, 2005), we have chosen to study
two capital cities that in many ways appear to be “most similar” (e.g., in
terms of shared characteristics of postsocialist development and EU
accession). However, we show how dierences in urban development
combine with dierent local constellations of sociopolitical regimes,
leading to very dierent patterns of housing mobilization in Budapest
and Bucharest. ese dierences are of particular importance, as they
allow us to illustrate how a structural eld of contention approach can
shed light on relations between structural processes and mobilizations.
1 Introduction: Embedding the Analysis of Housing…

14
Finally, it has been critically noted that some parts of the world are
sources of theory while others remain on the periphery of thinking (e.g.,
Roy, 2009; Hamel, 2014). Indeed, a number of authors have argued for
letting the experiences of postsocialist cities serve as a basis for global
urban theorizing (e.g., Grubbauer & Kusiak, 2012; Jacobsson, 2016c;
Tuvikene, 2016; Müller & Trubina, 2020; Baća, 2021; Jehlička &
Jacobsson, 2021). e ambition of this book is to provide a conceptual
framework and analytical approach that could be applied to other con-
texts and social struggles, based on an analysis of urban struggles in the
light of local histories.
In conclusion, the book is situated at the intersection of several areas
that have experienced a recent surge of interest in housing, social move-
ments, comparative urban studies, uneven development on EU peripher-
ies, and studies of postsocialism. In the following chapters, we outline
and illustrate the workings of the analytical framework that we suggest
can apply across these streams of literature.
Chapter Outline
e remainder of this book is structured as follows. Chapter 2 outlines
the structural eld of the contention approach and positions it in relation
to existing eld approaches to the study of social movements. Chapter 3
provides the structural and political context of the development of the
empirical analyses of housing contention in Budapest (Chap. 4) and
Bucharest (Chap. 5). Chapter 6 then compares the eld dynamics,
including eld transformations over the period covered, of the respective
structural eld of contention, demonstrating the use and relevance of this
analytical approach. Finally, Chap. 7 draws some implications of the
analysis presented in the book, identies some general lessons, and sug-
gests some openings for future research.
I. Florea et al.

15
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© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_2
2
The Structural Field ofContention
Approach
is chapter describes the analytical approach developed and applied
empirically in this book, which we conceptualize as the “structural eld
of contention approach.” It focuses on collective actors (rather than indi-
viduals), such as social activist groups. Our concept of eld should be
understood as an analytical notion and heuristic device developed for the
analysis of a social space constituted by actors representing dierent
structural positions, such as social classes, in relation to each other.
Relationships may take the form of alliances and solidarities, as well as
conicts and antagonisms, and actors can also work independently from
each other.
Two main distinctions of our eld concept from those of other eld
approaches is that we do not limit actors’ relationships to intentional
ones, and we include their structural background as part of the eld of
relationships. is means that even where actors work in parallel, we can
identify connections between their actions (e.g., through structural con-
nections between the issues they address or through unintended conse-
quences for each other’s working conditions). Our perspective calls for a
historically informed analysis that takes both structural and contingent
factors into account in shaping the eld, as both types of factors

22
aect—by enabling, constraining, and everything in between—the col-
lective agency of actors. Importantly, in contrast to most eld approaches
to social mobilization, it also incorporates and seeks to explain silences
and inaction, that is, a lack of mobilization and politicization on behalf
of social groups whose structural positions constrain their collective
agency or incline them to silence rather than protest. In this book, the
analytical approach is used to capture contention around housing.
In the following section, we rst discuss the benets of employing
relational and especially eld approaches in the study of social mobiliza-
tion, as well as their limitations. ereafter, we draw on Crossley’s notion
of social movements as “elds of contention,” pointing to the numerous
groups that interact within the internal space of a “movement” and to the
relationships, alliances, and conicts between those various groups as
they unfold over time, while embedding social movement struggles
within multiple dierentiated contexts of struggle (Crossley, 2006a,
p.552). Deriving inspiration from Crossley’s notion, we then elaborate
our own analytical approach, which, more than Crossley’s, stresses the
structural factors that constitute the conditions of group formation and
struggle. Structural factors are conceived as elements of the eld of con-
tention that produce the tensions giving rise to contention. ese ten-
sions inuence the conditions of contention, including relationship
formation among actors, and are at times addressed and acted upon by
movements.
Dynamics ofContention
at social mobilization is a complex matter, involving a large number of
factors, is well known to researchers of social movements and contentious
politics. Dierent theoretical traditions in social movement studies place
dierent emphases on these factors. ey are environmental/contextual
factors (such as political opportunity structures and resource availability),
cognitive factors (such as framing or collective identity), relational factors
(such as network cultivation or brokerage), or emotional factors (such as
collective anger or resentment). Whereas theoretical traditions were for
some time rather polarized, recently there have been various attempts to
I. Florea et al.

23
integrate or synthesize perspectives (Campbell, 2005). One such attempt
was the “dynamics of contention” approach to studying social contention
and mobilization (McAdam etal., 2001). At a general level, we have
derived inspiration from the “dynamics of contention” approach in devel-
oping our own structural eld of contention approach.
One of the benets of the dynamics of contention approach was this
ambition to identify a variety of mechanisms to investigate the complex-
ity of mobilization for contentious actions/politics. e authors set out to
explore “several combinations of mechanisms and processes with the aim
of discovering recurring causal sequences of contentious politics”
(McAdam etal., 2001, p.4). For the purpose of our research, we share
their ambition to let the patterns of mobilization, actors, and trajectories
of contention guide the analysis. As these authors put it:
• “With respect to mobilization we must explain how people who at a
given point in time are not making contentious claims start doing
so—and, for that matter, how people who are making claims stop
doing so.”
• “With regard to actors we need to explain what sort of actors engage in
contention, what identities they assume, and what forms of interac-
tion they produce.”
• “When it comes to trajectories, we face the problem of explaining the
course and transformation of contention, including its impact on life
outside the immediate interactions of contentious politics” (McAdam
etal., 2001, p.34).
Even if we do not follow the dynamics of contention approach strictly,
capturing the mobilization of actors, or the lack thereof, and their rela-
tional dynamics as well as transformations in the eld of contention (for
instance, in terms of shifting alliances) is an important part of our
approach that we develop further in the following chapters.
Perhaps one of the more lasting contributions of the dynamics of con-
tention approach was the stress on the relational mechanisms involved in
the mobilization of collective action, such as network cultivation, strate-
gic leadership, or brokerage (e.g., McAdam etal., 2001; Tarrow, 2011;
Tilly & Tarrow, 2007). In the past few decades, there has been a rise in
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

24
relational approaches to social movements, which focus on interactions
among divergent actors, their transactions, networks, and social ties (e.g.,
Diani etal., 2010; Diani & McAdam, 2003; Diani etal., 2018). Relational
approaches consequently emphasize interactions between dierent kinds
of collective actors (informal groups or formal organizations) and their
relationship building, seeking to discern patterns of conict and avoid-
ance as well as cooperation (e.g., Johansson & Kalm, 2015). Relational
perspectives on civil society and social movements include network (e.g.,
Diani & McAdam, 2003; Diani etal., 2010), coalition (e.g., Staggenborg,
1986; Van Dyke & McCammon, 2010; McCammon & Moon, 2015),
and eld models (e.g., Crossley, 2002a, 2003, 2006a, 2006b; Fligstein &
McAdam, 2011, 2012a, 2012b; cf. Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). Our
approach to contention draws on some insights from the coalition and
eld traditions but also diers from theirs in some important respects, as
discussed below.1
Coalition Models
One important aspect of the trajectories of contention, apart from show-
ing growth or decline, is the patterns or lack of collaboration among col-
lective actors engaged in a particular issue. Given dierences in actors’
structural positions, a key issue is the extent to which they can collaborate
across social divides. For instance, following Castells’s seminal work, it
has been argued that urban problems such as environmental or transpor-
tation problems are particularly conducive to cross-class alliances, as they
typically aect all classes, albeit to various degrees (Castells, 1983; Mayer,
1 Network analysis usefully illustrates ties between actors. However, it tends to provide a synchronic,
“frozen” picture of established linkages at a given moment, whereas in this study we are interested
in dynamics of relationships over a period of time, as well as their structural context, which shapes
the form of such relationships. Crossley and Diani, two prominent network analysts, seem to share
this view. Discussing the temporal dimension of social movement activity, they write, “e lack of
proper, easily accessible data has resulted in most network studies oering snapshots of networks at
a single point in time” (2019, p.159). Regarding the existing qualitative case studies, they con-
tinue: “those studies have not really managed to capture the complexity of the relational patterns
that may characterize dierent phases of social movement activity over time” (ibid.). e analytical
approach suggested in this book is intended to rectify this, at least in part.
I. Florea et al.

25
2013). However, previous research has also highlighted diculties in
mobilizing and forming coalitions across class divides or among groups
with dierent social backgrounds or interests (e.g., Lichterman, 1995;
Rose, 1999; Florea, 2016). Dierences in social positions of activists,
ideological dierences, and movement cultures as well as competition for
resources have been identied as factors impeding coalition formation
(Staggenborg, 1986; Lichterman, 1995; Beamish & Luebbers, 2009;
Kanellopoulos et al., 2017). Even so, eorts toward “coalition work”
(Staggenborg, 1986) or “bridgework” (Saunders et al., 2015), such as
frame bridging, have been shown to enable cross-movement alliances
despite constraints (Briata et al., 2020). Moreover, previous ndings
highlight that exceptional environmental/contextual conditions, such as
economic crises, may cause organizations and groups to set aside ideo-
logical dierences (e.g., Staggenborg, 1986; Borland, 2010; Goldstone,
2011; Lobera, 2019).
As mentioned above, Marcuse (2012) saw the nancial crisis of 2008
as conducive to the creation of alliances between “the deprived” (such as
those who are exploited, unemployed, impoverished, discriminated
against in employment or education, or in poor health) and “the discon-
tented” (those who are disrespected or treated unequally because of sex-
ual, political, or religious orientation, or otherwise constrained in their
capacity to explore the possibilities of life). However, as Mayer remarked,
it should be noted, “though all of them are aected by contemporary
forms of dispossession and alienation, they occupy very dierent strategic
positions within the post-industrial neoliberal city” (Mayer, 2013, p.11).
For instance, in a study of Argentinian movements, Daniel Ozarow
(2019) showed that the relationship between movements by the middle
class and the poor has passed through various phases since the early
2000s. From a close coalition supporting a leftist political turn at the
beginning of the decade, by 2015 the relationship was characterized by
parallel and sometimes inimical relations, and support for the conserva-
tive Macri government by middle-class activists. However, as the middle
classes did not benet from Macri’s policies, Ozarow documents that by
the end of the 2010s, they were again more open to alliances with
the poor.
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

26
Alliances across heterogeneous groups, such lower middle-class right-
wing groups, new leftist activists, the homeless, artists, or academics, fea-
ture in our case studies of housing activism in Budapest and Bucharest, as
detailed in later chapters. However, as we will see, these case studies also
reveal the challenges of forming multiclass alliances of housing activists
ranging from middle-class radicals and artists to socially marginalized
groups, justifying our emphasis on viewing actors’ relationships in the
context of long-term structural processes, alongside more contingent
factors.
While drawing on the valuable insights of studies of social movement
coalitions, one concern we have with this literature is that many of these
studies tend to be overly focused on intentional actions in researching
relations between actors in movements—as aptly illustrated in the title of
a book edited by Van Dyke and McCammon (2010), Strategic Alliances.
Among the housing activist groups described later on, the relations
between actors go beyond intentional alliances or conicts. In addition to
examples of parallel activism in the same structural conict, we see actors
with opposing political agendas supporting similar issues, conicts aris-
ing from unintended consequences, relations between movement groups
being governed by the gestures of high-level politics, as well as phases of
politically silent structural processes that can burst into the political
sphere at a later stage. We argue that there is a need for an analytical
approach to conceptualize the variety of these relationships—allowing us
to capture a wider spectrum of scenarios, such as the formation of cross-
group solidarity, the failure of such attempts, or the parallel mobilization
of radically dierent groups in the same social-structural context—as well
as the broader impacts of economic or political processes on actors’ rela-
tionships. For this reason, we nd eld models useful, as they enable an
integrated analysis of a varied social topology and patterns of alliance,
conicts as well as independence (cf. Martin, 2003), as they unfold over
time. Research from a long-term perspective suggests that cross-class alli-
ances can maintain divisions and fall apart over time (Ehrenreich &
Ehrenreich, 2013; Ozarow, 2019), which is one reason why we propose a
eld approach wherein the eld is more like “structure in process” (cf.
Crossley, 2006a, p.19) and is attentive to eld transformations over time.
I. Florea et al.

27
Field models have a long tradition in the social sciences (Martin, 2003)
and they are represented in diverse theoretical traditions2 even if Bourdieu
is the major source of inspiration for most contemporary theories. We
position our approach in relation to two of the most sophisticated
attempts to integrate social movement analysis with eld theory: Fligstein
and McAdam’s “strategic action eld” and Crossley’s “eld of
contention.”
Fligstein andMcAdam’s Strategic Action Field
In recent years, Fligstein and McAdam’s (2011, 2012a, 2012b) notion of
a “strategic action eld” (SAF) has been an inuential attempt to com-
bine social movement and eld theories, deriving inspiration from both
Bourdieu and neo-institutional theory. ese authors dene an SAF as a
meso-level social order wherein actors are attuned to and interact with
one another on the basis of shared, but not necessarily consensual, under-
standings about the eld’s purposes, its relationships to others, and the
rules governing legitimate action (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012a, p. 9).
ey view SAFs as “socially constructed arenas within which actors with
varying resource endowments vie for advantage” (2012b, p.3). In fact,
they conceive of society as “a myriad of strategic action elds” (2012b,
p.297), and claim that their theory is applicable to all strategic collective
action, whether in the uid form of social movements or in more orga-
nized forms, such as enterprises or universities.
In the competition for strategic advantage in the eld, “incumbents”
must compete with “challengers” who are “jockeying for position” (2011,
p.5). In addition, the authors claim that many SAFs have formalized
“governance units” that are “charged with overseeing compliance with
eld rules and, in general, facilitating the overall smooth functioning of
the system” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2011, p.6). Moreover, the authors
introduce the notion of “social skills,” referring to “a given actor’s capacity
2 Barman (2016) identies three major eld approaches: Bourdieu’s theory, the neo-institutional
organizational eld approach (DiMaggio & Powell, 1991), and the Strategic Action Field approach
(Fligstein & McAdam, 2011, 2012a, 2012b).
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

28
to motivate cooperation in other actors by providing those actors with
common meanings and identities” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012b, p.290;
also Fligstein, 2001).
We share with the SAF approach an interest in collective action and
collective actors (rather than individuals, as with Bourdieu), as well as the
view that the goal of actors is recognition of their grievances (2012b,
p.297). We also share an interest in the role of the “broader eld environ-
ment” or “context,” as well as the role of “exogeneous shocks” (2011,
p.2), as the authors frame it—for instance large-scale crises (for which
they give the mortgage crisis as an example)—in shaping the eld, as we
frame it. However, we do not share the emphasis on strategic action on
which this approach is premised. Fligstein and McAdam criticize rational
action theories for the notion that actors pursue xed interests, stressing
instead that skilled actors require the capacity to identify with others and
thus redene their interests in the course of action, for instance to build
coalitions with others (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012b, p.292). Even so,
their conceptual vocabulary is permeated by the idea of strategic action,
by which collective actors constantly seek “control” (e.g., 2012b,
pp.291, 306).
Moreover, this analysis of strategic action seems to imply a high degree
of reexivity of actors. We learn that actors seek “fashioning a shared
template” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012b, p.294) or even “fashion agree-
ment” (or “a stable consensus”), primarily with regard to membership
issues, the dening goal of the eld, and the rules of the eld (2012b,
pp.295, 300). While this may apply to formal organizations such as uni-
versities or business associations, it is more dicult to conceive of such
processes in a social movement context (which the authors could perhaps
explain by stating that social movements represent challengers in “either
unorganized or unstable elds”) (2012b, p.307).
Moreover, in SAF theory, the social skills of actors explain their suc-
cess. Structural factors are largely absent, even though the authors note in
passing that “the dierences in [actors’] behavior owe primarily to the
very dierent structural positions in which these actors nd themselves”
(2012b, p. 306). By contrast, structural factors are key to our eld
approach to contention.
I. Florea et al.

29
Another aspect that SAF has in common with other Bourdieu-inspired
eld approaches to collective action is the notion of shared rules of the
game, which is problematic from our point of view. Most eld theorists
share the idea of the autonomy of elds in relation to other elds (see,
e.g., Krause, 2018), seeing elds as “bounded arenas” (Berman, 2016).
Such eld autonomy is achieved by distinct eld logics based on doxa as
in Bourdieu’s theory, a shared sense of what is at stake, or simply by the
shared rules of the game, as with the SAF approach. In an almost system-
theoretical formulation, the authors speak of “the socially constructed,
internally self-referential, negotiated arenas within which strategic action
takes place” (Fligstein & McAdam, 2012b, p.292). Moreover, the notion
of shared rules leads the authors to a preoccupation with stability, argu-
ing, “e goal of action in strategic action elds is to create and maintain
the stability of the eld while simultaneously achieving the group’s goals”
(2012b, p.293). Challengers will attempt to create new rules and thereby
a new order (2011, p.18). By contrast, we share Martin’s view that eld
autonomy is an empirical question (2003, p.23) and that “eld theory is
an analytic approach, not a static formal system” (Martin, 2003, p.24).
Otherwise, there is a clear risk of reifying the eld.
Even so, the SAF approach has been found useful in the study of urban
mobilization (e.g., Domaradzka, 2018, 2019; Domaradzka & Wijkström,
2016, 2019; Lang & Mullins, 2020). Both Domaradzka and Wijkström
(2016) and Lang and Mullins (2020) were able to identify governance
units in their case analyses. Even so, in a social movement context, the
existence of a governance unit (able to dene the rules of the game) seems
to us to be somewhat rare. is is not to deny that some collective actors
occupy a more central position in networks than others, nor the role
played by individual or collective brokers in networks of collective actors.
However, the vocabulary of governance units seems to us again to presup-
pose too much intentionality, reexivity, and strategic coordination
capacity to be useful for studying the multiplicity of eld relations in the
dynamics of housing contention, as in our cases.
In this book, we suggest that it is useful to approach housing mobiliza-
tions in terms of a eld understood to be a social space of collective actors
(or one of “self-organized contestation,” in Martin’s vocabulary, 2003,
p. 30) who share a stake in matters of housing, while acting from
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

30
dierent structural positions yet related to each other. We call this a eld
because actors’ frameworks and capacity to act are dened by relationships
with each other and with the broader political and structural processes in
which they act. However, our approach deliberately avoids strong assump-
tions about actors being united by common collective identities (as social
movement network models tend to assume), interest-based strategic
action (as in coalition or alliance models), or elds as structured spaces of
positions, characterized by a distinct eld logic and shared views of issues
at stake (as in the eld models). To develop such an approach, we nd
Crossley’s “eld of contention” to be a good starting point.
Field Relations Beyond Strategic Action:
Crossley’s Field ofContention
Before Fligstein and McAdam, Nick Crossley (2002a, 2002b, 2003,
2006a) developed a theoretical framework combining Bourdieu’s theory
with social movement theory—not cited by Fligstein and McAdam, one
may note. Crossley’s project stemmed from dissatisfaction with the ratio-
nal actor theory that became dominant, especially in social movement
scholarship in the US from the 1970s onward, a critical view that we
share (as discussed above). He saw the need for an approach that main-
tained focus on strategic action but in a way that was more sensitive to
the structure–agency problem (2002a, 2002b, p.669). In his early for-
mulation, Crossley argued that Bourdieu’s practice theory could be
brought into productive dialogue with social movement studies (e.g.,
Crossley, 2003). He started by understanding eld in the sense developed
by Bourdieu: as sui generis social spaces, constituted by the objective rela-
tions between specic agents, organizations, and institutions, which are
organized around the common participation of these “players” in a his-
torically and culturally specic social “game” (Crossley, 2002b, p.674;
drawing on Bourdieu, 1993; Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992). According
to Crossley, the actors may hold very dierent subjective denitions of
this game, and—crucial from our perspective—“the overall structure and
dynamics of the eld are unintended and perhaps even invisible to its
I. Florea et al.

31
participants” (2002b, p.674). us, the actors involved “may disagree
radically at the level of subjective opinion, agreeing only to the fact that
they are in disagreement and that there is something meaningful and
worthy of disagreeing about” (ibid.).
Crossley considered it important in the analysis of elds not only to
consider highly visible protest events but also the less visible activities and
relationships in everyday life—along the lines of Melucci’s (1989) “sub-
merged networks” and Taylor’s (1989) “abeyance structures,” we may
add—thus stressing the continuity between temporally distant protest
events. For instance, Crossley (2002b, p. 672) argued that looking
beneath the visible “tip of the iceberg” of a high-prole anti-corporate
protest in Seattle revealed “a wide variety of forms of socio-political prac-
tices and relationships and an emergent social structure.” He conceptual-
ized this as a “protest eld.” In his later publications, Crossley framed it
as a eld of contention, in line with the dynamics of contention approach.
In his early formulation, Crossley consequently seemed to follow
Bourdieu’s vocabulary closely, with elds as sites of struggle structured by
an unequal distribution of the forms of capital and shaped by the habitus
of the agents, as well as the context and dynamism constituted by their
shared participation in a common “game” or “market” (eld) (2003,
p.44).3 In his later publications, Crossley seems to have downplayed this
inuence by citing ideas such as Zald and McCarthy’s eld concept as
inspirations (Crossley, 2006b; cf. Zald & McCarthy, 1994).4 In his study
of the eld of contention around psychiatry, Crossley dened it as “the
dynamic, always-in-process social and cultural structure generated by
way of the interactions and relationships both between SMOs and
3 More recently, Ibrahim (2013) followed Crossley’s formulation closely in his analysis of the con-
icts within the British anticapitalist movement, while Ancelovici (2021) developed an analytical
approach combining Bourdieu’s notions with political process theory, suggesting the notion of
“eld opportunity structures.” While we share with these authors the ambition to explain the
dynamics of movement struggle, both authors follow Bourdieu more closely in their understanding
of a eld than we do in our view of structural elds of contention developed in this chapter.
4 Zald and McCarthy argued that any social movement would tend to generate more than one
social movement organization, which then becomes part of an interacting eld. ey proposed that
this eld should form a central focus of analysis (1994, p.120; Crossley, 2006a, p.14). Crossley
and Diani use the notion of a collective action eld for the larger organizational settings in which
social movements are embedded (2019, p.151) but without developing their eld concept any
further.
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

32
between SMOs and a range of further relevant players who are implicated
in the problems or issues identied in social movement discourses”
(2006b, p.4). e eld, he stressed, is itself a constantly changing process
and the congurations within it could be understood as “structures in
process” (2006b, p.19). Crossley remarked that relationships in the eld
have to be “made” and can be “unmade” (ibid.), a view that is relevant for
our later analysis of the making and unmaking of solidarity in the eld of
housing contention in the empirical chapters.
Adding Context totheField: TheStructural
Field ofContention Approach
Similar to Crossley’s, the approach we propose in this book recognizes a
need for a multidimensional model of mobilization that can encompass
complexity and diversity in terms of structural positions, ideologies, and
tactics in a multilayered eld of contention that may be useful for empiri-
cal analyses.
Crossley proposed an understanding of social movements in terms of
elds of contention, emphasizing two key aspects:
Firstly, departing from traditional models of movements, which tend to
view them as unied ‘things,’ it draws our attention to the numerous
groups and agents who interact within the internal space of a ‘movement’
and to the relations, alliances and conicts between those various groups/
agents as they unfold through time. Secondly, it draws our attention to the
embedding of social movement struggles within multiple dierentiated
contexts of struggle, each of which aords dierent opportunities for strug-
gle but each of which makes dierent demands upon activists if struggle is
to prove eective. (Crossley, 2006a, p.552)
More than one movement may be represented in any eld of contention,
Crossley stressed (2006b, p.5). Crossley saw actors in a eld of conten-
tion as forming relatively autonomous congurations. ese are some-
times produced in the exchange of resources and sometimes in
competition; sometimes they cooperate and sometimes they conict.
I. Florea et al.

33
Crossley argued that the positions that groups take in relation to one
another are “just one amongst a number of emergent products produced
within the eld,” as sustained interaction could eventually generate
“norms, semiotic codes, language games, identity narratives and tradi-
tions” (2006a, p.553).
We suggest that this approach has several advantages (compared with
other eld approaches, such as those discussed above). First, it recognizes
emergent properties and eld dynamics without making strong assump-
tions about common understandings of the rules of the game (or accep-
tance of a doxa) as the more closely Bourdieu-inspired approaches tend
to do. Moreover, it is as much interested in the unintended and/or unre-
ected consequences of eld dynamics as in the conscious actor strate-
gies. However, to a greater extent than Crossley but largely consistent
with his approach, we stress the structural factors that constitute the con-
ditions of group formation and struggle, thus returning to the under-
standing of social movements as part of long-term structural processes.
We dier from Crossley by conceiving of structural factors as part of the
eld of contention that produces both the conicts around which con-
tention arises and inuences relationship formation among actors.
Importantly, we move away from a conception of the eld as an auton-
omous structure with an inherent, coherent logic, instead conceiving it as
a heuristic tool for revealing the complex relations between actors and
their broader context in the politicization of structural tensions around a
certain issue—in this case, housing. Our approach resembles what Chris
Pickvance (2001) proposed when he described responses to dissatisfac-
tion with housing through inaction, individual action, and collective action
as a linked set of objects of analysis. Pickvance emphasized that social
movement research that focuses only on the latter of these three, collec-
tive action, limits itself to seeing only the tip of the iceberg in terms of the
full scope of social conicts over housing. He considered the social and
institutional context, including structural inequality, to be a necessary
part of studying social responses to housing dissatisfaction. While
Pickvance did not use the notion of a eld, his main points correspond to
those we emphasize in terms of contention elds, which indeed is one of
the benets we see in our approach. Our comparative approach is
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

34
helpful, as it gives hints about where to look for silences and instances of
inaction, as some groups mobilize in one context and are silent in others.
In terms of social structure, our approach departs from social move-
ment studies’ traditional focus on movements’ own dynamics and their
immediate contextual factors. is focus was based on a founding insight
in social movement studies, namely that structural pressure in itself does
not result in movement politics; the latter needs to be formed through
movement actors’ work with the symbolic, political, and material
resources available in their context. How movements as collective agents
constitute their politics came to be the primary question in social move-
ment research, pushing the question of movements’ relationships with
broader structural processes into the background for a period. However,
faced with a global eruption of movements after 2008, social movement
research has returned to the question of structural background. ere has
been revived interest in how movements relate to structural conditions,
reected in a wave of calls to “bring back” the issue of capitalism to social
movement studies (e.g., Hetland & Goodwin, 2013; Della Porta, 2015).
Faced with simultaneous movements that articulated tensions of a global
crisis in various locally embedded ways while sharing repertoires and
mutual references, researchers needed to ask how broader structural pro-
cesses, local constellations, and movements’ crisis politics across dierent
global locations were related. As Flesher Fominaya argued, “although the
economic crisis and attendant increases in social-economic inequalities
and hardship provide a crucial motivating factor for protests against aus-
terity, they are insucient to explain mobilization” (2017, p.2), pointing
to the highly dierent collective responses to austerity in Ireland
and Spain.
While social movement scholars recently returned to a structural focus,
for urban and housing movement scholars the role of structural transfor-
mation and conicts has remained a key focus (the legacy from Castells,
1978, 1983), prolically combined with an interest in new crisis-based
transformations and social movements (Fields, 2017; Martinez, 2019;
Soederberg, 2020). We oer a novel analytical approach by which to
grasp multiple modes of politicizing housing and their interactions in a
complex eld of contention, as well as to place their dynamics closely
within the broader context of structural and political trends. First, tracing
I. Florea et al.

35
connections between various forms of contention and the respective
aspects of structural transformations that they address or to which they
are structurally linked allows for a ne-grained qualitative understanding
of relevant connections between movement actors and broader structural
shifts. Here we note how broader dynamics of global economic transfor-
mations aect local conditions of movements (as, e.g., Silver & Karatasli,
2015 suggest) and the way local social hierarchies, institutions, and poli-
tics condition actors’ relations and forms of contention. Second, our trac-
ing of the politicization of housing after 2008 in two cities includes
moments of mobilization as well as low-visibility organization and politi-
cal silences. Our framework can address the interdependencies of hous-
ing movement activity without losing sight of the embedding of housing
contention in broader socio-historical relations or the politically silent
tensions resulting from the same structural process.
Our approach does not claim that structural processes translate directly
to values or ideological positions. It recognizes both structure and collec-
tive agency, complex historical constellations as well as the role of contin-
gent factors and events in shaping actors’ problem thematization and
alliances. It requires attention to both structural and contingent factors in
shaping the eld.
In considering how structural processes translate into social mobiliza-
tion and movement formation as well as the relations of solidarity or
antagonism within the movement eld, we wish to preserve the heuristic
value of social movement research tools for examining the constitutive
process of a movement, including its frames and identities, while paying
attention to actors’ positions within the structural process. We conceive
the constitutive process to occur not only within a movement or its stra-
tegic/intentional interactions but also through the structural conditions
of the eld. How do actors’ social positions in long-term processes con-
verge at a certain moment of mobilization? How do long-term political
divisions, national policies, or economic crises inuence movement
groups’ opportunity structures for alliance formation? How do actors’
positions manifest in their coalition formation, and in the embedding of
housing contention in broader political struggles? Asking such questions,
we embed the analysis of the constitution of movement politics and alli-
ance structures in a eld of contention conceived as a historical social
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

36
process. It follows that analyzing the structural and historical context
closely is required in our structural eld of contention approach. is
kind of ne-grained analysis of structural transformations is an essential
part of our eld concept.
us, in our application of the notion of the eld, we shift attention
from inherent dynamics to contextual embeddedness similar to social
movement studies’ recent turn from the dynamics of movement to their
structural conditions. While we support Crossley’s claim that “interac-
tions and relationships both between SMOs and between SMOs and a
range of further relevant players who are implicated in the problems or
issues identied in social movement discourses” (2006b, p.4) should be
reected in understandings of the process of contention, we do not con-
sider that these interactions and relationships would form a “social and
cultural structure” on their own, even if it is dened as dynamic and
“always in process” (ibid.). Just as social movement studies now renounce
the claim of an autonomous sphere of movement dynamics (which was
also an argument for distinguishing social movement research as an
autonomous discipline from other branches of social research) and turn
to investigating relations between movement formation and structural
shifts, we also apply the notion of eld, not in the sense of an autono-
mous objective structure but as a heuristic tool that helps to make visible
those factors of contention that are beyond individual movement actors’
explicit aims and intentional actions, and we understand the latter in the
context of the former. While from a structuralist standpoint this interpre-
tation may seem to negate the value of the eld concept, we believe it is
worthwhile to retain as a heuristic tool for empirical research on social
mobilizations. Applied in the latter sense, the notion of a eld can assist
researchers to grasp actual connections between movement actors and
their contexts, without the need to harmonize empirical ndings with a
projected inner logic of the eld or limit their scope to intra-eld “rules
of the game.” We believe that this approach is particularly suited to trac-
ing how structural tensions generated by broader crisis processes become
politicized in a given context. Our comparison between Budapest and
Bucharest makes it possible to draw out specic features of this approach
that can be applied as tools in other contexts and cases.
I. Florea et al.

37
Besides the abovementioned aspects, we nd that analyzing eld trans-
formations over time is essential to see how the eld of contention as a
structure in process unfolds. In this study, we focus on the eld transfor-
mations in the period after the nancial crisis of 2008. is aspect of our
analysis shows how transformations of relations between movement
actors, external players, and their broader contextual conditions aect
actors’ opportunities and frames, even if their internal organization or
intentionality does not change.
Finally, following various levels of processes that simultaneously shape
housing conicts, our analytical use of the eld concept emphasizes the
multiple scales of interaction implicit in a eld of contention. Global
ows of nancial capital, dynamics of national or local politics, and activ-
ist groups’ alliances and conicts within these processes are simultane-
ously active in “local” housing conicts in the two capital cities that we
take as case studies. A multi-scalar approach to the eld of contention,
employing a range of lenses from the local to the global, is thus useful in
tracing how the “localization” of broader political and social conicts
occurs throughout interconnected scales of social action.
Conclusion: TheStructural Field
ofContention Approach
To conclude, the structural eld of contention approach proposed in this
book extends previous insights in social movement research and applies
them to understanding the development of contention, addressing spe-
cic eects of the current crisis in local contexts. First, agreeing with
previous literature on elds of contention, we emphasize that instead of
homogenous actors, movements need to be seen as made up of a multi-
plicity of actors whose mutual relations and structural embeddedness are
among the factors that shape movement dynamics. Second, consistent
with Crossley, our approach goes beyond intentional action and con-
scious movement frameworks to include unintended eects and unrecog-
nized interdependencies in the eld. ird, beyond highly visible
moments of mobilization, low-visibility phases of organization and
2 The Structural Field of Contention Approach

38
political silence over issues otherwise expressed by movement actors are
also considered. Fourth, like Crossley, we think of the eld of contention
as being in constant change, with relations between actors being made
and remade across time.
Importantly then, in several respects we go beyond previous applica-
tions of the eld concept to propose a “structural eld of contention”
approach. First, we conceive of structural processes to be part of eld
relations, in line with a recent turn from movement dynamics to move-
ment–context relations in social movement studies. Second, this implies
a break with the structuralist concept of the eld and denes the eld not
as an objective, autonomous structure made up of internal rules but as a
dynamic eld of empirical relationships between actors and their context.
Our approach also places a strong emphasis on the transformations of the
eld as a whole, which can shift actors’ positions and understanding even
if their internal characteristics remain the same. Finally, as an approach
designed to investigate how the global crisis becomes politicized inlocal
contexts, the structural eld of contention concept places strong empha-
sis on the multiple scales of relationships through which broader pro-
cesses aect local actors and local forms of contention are developed.
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© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_3
3
The Structural Background ofHousing
Contention inBucharest andBudapest
In both Budapest and Bucharest, housing dynamics have historically
been entangled with macroeconomic contexts and political regulation,
which have shaped investment and demographic ows through these two
capital cities. ese ows have been dened by the two countries’ depen-
dent positions and catching-up eorts within world-economic hierar-
chies, as well as both cities’ prominent positions in their countries’ uneven
internal development (in terms of both investment and redistributive
policies). Housing struggles have played out in historical cycles of macro-
economic processes that linked local housing conicts to global and
regional ows of capital and the hierarchical schemes of uneven develop-
ment between capital cities and rural hinterlands. is chapter reviews
the presocialist, socialist, and postsocialist transformations that are par-
ticularly signicant for understanding present forms of housing conten-
tion, and oers insight into how the structural contexts of present housing
struggles have been shaped through these dierent eras. e chapter’s
conclusion can be read as a short summary of this long-term process.

44
Urban Development Before 1945
e characteristics of the housing conditions seen today in Budapest and
Bucharest such as strong urban–rural hierarchies, housing shortages for
the lower-income population, informal peri-urban housing, the gap
between inner-city housing costs and laborer incomes, and the long-term
housing disadvantage of Roma populations formed over a long period,
going back to before 1945. ese are the housing conditions in which the
diverse forms of housing contention in our two case studies emerge, play
out, and interact.
Budapest achieved its modern form in the decades following the
Austro-Hungarian Compromise of 1867 following the 1848 revolution
of independence (the parts of Buda, Pest, and Óbuda were ocially
merged in 1873). In addition to the political aim of making Budapest a
regional center to compete with Vienna, the city’s unprecedented growth
(among the fastest in Europe at the time) was fueled by transformations
induced by the global economic crisis of the 1870s (Wallerstein, 2011).
On the one hand, in a crisis-induced move from productive to nancial
investments, Western capital mediated by Austrian banks ew into spec-
ulative real estate and infrastructure projects in the region (Raviv, 2008).
On the other hand, the previous model of world-economic integration
through grain exports to industrializing Western countries collapsed
(among other reasons, because of Latin American plantations taking up
this role; see Baer & Love, 2000). As a result, Hungarian landowner elites
redirected their investments into industry and urban real estate. ey
lobbied for legislation favoring high-density urban construction and
invested capital accumulated during the previous ourishing of grain
exports into building inner-city tenement houses (Gyáni, 1992). As the
combined eect of these investments accumulated with a national indus-
trialization eort geographically concentrated in Budapest, the real estate
market and speculation in Budapest boomed. By the turn of the century,
the sharply uneven development between Budapest and the countryside
was noted as a problem undermining economic growth. is gap was
further widened by Hungary losing two thirds of its territory in 1919,
and remained a lasting characteristic in socialist and postsocialist decades
as well.
I. Florea et al.

45
e boom of urban investment was followed by corresponding popula-
tion growth, as workers eeing from impoverishment in the countryside
sought jobs in industry and construction (Győri, 1996). Within Budapest,
this population inow appeared as both a labor resource for urban growth
and the urban policy problem of integrating new masses of non-urban
migrants. Informal, overcrowded settlements of the new urban poor came
to be seen as a problem of urban development, particularly after substan-
dard conditions resulted in cholera outbreaks in the 1870s. e city’s rst
reaction was to evict people from overcrowded settlements, and its subse-
quent reaction was to provide alternative temporary housing in barracks,
following interventions by major industrialists who emphasized the indus-
try’s need for a settled labor force. e rst initiatives for homeless shelters
started from well-positioned civil society groups, but these later also gained
the support of the municipality (Győri, 1998, p.31). Plans to construct
workers’ colonies slowly made it into development plans. After 1906, the
city administration sought to upgrade infrastructure and housing to
accommodate the new levels of population growth. is included a pro-
gram for building small ats for workers and an ocial system for home-
less shelters, including the construction of the People’s Home (Népszálló),
still the largest building in today’s homeless assistance system.
World War I losses and the need to provide temporary housing for citi-
zens eeing lost territories slowed this process, but in the late 1920s,
small-at programs were again undertaken (Győri, 1996, p. 14). e
situation was not without conicts: the rst decades of the twentieth
century were characterized by tenants’ rent strikes against expensive and
overcrowded worker housing (Udvarhelyi, 2014). e issue of workers’
immigration also came to be discussed in terms of peri-urban settlements,
where people pushed out of the city met new rural migrants seeking
urban jobs. Building peri-urban infrastructure to integrate this workforce
became an aspect of urban policy in the interwar era (Győri, 1996, p.12).
Bucharest became the capital of the Romanian Principalities in 1862,
at a time when they were integrating into Western commercial circuits as
an intensive grain exporter. Locally, this involved an economic regime
where several thousand noble families owned most of the land while the
majority of the peasant population worked under neo-serfdom condi-
tions (Dobrogeanu-Gherea, 1910). e following decades of capitalist
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

46
modernization involved the growth of local middle classes (especially
among ethnic Romanians), the rise of their political power through the
National Liberal Party, and their concentration in urban areas. As
Bucharest and several other commercial cities underwent slow industrial
development during the second half of the nineteenth century, the num-
ber of state functionaries increased 30 times. Most lived in the capital
city, so their strengthening political and economic position inuenced
the development of Bucharest. State redistribution privileged these mid-
dle classes until 1945 through the allocation of state loans, the redistribu-
tion of properties, and state housing (Voinea, 2018, p.23), which became
a long-term structural characteristic that changed housing distribution in
their (and their heirs’) favor.
Parallel with the above trend, extensive land reform began in 1864, but
only fragmented, insucient, and credit-dependent property was redis-
tributed to the large peasant population. is led to decades of revolt and
the migration of the poor toward larger cities such as Bucharest. It also
formed the basis of long-term structural characteristics of the property
regime in Romania, dominated by small and poor rural properties, a
large population without property, and a serious housing shortage, espe-
cially for the urban poor. Specic to this context is the long-term struc-
tural exclusion of the Roma population from owning property. After
being kept in slavery for centuries by the monasteries, noble families, and
the state, the Roma emancipation in the mid-nineteenth century was not
followed by any compensation in property, in-kind forms of exchange, or
money. In addition, because they lacked the status of peasants, they could
not access property through agricultural land reforms.
Similar to Budapest, although later in the rst decade of the twentieth
century, the city administration reacted to the growth of the poor urban
population with a combination of sanitary and repressive measures. Only
after country-wide peasant revolts extended to peripheral areas of
Bucharest, demolitions and evictions targeting poor households as anti-
tuberculosis measures gave way to social interventions (Voinea, 2018,
p.49). Nevertheless, the 1912 census recorded that fewer than half of the
households in Bucharest had access to running water, and 60% were ten-
ants paying half of their wages on rent (Voinea, 2018, p.39).
I. Florea et al.

47
Another land reform promised to peasants before World War I to draft
them came in 1921. It redistributed expropriated plots, including those
at the edges of Bucharest, and put an end to the domination of large
noble landlords. However, especially during the 1929–1933 global crisis,
the aftermath of the reform ruined the peasants through high taxation
and compensatory payments to former landlords. e redistribution of
agricultural and urban properties outside the built-up areas mostly ben-
eted emerging rural capitalists, urban state functionaries, and better-
paid workers in state-controlled industries (Voinea, 2018, pp.18–19). In
the context of these social transformations, in the 1930s, one of the main
planning goals of the municipal authorities in Bucharest was to keep the
poor separated and on the peripheries (Voinea, 2018, p.171). us, self-
built housing and rural housing models were the dominant form of
dwelling for the urban poor in these peripheries (Calota, 2017, p.369).
In 1941, Bucharest reached almost one million inhabitants and had a
population density twice that before World War I.e aftermath of the
Great Depression still aected the rural areas as a push factor, leading to
a continuous housing crisis (Ghiţ, 2019, p.112).
As these short overviews show, housing shortages have been a character-
istic of the two cities’ nineteenth- and early twentieth-century booms,
when impoverished rural populations ed to the capital cities in search of
employment. Early reactions to housing poverty by local authorities cen-
tered on sanitary and punitive measures. While instances of workers’
housing construction and an incipient system for homeless assistance
developed in Budapest, in Bucharest, keeping the poor away from the
urban center remained the main policy. Peri-urban informal settlements
played an important role in providing self-built, often temporary housing
in both cities. Poor people’s struggles (such as housing strikes in Budapest
or peasant revolts in Bucharest) did inuence real estate dynamics. But
these overviews also point out the signicance of the urban middle classes
in the development of housing-related tensions, seen in their strong state-
based bargaining power in housing redistribution, the dening role of
professional civic initiatives, and urban policymakers shaping social hous-
ing policies. is type of redistributive self-interest and mediating role of
urban middle classes remained a lasting characteristic of housing dynam-
ics that also features in our conclusions on post-2008 housing contention.
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

48
Housing Policies andTheir Political–Economic
Context intheSocialist Period
Urban growth under socialism was strongly tied to the program of
import-substitution industrialization, similar to other postwar state-led
developmentalist regimes across the globe (Walton & Seddon, 1994;
Ban, 2014; Gerőcs & Pinkasz, 2018). is had two main consequences
for the structural context of socialist housing policies. e rst was the
extraction of agricultural resources to support industrial urbanization,
resulting in the collectivization of land and agrarian products and the
channeling of agrarian populations into cities as a source of industrial
development. Within cities, this increased the housing needs for labor
while state investments were primarily targeted toward heavy industry.
e resulting housing shortage (Konrád & Szelényi, 1974), overlapping
with that before 1945, was addressed by the state by limiting immigra-
tion from the countryside, nationalizing and redistributing homes, and
building state housing. While newly built socialist housing blocks became
central to socialist housing policies, urban growth continued to lag
behind industrial growth (Pickvance, 2002). Commuting, bed rentals,
workers’ hostels, and informal self-built dwellings in industrial outskirts
remained a reality for industrial workers coming from the countryside.
Private housing (with the possibility of state loans in addition to private
savings and self-building) and cooperative housing remained part of
socialist housing systems, with private self-built housing dominating
rural areas. e redistribution of state assistance for housing was hierar-
chical, with high-level bureaucrats and workers in privileged industries
obtaining more benets (Szelényi, 1983).
e other main consequence of import-substitution industrialization
that dened the structural context of housing policies was the demand for
technological imports (for industrial development), and raw materials and
agricultural exports (to earn the hard currency for technological imports).
In both countries, this double pressure led to indebtedness, accelerated by
the oil crisis of the 1970s. e resulting debt service pressure reshaped the
conditions of housing investments in both states. In Hungary, it led to
decreasing state funds, the stepping up of private and cooperative con-
struction, delays in the maintenance of state housing, and ultimately the
I. Florea et al.

49
privatization of homes. In Romania, the same conditions were met by an
eort to pay back loans through extreme austerity and to maintain indus-
trialization, including through urban construction (Petrovici, 2017).
In Hungary, the rst decade of socialist housing politics was domi-
nated by measures such as limiting rural immigration, nationalizing
apartments, evicting former landlords, and the imposed partition of
larger apartments (Kocsis, 2009). Socialist housing construction acceler-
ated from the 1960s and soon created a construction boom on the scale
of that following 1867 (Illés, 2009, p.10). By 1980, the number of state-
built ats exceeded 520,000 (15.2% of the national housing stock), and
52.9% of homes were state property (KSH, 1983). State construction
targeted greeneld projects (rather than inner-city regeneration). e
allocation of state funds for housing followed hierarchies representing the
interests of those in power (Szelényi, 1983). Below the party cadres were
urban workers, commuting workers, and then agricultural workers, rep-
resenting nearly half of the population who either received no help
(Misetics, 2017) or were oered state bank credit (Illés, 2009, p.126).
As Hungary’s public debt servicing spiked throughout the 1970–1980s,
state funds for housing decreased and were redirected from state housing
construction to loans supporting private self-built dwellings and coop-
eratives. e legalization of the second economy (Galasi & Kertesi,
1985) involved a variety of private and self-help activities conducted
after working hours. Self-built housing, involving complex informal sys-
tems of mutual help, was combined with state loans to build houses in
rural areas, using savings from second economy activities. In the 1980s,
construction in rural spaces surpassed that in cities because of the slow-
ing of state construction and due to the wave of private investment in
housing (Illés, 2009: 149).
Beyond the slowdown of state construction, cuts in the state budget
also resulted in underperforming state maintenance companies especially
in inner-city, run-down tenant buildings (Hegedüs et al., 1993).
Dissatisfaction spread among tenants (Bodnar, 2001: 35–58) and was
evident in the foundation of the Tenants’ Association in 1988, as described
in Chap. 4. Among urban planning experts and in urban policy, the same
tensions induced greater receptiveness to inner-city regeneration (Jelinek,
2017; Cséfalvay etal., 1995).
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

50
Another change induced by decreasing funds was the prioritization of
support for housing cooperatives. e system of housing cooperatives
was established in the early 1960s, with plots provided by the state and
the National Savings and Trust Company (OTP) acting as investor and
developer. Unlike in rental cooperative models, apartments were sold
into buyers’ private ownership (LOSZ, 2018). A centralized system for
the management of cooperative houses was established, with representa-
tive levels going from single houses to county and national levels. In the
1980s, support for cooperative housing was stepped up to compensate
(partially) for the slowdown of state housing construction. At the time of
the regime change in 1989, the system consisted of 1200 housing coop-
eratives, with 280,000 ats (LOSZ, 2018).
From the 1970s, housing decits started to manifest in the growing
numbers of commuters and workers living in workers’ homes, as well as
in peri-urban informal housing (Bőhm & Pál, 1979). In the years before
the regime change, this latent housing poverty also started to manifest in
inner-city homelessness. Ocially unrecognized by the regime, the
homeless were persecuted by the police (Győri, 1990).
In Romania, most contemporary housing stock was built between
1945 and 1970. e majority of the urban population still lives in the
apartment blocks built during the socialist era, which also represent the
majority of the urban housing stock. e boom in state housing con-
struction came in the early 1960s, with construction slowing but con-
tinuing to grow until the end of the 1980s (Institutul Național de
Statistică, 1990). At the same time, new private housing construction has
diminished since 1960, and halved with each decade despite a policy of
encouraging and nancing self-building in villages and smaller towns
from the 1970s, similar to that of Hungary (Noica, 2003). is reected
an eort to maintain housing construction throughout the debt crisis
years (Vincze, 2017), including in Bucharest. ere, from the early 1950s
to the end of the regime in 1989, formerly peripheral, segregated, and
poor areas of the early twentieth century were transformed into new
socialist neighborhoods. Single-family homes from previous eras were
mixed with new blocks of ats. Next to housing construction, the state
also tried to overcome the disparity between industrialization and urban-
ization by sustaining transport infrastructure for commuting and rapidly
I. Florea et al.

51
constructing worker colonies and hostels (“blocks for singles,” as these
lower quality blocks of ats came to be called). Cheap loans for self-
building and buying state housing were also oered via the state-owned
savings bank. rough these parallel processes, those in poorer social
strata, including the Roma (Achim, 2004), could access personal prop-
erty and gain better qualications and jobs in urban centers. However,
structural urban–rural and regional inequalities were not overcome.
As in other socialist countries of the region, state housing construction
was neither the only nor the rst housing policy: the nationalization of
large and medium-sized urban properties and their redistribution had
already been underway since the late 1940s and early 1950s through a
series of nationalization decrees. In Bucharest, about 70,000 apartments
and houses were nationalized, and in Romania, about 200,000 (Chelcea,
2012; Societatea Academică Română, 2008). Nationalized housing was
redistributed to families in need, such as state tenants on cheap rents.
Villas previously occupied by single well-to-do families were divided into
apartments to host several families without property; former owners had
to move out or were restricted to a single at or oor. Central areas, previ-
ously aordable only to the rich, were thus desegregated. Despite the fact
that many households living in severe housing poverty before 1945 could
access secure housing, similar to Hungary, the redistribution of high-
quality housing followed the rank of state functionaries of the era
(Chelcea, 2012). In addition, with the parallel construction boom and
relocations into new neighborhoods of apartment buildings, and with
the destructive 1977 earthquake in Bucharest, several central areas
became less attractive. eir nationalized homes were thus redistributed
to lower-ranked workers, including Roma and mixed families.
e process of urban property nationalization has been strongly con-
tested since 1989. Property restitution became an important topic for the
anticommunist, right-wing, anti-Roma, and right-liberal discourses
(Vişan etal., 2019). Postsocialist restitutions (a reverse of the nationaliza-
tion process) reinstated some of the exclusions and unequal aspects of the
pre-1945 property regime: previously nationalized plots were again
merged into large properties owned by a few large landlord speculators,
and large villas in central areas again became the property of the wealthy,
pushing up real estate prices. Precarious households of long-term state
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

52
tenants in these buildings (many Roma and ethnically mixed households)
were evicted and left homeless. In the 2000s, this formed the basis of new
housing movement alliances with evicted people and Roma rights activism.
Regime Change andHousing Policies
After 1989
Although the transition to the market economy involved a severe lack of
capital and subordination to Western markets in both countries (Ban,
2014; Krausz, 1998), the political environments of the regime change
diered signicantly. ese dierences had important consequences for
the formation of postsocialist regimes and political conicts that contin-
ued to dene the forms of contention over housing.
Differences inLate Socialist andPostsocialist Global
Economic Integration
In the last decades of the socialist regimes, Hungary and Romania took
two signicantly dierent routes. In Hungary, the 1956 revolution was
followed by a compromise that reduced ideological pressure, promised a
general rise in living standards, and consolidated tensions between indus-
trial and agricultural lobbies through a global market integration model
built on a “bridge position” between Western and Comecon markets
(Gagyi & Gerőcs, 2021). After the 1973 oil crisis, international lenders’
conditions for liberalization and internal interests for privatization com-
bined in a process of spontaneous privatization that was already under-
way in the 1980s (Comisso & Marer, 1986; Stark, 1990).
On this basis, transition in Hungary occurred through peaceful nego-
tiations, dominated by an alliance between local liberal dissidents, reform
socialists, major company managers interested in privatization, interna-
tional lender organizations, and Western capitalist lobby groups
(Drahokoupil, 2008; Éber etal., 2014). In politics, two main contenders
arose: a dominant liberal power bloc represented by an alliance between
the liberal and socialist parties and supported by the aforementioned
I. Florea et al.

53
groups, and a conservative bloc that promoted national values and pro-
tectionist policies beneting national capital. Lacking the structural alli-
ances to carry out this program, the conservative bloc created a political
discourse from a defensive position, claiming that former socialists and
liberals were selling the country to Western capitalist interests (Szalai,
1994; Gagyi, 2016). e liberal bloc reacted to these charges by dismiss-
ing the nationalism (and potential anti-Semitism) of these arguments
and posing as the defender of Western democracy. As popular discontent
accumulated in the face of the transformation crisis and postsocialist neo-
liberal governance, the conservative bloc’s right-wing anti-neoliberal nar-
rative became the main political language for the expression of economic
grievances. is was also linked to the operative penetration of popular
strata by the political right (Halmai, 2011; Szombati, 2018; Buzogány &
Varga, 2018; Greskovits, 2020; Scheiring, 2020a). By the late 2000s,
these dynamics channeled postsocialist grievances into a supermajority
victory by a conservative coalition headed by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz Party.
By contrast, until 1989, Romania maintained a program of intensive
industrialization, coupled with strong political control that did not allow
reform technocrats to reach the levels of power they had achieved in
Hungary (Petrovici, 2006). Faced with a crisis in the sustained industrial-
ization eort by the late 1970s, the Romanian regime rst took an
International Monetary Fund (IMF) loan in the early 1980s, under worse
conditions than countries that had accepted earlier petrodollar loans. Faced
with these harsher conditions, it then promoted strong austerity measures
to repay debt to avoid pressure for liberalization (Vincze, 2017). Owing to
the strong centralization of power in the late socialist period, the institu-
tionalization of the regime change was dominated by gures in the second
and third tiers of the party apparatus. eir coalition (not always harmoni-
ous) gained an electoral victory in the rst elections after 1989. It tried to
steer marketization toward a protectionist direction favorable for the for-
mation of national capital (Ban, 2016), a direction opposed by interna-
tional lenders. Although its public debt was repaid by 1989, the nancial
markets “punished” Romania by not buying state bonds until 1994 (Ban,
2014, p.114). As it advanced throughout the 1990s and new generations
of political gures emerged, the former socialist and protectionist coalition
was absorbed into the changing constellations of a social democratic front.
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

54
e contender liberal political bloc that was formed during the regime
change, reclaiming the tradition of the pre-1945 liberal and conservative
parties, gained a political victory in 1996, rapidly advancing privatization
and the liberalization of utility prices. Its policies rendered living costs
unaordable for many urban households and generated a massive and
hitherto unseen wave of urban–rural migration, as well as a parallel wave
of household disconnections from energy distribution. Owing to the
organizational power of socialists, the opposing liberal political pole
could only strengthen its power with the country’s accession to NATO
and the European Union (EU) in the 2000s, resulting in an alliance of
liberal anticommunists and President Traian Băsescu, who assumed the
presidency in 2004 after being the Minister of Transport during the
privatization years. Băsescu was the country’s main negotiator with the
World Bank (WB) at the turn of the millennium and the initiator of
neoliberal urbanism as the mayor of Bucharest. e confrontation
between liberals and social democrats remains a dening aspect of
national and local political dynamics today.
The Privatization ofHousing andPostsocialist
Housing Policies
In Budapest, the privatization of state housing maintained and aggra-
vated the inequalities of previous distribution, propelling spatial segrega-
tion (Bodnar, 1996, 2001). Valuable apartments in elite districts were the
rst to be privatized, with the best of conditions. As privatization occurred
considerably below market prices, owners of larger and more valuable
ats received greater “privatization gifts” than those less favored by social-
ist housing policies; the scale of favors correlated with levels of education
and income (Misetics, 2017, p.271). e 1993 Housing Act codied
these hierarchical housing privatization advantages while tenants’ rights
were weakened. In the rst 5 years of the transition, public housing at the
national level decreased from 740,000 to 38,000, and has continued to
fall ever since (Misetics, 2017, pp.270–271). e housing stock remain-
ing in public hands was typically substandard either because tenants were
too poor to buy it or because they did not want to due to its dilapidated
I. Florea et al.

55
state. e decreased stock of social housing, together with the decentral-
ization of social policies to the level of (underfunded) local governments,
had a strong limiting eect on social housing policies; it created the ten-
dency for local governments to privatize their housing stock to gain
income, a practice that disadvantaged tenants with less education and
income (Győri, 2003b). Meanwhile, the decentralization of social hous-
ing policy to underfunded local governments resulted in fewer and more
unequal subsidies (Hegedüs et al., 1996; Győri, 2003b). ose who
lacked access to socialist public housing favors (most of the rural popula-
tion) were also deprived of the “gifts” from its privatization. Falling
incomes and surging unemployment coincided with energy costs being
aligned with world market prices and a decrease in public expenditure on
housing benets from 8.6% to 1.8% of GDP between 1989 and 1995
(Misetics, 2017, p.268; Dániel, 1997).
In Budapest, the combined eect of growing unemployment, rising
utility costs, the disbanding of workers’ homes, and closures in other state
institutions (such as correctional facilities and prisons) led to visible
growth in public homelessness (Győri, 1990), which remains the most
obvious form of urban housing poverty. roughout 1989–1991, home-
less people’s demonstrations and allied activists’ eorts constituted a sig-
nicant push for homelessness to be recognized as a social issue rather
than one of public order. As Chap. 4 explains, this process, together with
the engagement of social workers and policy experts, as well as the incor-
poration of housing poverty into political parties’ social policy agendas,
led to the establishment of an ocial system for homeless assistance.
However, in subsequent decades, the problem of insucient public hous-
ing was unresolved, and public housing policies favored construction and
purchase (advantaging the middle and upper social strata) over providing
housing benets to prevent housing and energy poverty (Misetics, 2017).
In addition to homelessness, another eect of housing poverty after
privatization has been geographical peripheralization. Newly unem-
ployed industrial workers and commuters, pensioners, and large families
on lower incomes were the main groups who migrated into rural areas
after being pushed out of cities. ey often took their small privatization
gains from apartments they could not sustain in the city in the hope of
sustaining themselves in cheaper locations (Illés, 2009, p.175). e rural
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

56
areas where they headed often turned out to be long-term repositories of
unemployment and growing poverty. Within the city, internal peripher-
alization pushed poor families, often Roma, into low-quality, over-
crowded zones (Czirfusz et al., 2015). Peri-urban informal dwellings
surged again, with households turning former allotment garden build-
ings into informal homes (Vigvári & Gagyi, 2018).
In Budapest, urban regeneration programs continued to address inner
districts after the 1990s, but with a changed focus compared with the
socialist municipality plans of the 1980s. As Jelinek (2017) shows, urban
regeneration projects in the 1990s sought market-driven development
and were insensitive to social aspects, which started waves of evictions
and intra-urban peripheralization. While European models of socially
inclusive urban rehabilitation were applied in a agship project in the
2000s in the eighth district, market- and then increasingly state-driven
development in the district maintained an exclusionary character toward
Roma and the poor (Czirfusz etal., 2015).
In Romania, similar to other East European contexts, privatization
took place in response to pressure from IMF and WB loan agreements, as
well as EU accession conditions (Stanilov, 2007; Vincze, 2019).
Privatization reduced public housing stock from 30% in 1990 to less
than 2% in 2011. In the early 1990s, state tenants in blocks of ats could
already access “right to buy” programs at very low prices, and housing
loans from the still-dominant state bank. In the mid-1990s, state tenants
in nationalized housing could also access a “right to buy” program which,
as in Hungary, advantaged households already inhabiting more valuable
properties.
Another form of housing stock privatization was implemented through
the property restitution process (Lancione, 2017; Vişan et al., 2019).
is was legitimized by its winners as the opposite of nationalization and
collectivization. e process started in 1990, but intensied and became
more uniformly implemented with the adoption of the Restitution Law
in 2001 (Law 10/2001). Its eects on housing conditions in Bucharest
and the entire country were manifold. Rural restitutions of collectivized
land left those households that did not own land before collectivization
homeless. e result resembled the pre-1945 rural property regime frag-
mented and deeply unequal, with the Roma as the main ethnic group
I. Florea et al.

57
excluded from property (Zamr, 1998; Stănculescu & Berevoescu,
2004). Urban restitutions restored large properties to the hands of
pre-1945 elite families, surrounded by law rms and potential real estate
investors. In large cities, the result created the property regime conditions
for wider urban regeneration projects in the following decades.
As urban restitutions (re)privatized tenanted properties (Popovici,
2020), former state tenants faced unaordable private rents from the new
owners. e owners’ investment plans in the vast majority of cases led to
the tenants being pushed out (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019). Despite the
fact that some form of property restitution was imposed and imple-
mented in all former socialist countries (Lux etal., 2017), the manner in
which this occurred diered signicantly. Hungary did not implement
in-kind property restitutions (owners impacted by nationalization were
instead eligible for compensation notes or agricultural vouchers). In
Romania, the Restitution Law implemented restitutio in integrum which
meant prioritizing in-kind restitutions of entire properties, including
those that had been converted into public institutions, parks, and public
housing since the 1950s. is most aected Bucharest and several other
larger cities, and created the conditions for housing and housing conten-
tion in the past three decades.
As in Hungary, another form of housing privatization followed the
privatization of industrial companies that owned workers’ hostels and
“blocks for singles.” e ownership and maintenance responsibility for
these often remained unclear, with homes becoming dilapidated, while
the workers became unemployed or underemployed. In Bucharest, sev-
eral such micro-neighborhoods of apartment blocks were stigmatized and
often raided by the police throughout the 1990s and early 2000s, but also
became the only aordable housing options for many unemployed peo-
ple (Rughiniș, 2004; Fleck & Rughiniș, 2008).
All these paths of privatization lead to evictions and homelessness,
combined with discrimination against the Roma due to long-term exclu-
sion from both urban and rural property and labor. At the level of urban
transformations, these privatization paths turned urban peripheries, espe-
cially those of large cities such as Bucharest, into the most concentrated
areas of severe poverty throughout the 1990s (Stănculescu & Berevoescu,
2004). As in Hungary, but somewhat later, street homelessness in
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

58
Bucharest and other major cities was the rst visible outcome that
prompted reactions. Unlike those in Hungary, the reactions were based
on charity work and humanitarian or religious NGOs linked to foreign
funds and organizations. ese charities came to dominate the area of
homelessness support in the eld of housing and replace state and local
authorities’ responsibilities.
e Roma rights movement was the rst to address housing in Romania
as a political rather than a charity issue, demonstrating its connection to
social inequalities and multiple forms of exclusion (European Roma
Rights Center, 2002). e Roma rights movement grew from the early
1990s under the inuence of Roma intellectuals who had established
themselves in universities or higher positions before 1989. ey estab-
lished advocacy and human rights NGOs and networks, that were very
active in the 1990s, with international visibility, alliances, and funding.
As Chap. 5 explains, this early politicization process imbued the housing
justice mobilizations with a strong antiracist stance. It also entailed an
ambiguous relationship between housing activists and humanitarian
NGOs involved in homelessness support.
The 2000s: Problems ofHousing Access
andtheMortgage Boom
In Hungary, the post-privatization super-homeownership system (Lux &
Sunega, 2020), whereby the majority of households lived in owner-
occupied housing, and social and rental housing was minimized (only
9% of the population lived in formally rented homes according to statis-
tics in 2015 [KSH, 2016]), seriously limited housing access for low- and
middle-income households unable to buy their own homes. e rst gov-
ernment (1998–2002) of the current Prime Minister Viktor Orbán initi-
ated the rst large-scale, state-aided housing loan program. In line with
his Fidesz Party’s political program, recently turned national conserva-
tive, these subsidies were mostly targeted at upper middle-class families
(Misetics, 2017, p.276). e public costs of the program proved to be
unsustainable in the context of growing public debt and was abolished by
the incoming socialist government in 2004 (Bohle, 2014, p.15). As a
I. Florea et al.

59
result, the high demand for housing loans was channeled into a booming
market for private mortgage loans. After the ban on foreign currency
loans was lifted as one of the EU accession requirements in 2001, foreign
banks penetrated Hungarian markets with foreign currency- denominated
(forex) loans. ese entailed higher risks than forint loans, as the risk of
currency rate exchange was borne by the debtor. However, at that
moment, they appeared to be and they were marketed as cheaper than
forint loans. In a boom of low-rate and aggressively marketed forex mort-
gages, lower-income households that could not previously access owner-
ship through loans to meet their housing needs ocked to the banks,
accumulating a dangerous level of risky debt right before the 2008 crash.
e Hungarian housing mortgage boom, although specic in its high
proportion of risky Swiss Franc (CHF) loans (80% of new loans and
90% of mortgage loans in the last years of the forex boom [MNB, 2009]),
ts into a regional wave of foreign lending (Bohle, 2014) fueled by the
dynamics of the world-economic phenomenon of housing nancializa-
tion (Aalbers, 2008). While the nancialization of the economy has been
described as nancial investments dominating governance decisions
throughout the global economy (Epstein, 2005), the securitization of
mortgage markets that redened homes as an object of speculation
(Martin, 2002) played an especially important role in terms of both a
“great risk shift” from banks and state social policy to households (Hacker,
2019) and through the eect of the US housing bubble’s implosion
after 2007.
e mortgage boom of the 2000s in Central and Eastern Europe
(CEE) was part of the 2000s wave of housing nancialization in Europe,
with the dierence that it picked up speed later (in the late 2000s, when
Western and Southern European markets were becoming saturated
[Raviv, 2008, p.299]). Lenders mainly targeted households, not corpo-
rate actors (Bohle, 2014, p.5). Most debtors took short-term exible
loans instead of the long-term xed-rate loans dominant in Western
mortgage markets (Pósfai etal., 2017, p.17). Moreover, interest rates
were higher than in Western Europe (Raviv, 2008, p.300). e majority
of loans were taken in foreign currency with exchange risks externalized
to borrowers (Bohle, 2014, p.4), mostly from foreign-owned nancial
institutions (Pósfai etal., 2017, p.8). While the total value of Western
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

60
European housing mortgages was higher, the rates of nonperforming
mortgages after the crash were higher in Southern and Eastern Europe
(Pósfai etal., 2017, p.8). Borrowers for whom credit was not for accu-
mulation of wealth but survival were included in the same bubble but
with higher debt service rates, and fell into debt spirals at a higher rate
than did wealthier borrowers (Csizmady etal., 2019).
In Romania since the 2000s, Eurostat has consistently reported above
90% of the population living in owner-occupied mortgage-free homes.
is super-homeownership system has often been presented as oering
housing to the vast majority, but this interpretation of the statistics is
misleading (Vincze & Florea, 2020). In fact, as in Hungary, extended
families own just one home, which is not enough for several generations
to cohabit. e unregulated and predominantly informal rental market1
is estimated to represent 15–20% of the housing stock in large cities
(World Bank, 2015). Both rural and small-town personal properties in
underdeveloped regions have been devalued and become a poverty trap
in the absence of employment. Moreover, homeownership for the low
but stable income groups (from pensioners to the growing number of
workers on the minimum wage) has been often coupled with poor living
conditions, such as a lack of or disconnection from utilities, a lack of
resources needed for repairs, and overcrowding. Romania has consistently
had the highest in-work poverty rate since its accession to the EU in
2007, meaning that low but stable income households verge on poverty
connected to housing insecurity.
For these reasons, low but stable income households have also experi-
enced evictions and life in informal housing areas, side-by-side with
households aected by severe poverty and lacking a stable income.
Evictions or expulsions of former state tenants after restitution often
aected low- to middle-income households: these were worker house-
holds that were allocated nationalized homes in more or less central areas
1 Informal renting is a widespread practice in both Romania and Hungary, where landlords prefer
not to sign contracts or declare rental incomes to avoid taxation. Informal rents are thus slightly
cheaper than formally registered and declared rents, but the lack of contracts also puts tenants in
more vulnerable positions. As neither landlords nor tenants register such situations, census data do
not reect this phenomenon. Instead, estimations are based on data from real estate agencies and
search platforms.
I. Florea et al.

61
before 1989 through their state employer. roughout the 1990s and
2000s, working on decreasing incomes and losing their cheap rent con-
tracts, these households suered under a process of class restructuring
that impoverished and fragmented the working classes. Dierentiated
access to credit lines added yet another layer of class fragmentation.
Like other CEE contexts, under pressure from external creditors and
EU accession, Romania privatized most of its state banks, selling them to
foreign nancial groups that came to dominate the credit market (Gabor,
2012; Vincze, 2019; Ban & Bohle, 2020). Only after 2007, with the EU
accession and the strengthening of the neoliberal government, did the
National Bank lift its strict limits on loan to income levels for households
and allow new and riskier credit lines, such as consumer loans with homes
as collateral. us, the number of bank debtors doubled each year during
the early years, reaching 900,000in 2008 (Banca Națională a României,
2020) out of a total population of about 20 million. Despite being part
of the same wave of nancialization as Hungary, Romania entered after a
lag and experienced important dierences in the way this process incor-
porated households. us, the proportion of bank debtors in the popula-
tion was much smaller in Romania before 2008, and they represented
mostly middle- to high-income groups.
Forex loans, mostly euros-denominated, were also targeting middle- to
high-income groups, while Swiss Franc loans never accounted for more
than 5% of all household loans. On the other hand, hire-purchase loans
oered by retail chains, mostly for buying household goods, represented
the dominant form of household credit. At that time, hire-purchase loans
were unregulated, poorly monitored by the authorities, risky, and expen-
sive, and were the only form of credit accessible to lower but stable
income households. us, dierent income groups accessed dierent
types of loans. e wide category of low- to middle-income groups could
only access small but expensive and risky hire-purchase loans, often sold
to loan recovery agents when arrears accumulated. ose in the middle-
income category could access forex consumer loans with their homes as
collateral, which were the riskiest bank loans. Middle- to high-income
debtors could access more protected bank mortgages (the riskier among
them being the forex-denominated ones, with variable interest rates).
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

62
At the same time, Bucharest experienced a real estate boom in the
2000s. Large restituted properties in central and semi-central locations
constituted the basis for urban regeneration projects (Vişan etal., 2019;
Schwartz, 2016), while those on the peripheries or in rural suburbs served
to expand greeneld developments. Experiencing a similar transforma-
tion of urban governance as in other CEE contexts, the local authorities
of Bucharest in the early 2000s delegated representatives of real estate
developers to draft urban regulations and plans (Florea & Dumitriu,
2018). Several activist groups that formed at that time, mostly under the
inuence of the alter-globalization movement, reacted to the increasing
power of developers in the city and to the urban commodication wave.
As Chap. 5 details, these groups became involved in the dynamics of the
eld of housing contention.
Political-Economic Transformation After 2008
In Hungary, the eects of the 2008 crisis combined with earlier signs of
economic instability that had piled up since the mid-2000s and deepened
by the socialist–liberal coalition’s eorts to maintain its dwindling politi-
cal legitimacy through public spending and private Keynesian debt-led
consumption. Despite these eorts, a series of violent protests broke out
in 2006 against the socialist government, the repression of which sealed
the political delegitimization of the previous era of neoliberal integration.
Jobbik and Fidesz—the parties that penetrated popular right-wing anti-
neoliberal movements in the 2000s—have both proted from stepping
up as the political representatives of the discontent that fueled the 2006
wave of protests.
By the end of 2009, the total volume of household debt (including
mortgages and other types of loans) relative to GDP reached 40%, of
which 70% was from forex loans (MNB, 2009). Between 2008 and
2009, installments of CHF loans grew by 70%–80% (Dancsik et al.,
2015, p.115). Combined with a rise in unemployment and a decrease in
household income, as well as the devaluation of collateral (as housing
markets froze due to the crash), the situation resulted in hundreds of
thousands of families going into arrears or outright debt spirals (Kiss,
I. Florea et al.

63
2018). To stabilize the economy in crisis (deepened by a speculative run
on the forint in June 2008), the socialist government took out an IMF
loan and applied further austerity measures, including those against
housing subsidies (Misetics, 2017, p.278).
At the parliamentary elections of 2010, Fidesz (and its smaller ally, the
Christian Democrat party) won a two-thirds supermajority victory,
allowing it to change the constitution or pass acts of law with the support
of the governing coalition alone. is victory was based on a campaign
that relied strongly on social discontent with neoliberal governance, as
well as on new grievances linked to the crisis, and promised a “national
freedom ght” (Wiedermann, 2014) against subordination to Western
capital. Once in government, Fidesz’s actual policies were for the massive
centralization of administrative, judicial, and media power (Kovács &
Trencsényi, 2019), and it used this capacity to undertake a reorganization
of Hungary’s world-economic integration. Although its symbolic com-
munication often emphasizes the Orbán regime’s enmity to the EU or
Western models of democracy, the regime’s economic policy strongly
supports foreign direct investment (FDI) in export manufacturing sec-
tors while selectively helping domestic capital to accumulate in service
sectors, with state support (Éber etal., 2019; Scheiring, 2020b). A third
important pillar of the regime’s world-economic integration model is a
struggle to reduce external nancial dependence to create space for
maneuvers in economic policy (Gagyi & Gerőcs, 2021). Complementary,
the new regime transformed education and labor regulations to suit FDI
interests, replaced unemployment benets with a workfare system, and
converted social policy into a “family policy” biased toward the middle
class (Gagyi & Gerőcs, 2019; Czirfusz et al., 2019; Szikra, 2014). In
addition to the public work program, the regime’s punitive attitude
toward poverty was also infamously expressed in the criminalization of
homelessness.
In Romania, the neoliberal coalition retained power from 2004 to
2012. rough the successive victories of President Traian Băsescu and
his successor Klaus Iohannis, another former mayor who pioneered neo-
liberal urbanism in his city (Oancă, 2010), the coalition also ensured a
presidential position until 2024. is coalition oversaw the crisis-
management austerity measures and contracting of a new loan agreement
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

64
with the IMF, WB, and European Bank for Reconstruction and
Development, intended to achieve macroeconomic stabilization.
e crisis started unfolding in early 2008, with the fall of real estate
prices. It was followed in 2009 by a sharp drop in GDP and attacks on
the currency (including those led by then ING consultant Florin Cîţu,
who later became the nance minister in 2019–2020, then Prime
Minister in late 2020). reats of foreign banks’ withdrawal left very
limited room for monetary policy to maneuver, considering the high
market share of foreign banks (Ban & Bohle, 2020; Kudrna & Gabor,
2013). Unlike the situation in Hungary, bank debtors without arrears
were always in the vast majority (always above 75% of debtors) owing to
the dominance of middle- to high-income borrowers. ese wealthier
and better protected debtors supported most austerity measures to keep
the RON-Euro exchange rate in check (and thus their monthly payments
of forex-denominated loans) and maintain their asset prices (Ban, 2014).
In the context of post-crisis austerity, the ruling neoliberal coalition
further consolidated Romania’s position as a pool of cheap labor for
export-oriented FDI and the Western labor markets. Unlike in Hungary,
post-crisis policies did not constitute a reconguration of its integration
path, but strengthened the previous one. With this process, national capi-
tal and the political parties associated with it (the Social Democratic
Party and sometimes its coalitions with conservatives) started losing
ground in the face of transnational capital and its political allies (the
National Liberal and Democratic Parties). However, national politics
remained tense, with clashes among the main parties and government
overturns continuing today (2021).
Considering Romania’s integration path, it is not surprising that the
main aspects of the austerity measures targeted labor exibilization, slash-
ing labor rights and union power (Ilie & Lazăr, 2017; Guga, 2019). In
2011, the Labor Code and Social Dialogue legislation were amended,
requiring unions to have at least 15 members, aecting millions of workers
in smaller companies who could no longer organize in unions. About 50%
of all contracts were capped at the minimum wage, aecting millions who
could hardly aord housing costs. e amount of the minimum wage
became the main eld of political confrontations between the main parties.
Meanwhile, the cost of housing and related charges continued to grow in
I. Florea et al.

65
the cities, constituting the most expensive category of costs incurred by
households (Friedrich Ebert Stiftung, 2020; Guga etal., 2018). us, wage
concerns gradually included and expressed concerns over housing security,
housing conditions, utilities, and access to better credit conditions.
In 2012, about 32% of the population was in arrears on (formally
registered) rents, utility bills, mortgages, and hire-purchase repayments.
About 51% of the total population, and more than 64% of those on
lower incomes, lived in overcrowded conditions. A massive anti-austerity
wave of protests lasted from 2011 to 2012, in parallel with the interna-
tional wave of austerity-sparked protests. In its aftermath, the govern-
ment was regained for some years by the social democratic coalition.
GDP growth was recorded in 2013 (Ban, 2014), and in 2014, the end of
austerity was announced (Guga, 2019). e slashing of workers’ rights
was further advocated by the neoliberal coalition, which remained strong
in the parliament, and the National Bank. e 2014 presidential election
campaign ended with the victory of Iohannis, having been dominated by
the liberal parties’ attacks on lower-income workers and the poor, similar
to the anti-poor discourses in Hungary.
Tensions Around Housing Poverty After 2008
In Hungary, tensions around housing poverty after 2008 were deter-
mined by the eects of the crisis as much as by the transformation of the
political regime. e most politicized aspect of housing poverty in this
context became homelessness. While the institutionalization of homeless
assistance in the 1990s shifted the issue of homelessness from policing to
the realm of social policy, the criminalization of homelessness remained a
creeping trend in the following decades, from selective enforcement by
police and public space supervisors, to anti-begging regulations by local
governments or prison sentences as punishment for squatting (Bence &
Udvarhelyi, 2013). Radicalizing this trend, after 2010, the Orbán gov-
ernment made the criminalization of homelessness into an explicit state
policy. In 2010, in an amendment to the construction law, local govern-
ments were entitled to ban homeless people from designated areas, with
Budapest’s Fidesz-led eighth district pioneering the use of this
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

66
opportunity (Udvarhelyi, 2014). In line with plans to open new shelters
with obligatory detention centers, two new homeless shelters were opened
by the Budapest municipality in collaboration with the Minister of
Interior, containing a police station and a short-term jail (Udvarhelyi,
2014, p.821). In recognition of his pioneering eorts, eighth district
mayor Máté Kocsis was made rapporteur for homelessness by parliament
and continued to work on the issue on the national scale.
In December 2011, the parliament made living in public spaces illegal
throughout the nation. In the 7 months after the law came into eect in
April 2012, more than 2000 people were prosecuted, and a total of almost
40 million HUF (approx. 120,000 euro) was incurred in nes (Udvarhelyi,
2014, p.823). In response to the eorts of civic groups, the Constitutional
Court in 2012, found punishing the homeless for being homeless to be
unconstitutional. However, in March 2013, the constitution was modi-
ed by the supermajority government to allow local governments to ban
living in public spaces. With this step, Hungary became the rst country
in the world to constitutionalize the criminalization of homelessness
(Udvarhelyi, 2014). As Chap. 4 shows, the struggle over criminalization
did not stop here: new waves of the criminalization campaign were met
by civic resistance, as well as foot-dragging by the police in its
implementation.
Two other important aspects of housing poverty after the crisis in
Hungary were evictions and informal housing. e growing number of
evictions was mainly linked to the forex mortgage crisis, an issue that
became strongly politicized by both debtors and the government, as the
next subsection shows. By contrast, the new wave of households moving
into peri-urban informal housing (Vigvári & Gagyi, 2018) remained a
politically silent phenomenon.
In Romania, during the austerity years, almost 30% of the population
was in utility arrears, while populations trapped in rural and small urban
areas could not aord connection to basic infrastructure and utilities
(Vincze, 2013). Anticipating a worsening of the ability to pay housing
costs for a growing population, the neoliberal government changed both
the Civil Code and the Labor Code in 2011. e modications
I. Florea et al.

67
diminished tenant protections and their protection against evictions. As
expected, the number of evictions from homes grew after 2010 above the
spike in 2002–2003 caused by the implementation of the Restitution
Law in 2001; the rate of evictions imposed by law enforcement agents
also grew. ese trends continued throughout the period of economic
recovery. e cities of Bucharest, Cluj-Napoca, and Timişoara were
marked by evictions disproportionately aecting Roma and ethnically
mixed households. Such evictions became central to the dynamics of the
housing mobilizations. In 2016, the interim technocratic government
opened public consultations on the National Housing Strategy, with
humanitarian NGOs, experts, and housing rights groups to prove its
transparency on issues that attracted public attention at that time. Despite
having limited results (the National Housing Strategy had still not been
adopted in 2021), as Chap. 5 describes, these public consultations cata-
lyzed the involvement of left-leaning housing rights groups in advocacy
processes at the national level.
Under pressure from growing housing costs and evictions, informal
housing arrangements became even more widespread, reaching over
100,000 households according to estimates by the Ministry of
Development. Many of these households were Roma, according to the
National Agency for Roma. At the peak of the economic growth cycle
that started after 2013, in 2017–2019, some of these households were
evaluated by social aid NGOs to have improved resources at the point of
exiting poverty. Given the increased availability of resources for house-
holds in certain informal settlements (and thus their ability to pay for-
malization costs), new policies in line with EU and e United Nations
recommendations and requirements were fast-tracked to formalize their
situation. Special new credit lines promoted as corporate social responsi-
bility programs by large nancial groups or under EU programs, such as
HERO 2020, were drafted to penetrate this emerging income category.
By 2021, these had still not been implemented. e majority of house-
holds that could not aord formalization costs or loans or could not be
formalized (due to hazardous conditions or locations), were left out of
these measures.
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

68
The Politics ofDebt Crisis Management
andtheNew Housing Boom
From the perspectives of banks and policy makers, the main priority in
managing the Hungarian forex debt crisis was portfolio cleaning, prefer-
ably through the restoration of debtors’ solvency through debt restructur-
ing (Dancsik et al., 2015). Legislation introduced the possibility of
recalculating debt at a Central Bank medium rate (eliminating banks’
unilaterally imposed exchange rates) and capped interest rates. is eased
the situation of many debtors, although it oered little help to those
already in arrears (Dancsik etal., 2015). In addition to other tools, such
as a crisis tax imposed on banks, these measures were designed to put
pressure on foreign banks as part of the government’s broader eorts to
increase the share of domestic actors in the nancial market. Foreign
banks’ insolvent assets were bought by the government at relatively high
prices (Mihályi, 2015). e share of domestic actors grew from around
20% before 2010 to more than half of the nancial market by 2017
(EBF, 2018).
e other main crisis measure was the conversion of forex loans to
forint in early 2015. As Swiss Franc rates soared in the following months,
this step saved forex debtors from further rate rises. However, it also xed
debt rates at exchange rates at the moment of recalculation, keeping
installments above sustainable levels for many debtors in arrears. In terms
of nancial stability, banks and regulators consider the conversion to be
the end of the forex mortgage problem (Kolozsi, 2018). e conversion
also constituted an important step in the government’s program to
decrease external nancial vulnerability and increase government control
over nancial politics (Karas, 2021).
ose debtors who took out the loans not as investments but because
they had no other way to access new housing and whose household
incomes were destabilized by higher installments beneted little from
these measures (Csizmady etal., 2019). As Chap. 4 explains, debtors’
movements initially supported by the government as part of its “eco-
nomic freedom ght” political campaign were marginalized and silenced
after 2014. In a move to clean bank slates, a large proportion of
I. Florea et al.

69
outstanding debt was transferred to debt collection companies (Palkó,
2018). Even cases of successful debt restructuring often entailed an
increased debt servicing burden, met through property sales, moving to
substandard housing, cutting consumption, or work migration (Csizmady
etal., 2019; Habitat, 2018). Family breakups, psychosomatic illnesses,
and suicide are often mentioned in debtors’ and advocates’ interviews
(Szabó, 2018; Chamber of Debtors1, 2018; T.G., 2018).
e two measures targeted at debtors with problems were temporary
moratoriums on evictions and the National Asset Management program
(NAM), established to acquire the homes of debtors in the worst situa-
tions. Between 2012 and 2017, NAM acquired over 36,000 homes, the
majority of homes under enforcement proceedings (Magyar Narancs,
2019). While NAM represents the largest expenditure on social housing
since 1989 (Misetics, 2017, p.279), it was praised by banks as a key tool
for enforcing the use of collateral, a necessary means to restore general
willingness to repay debt (Dancsik etal., 2015). In 2019, having fullled
its function, NAM started a program either to sell homes back to the
families who became its tenants or to remove the previous protection
against evictions from its rental agreements (Magyar Narancs, 2019).
e cleaning of debt portfolios and the creation of domestic nance
capacity, together with building new middle-class savings through regres-
sive redistribution, was used to boost a new wave of lending after 2015.
A new housing subsidy scheme called CSOK (“kiss” in Hungarian) was
introduced in 2016 to support home construction and purchases.
Although it required a down payment (thereby primarily targeting
middle- class families able to pay it), CSOK oered a subsidized loan,
paid according to the number of planned children. e combination of
CSOK subsidies with mortgages, together with tax benets for new con-
struction, created a new state-supported real estate boom after 2016. is
time, loans were primarily oered in forint, administered by nancial
institutions in domestic hands, and based on domestic savings. Captured
by new domestically controlled capital circuits in nance and construc-
tion, the CSOK-induced boom represented an important tool by which
to capitalize domestic players (Karas, 2021). Meanwhile, CSOK also
implied a disciplinary aspect: single parents on child benets, people
more than 6 months in arrears on their social insurance payments, those
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

70
on workfare, and those with criminal records were excluded from the
program (Misetics, 2017, p.279).
In addition to state measures, other factors also contributed to the boom
in housing prices after 2015. ese included the general post-crisis recov-
ery, speculative foreign investments (such as Russian and Chinese buyers
on the Budapest real estate market), the eect of the tourism industry
(including state-aided domestic capital circuits but also short- term Airbnb
rentals) that raised rent prices in inner districts, and government- led urban
regeneration projects. As a result, home prices and rents showed a signi-
cant spike between 2015 and 2019, creating a signicant problem, even for
middle-class tenants (Portfolio.hu, 2019; Jelinek, 2019).
In Romania, the similarity to Hungary was the implementation of post-
crisis policies supporting a new real estate boom; however, the political and
economic constellations around them diered. In 2009, the neoliberal gov-
ernment contracted a 20-billion-euro loan from international creditors for
the purpose of stabilization. It subsequently launched new state programs
and enhanced the scope of previous programs to (re)boost household credit
and maintain prots in the construction sector. e new “First Home”
state-backed mortgage program oered better lending conditions, in part-
nership with most of the banks in the market. e Bauspar program for
saving in order to borrow later for housing repairs, construction, or pur-
chase, in partnership with the main Austrian nancial groups, was sup-
ported by bonus payments from the state. e public construction
programs of the National Agency for Housing, building for sale to low- to
middle-income young families (under 35 years), were reorganized in part-
nership with the main banks. e thermo- insulation program for apart-
ment blocks was reorganized and expanded, with costs covered by national
funds and funds borrowed by local authorities on international markets.
is program mostly beneted private owners of apartments in larger cities
with municipalities that were able to take out such loans. Despite a great
need for social housing for lower- income groups, this need was not inte-
grated into national or local budgets after 2008 (World Bank, 2015; Blocul
pentru Locuire, 2019). e way local authorities dealt with the high
demand for social housing, given the almost total absence of social housing
stock, was to increase competition among applicants and recipients and to
introduce additional exclusionary criteria that in fact violated the national
I. Florea et al.

71
Housing Law stipulations (HOPE, 2021). As Chap. 5 illustrates, the great
need for social housing and the inequalities in the allocation of state bud-
gets turned this into the main issue for housing rights groups after 2014.
Instead of social housing, the state-backed credit-based programs were
promoted as housing policies, absorbing about 97% of the entire budget
for housing programs since the crisis. e programs’ conditions were
accessible mostly to those in the middle-income category, increasingly
concentrated in urban areas (Petrovici & Poenaru, 2017; Guga, 2019).
us, these programs not only beneted these groups at the expense of
others in need of social housing, but also widened geographical and class
divisions. Moreover, being backed by the state, these programs had safer
conditions for debtors, creating a dierence between pre- and post-2009
household debtors. As Chap. 5 discusses, dierences between debtor
groups hindered broader collective mobilization, leaving the worst
aected debtors with limited options for organizing.
With government changes in 2012 and 2016, these programs became
a political battleeld. Under the Social Democratic Party (PSD) coali-
tions, from 2013, the First Home program only granted mortgages in the
national currency, thereby contributing to the slow decline of the domi-
nance of forex loans for households. After 2017, the two banks involved
in the Bauspar program were ned for not respecting the terms of their
contracts as partners of the state. With the return of the National Liberal
Party (PNL) government in 2019, these nes were forgiven as part of the
government’s publicly declared program to “make peace with the banks.”
Moreover, the two national political factions struggled over the inclusion
of lower-income groups in the First Home program: PSD supported a
version of the program dedicated to lower- to middle-income households
only, whereas PNL supported (and nally passed in 2020) a version of
the program dedicated to middle- to high-income clients. us, the pen-
etration of bank credit among lower-income groups remained very lim-
ited in Romania, and the majority of lower-income households were
stuck with smaller but more expensive and riskier hire-purchase loans
and debt on utility bills. On the other hand, similar to earlier capitalist
cycles in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, with signs of economic
growth since 2013, the “winners” of these policies, generally in the
middle- income category, also gained political power.
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

72
Since late 2015, these groups’ political power was expressed through
massive and lasting anticorruption protests and the successive rise of a
new neoliberal party, absorbing urban middle- to high-income groups.
Called the “Save Romania Union” (USR), this political party targeted the
Social Democratic Party, portraying it as the main source of corruption
and backwardness in the country. Taking a strong anticommunist stance,
USR attacked the poor, recipients of state benets, and rural residents as
corrupt PSD voters, demanding their constant surveillance. From the
beginning, it allied with the transnational capital seen as a source of
development, the liberal president, and neoliberal technocratic political
groups (such as those that later coalesced as the PLUS Party).
Anticorruption protests broke out in November 2015 after a deadly
re in a Bucharest concert club, and again in early 2017in response to
justice system legislation passed by the PSD government that was seen as
enabling corruption to be pardoned. ese mobilizations reinforced
middle- class political frameworks expressed in new neoliberal party poli-
tics. ey were manifested as periodic anticorruption demonstrations in
the largest Romanian cities until 2018. e topic of corruption has been
evident in public discourse since the Greek crisis, as it was one of the
mainstream explanations for the Greek debt situation. e anticorrup-
tion mobilizations were the most visible forms of contention after the
crisis in Romania. PSD, despite remaining popular among voters for
ending austerity measures in 2014 and its wage-led growth policies,
which slightly improved living conditions in 2017–2019 (Guga, 2019),
was losing ground. In its governing coalitions, it hardly increased the
national budget for housing programs and did not return the Labor or
Civil Codes to pre-austerity forms (Ilie & Lazăr, 2017). However, it con-
tinued to support the advancement of the middle-income categories thus
further contributing to class disparities by passing protective laws. e
in-kind debt repayment law, in 2016, aided mortgage debtors (a better
positioned group of debtors) to renegotiate and renance loans with bet-
ter conditions. Amendments to the Housing Law in 2017 granted privi-
leged access for defaulting mortgage holders to a special category of
public housing. In this context which protected and beneted the more
auent buyers, the new housing boom after 2015 was fueled by the buy-
to- rent investments of the urban middle class (Prot.ro, 2019).
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73
After 2019: Changes intheStructural
andPolitical Context ofHousing Contention
During thePandemic
In Hungary, the period after 2019 brought two main changes in the
structural and political context of housing contention: the eects of the
COVID-19 pandemic and the start of political campaigning for the 2022
parliamentary elections. e freeze of tourism due to the COVID-19
pandemic, together with general pressure on the population’s spending
capacity, brought a temporary decrease in housing prices. is was par-
ticularly felt in relation to rents, which decreased at an average of over
10% in Budapest, and up to 17% in inner Pest districts (KSH, 2021).
e eect on house prices has been milder, owing to a government mora-
torium on debt payments for consumer loans, which delayed the surge in
supply that could be caused by mass defaults (Penzcentrum.hu, 2021).
is step was also especially signicant for protecting the real estate sector
(which is economically and politically important to the government), as
more than 35% of household loans belonged to employees in the real
estate, tourism, and construction sectors, which suered a major freeze
due to the pandemic (Karas, 2021). While market actors and regulators
all expect a series of debt defaults once the moratorium is lifted, contin-
ued household lending and construction, driven by further state subsi-
dies and tax cuts, contributed to a strong market rebound in 2021,
accompanied by growing construction prices owing to energy costs, sup-
ply chain problems, and the lack of a workforce (MNB, 2021).
As Chap. 4 details, one measure that housing groups addressed during
the COVID-19 pandemic was a regulation that allowed local govern-
ments to limit short-term rentals, thereby easing pressure on Airbnb
apartments on the rental markets. e government’s motivation for this
move was to protect the state-backed tourism industry from Airbnb com-
petition in the middle of a sectoral crisis (Büttl, 2020). Although Airbnb
lobby groups have been successful in curbing reforms, reduced short-
term renting as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic is expected to push
more apartments onto the long-term rental market (Penzcentrum.
hu, 2021).
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

74
e government’s broader pandemic policies were marked by eorts to
avoid the political eects of a pandemic-related crisis before the 2022
parliamentary elections and to secure party actors’ economic grip on stra-
tegic resources in the face of potential electoral loss (Bódis, 2021). Other
than campaign communication, electoral politics was also evident in con-
icts with local governments held by the opposition coalition, which
won them in the 2019 elections.
In Budapest, several district-level opposition governments and the
municipal government headed by Mayor Gergely Karácsony were exam-
ples of a long-term alliance between opposition politics and antigovern-
ment protests over social issues against the Orbán regime. New economic
pressures on middle-class groups also sparked the interest of educated
youths for social issues, creating an opening for social demands in main-
stream liberal opposition discourse and contributing to a new leftist
political trend (Gagyi, 2021). Leftist housing activists were among the
main participants in post-2010 demonstrations and the newly formed
new leftist scene. In 2019, leftist housing activists’ framing of the housing
issue mainly focused on homelessness, social housing, and rent aord-
ability was part of several opposition candidates’ campaigns, including
that of Gergely Karácsony. As Chap. 4 shows, this alliance between
socially sensitive liberal opposition politics and left housing activism
aected the development of housing contention after 2019. e eects
ranged from practical interventions such as opposition mayors rejecting
anti-homeless regulations and municipal moratoriums on evictions to
highly politicized clashes such as the national government withdrawing
funds from local homeless advocacy institutions or the opposition’s cam-
paign against the development of a campus for the Chinese Fudan State
University.
In Romania, the clashes at the national political level continued during
the pandemic, with 2019 marking the removal of the PSD coalition from
government, the return of the National Liberal Party, and a new victory
for Klaus Iohannis as president. General and local elections followed in
2020, with the National Liberals maintaining leadership of the govern-
ment coalition. e party formed a government with new neoliberal
USR and PLUS parties (as minority partners), which illustrates the rapid
rise of these parties, representing the urban middle- to high-income
I. Florea et al.

75
groups. USR and PLUS candidates also gained mayoral positions in the
main cities such as Bucharest, some Bucharest districts, Timişoara, and
Braşov. Moreover, AUR, a new far-right party, entered parliament for the
rst time, in the context of very low voter turnout. In this national politi-
cal context, Romania reinforced its neoliberal integration path, mainly
based on creating favorable ground for FDI demands and on cheap labor
as its competitive advantage. In response, labor struggles have intensied
since 2019, with the main union confederations continuously organizing
protests and other events. eir protest frames started to include issues
connected to wages, such as living costs, housing costs, and housing con-
ditions and thus opened to collaborations with housing rights groups. As
the government has used the pandemic as a pretext to freeze the mini-
mum income when prices have been soaring since early 2020, struggles
over living costs have become more visible.
In housing policy, the long-term tendency to benet the narrow
middle- to-higher income category will probably continue. Its most recent
manifestation appears in the 2020 transformation of the “First Home”
program into the “New Home” program, designed for more expensive
homes and higher loans. e “New Home” program was attainable only
to those on higher incomes and was designed to include applicants who
already own property.
What is specic to this phase is the intensied privatization of vital
health and education services and the remaining state companies, with
the support of the new neoliberal parties. Moreover, Romania has negoti-
ated a 30-billion-euro nonrefundable allocation from the European
Commission for its 7-year National Plan for Recovery and Resilience, on
top of its access to the usual EU cohesion funds. us, there is increased
competition within the governing coalition and at the local level over
arrangements to manage and distribute this consistent funding. In 2020,
housing rights groups have successfully advocated for the inclusion of
social housing construction in this budget. However, the nal allocations
to be approved by the European Commission and implemented by the
government were still unknown by the end of 2021. Charities and
humanitarian NGOs are also lobbying to access funding programs within
the framework of the National Plan, advancing themselves as surrogates
for state services with the support of the neoliberal coalition.
3 The Structural Background of Housing Contention…

76
Another specic aspect of this phase is the anticorruption ethos ampli-
ed by the new neoliberal parties. is is manifested in the increased
policing of social benets and social services recipients, including tenants
of social housing (Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, 2021). At
the beginning of the pandemic, on the pretext of enforcing lockdown
measures, the police especially targeted those in poorer or informal hous-
ing areas (Vincze & Stoica, 2020). us, the anticorruption ideology’s
xation on lower-income groups is evident in direct policing pressure.
Until the end of 2021, the Ministry of EU funds was led by a USR Party
representative who in 2019 proposed a legislative change to imprison all
those with so-called communist ideas. is also signals a limited and even
risky environment for action for left-leaning groups and movements,
including those focusing on housing rights.
Conclusion: Long-term Structural Factors
intheDynamics oftheContention Field
is chapter reviewed long-term structural factors that have shaped the
dynamics of housing and housing-related contention in Bucharest and
Budapest. Many of these dynamics are common to the two cases, owing to
the two cities’ relatively similar position in the world economy and shared
socialist/postsocialist histories. One of the main factors that we emphasized
was the eects of urban–rural hierarchies, propelled by catching-up eorts
in the world-economic context and resulting in unequal internal develop-
ment, which manifested in historical rhythms of rural–urban labor migra-
tion and the peripheralization of surplus labor. Another factor was nancial
vulnerability and dependence, which is evident in the eld of housing as
both a lack of sucient funding for housing and housing-related house-
hold debt. We showed that within these limitations, housing relations in
the two capital cities have developed under conditions of a permanent lack
of capacity to meet the housing needs of the entire population, despite
these cities’ prominent positions in both investment and redistributive
policies at the national level. Two additional status-based factors that we
identied in the long-term governance of this problem were urban middle
classes’ capacity to obtain redistributive favors and the intersection of
I. Florea et al.

77
ethnic discrimination with poverty among the Roma, which have remained
the characteristics of property regimes as well as housing-related redistribu-
tive policies until today.
Reviewing the presocialist, socialist, and postsocialist periods, we
showed that housing poverty, informal dwelling and temporary housing
for labor (from bed rentals to workers’ hostels) have been characteristic of
the two housing systems from the rst modern urban booms and remain
so now. While socialist policies involved large-scale apartment construc-
tion, relatively broad institutionalization of temporary workers’ hostels,
and redistribution of existing housing stock that also favored the poor (as
in the case of inner-city nationalized rentals for Roma families), the paral-
lel boom in industrialization exceeded this broadened housing capacity.
us, socialist development remained marked by a gap between housing
needs and housing capacity. e commodication of housing after 1989
exacerbated this problem and opened the way for new forms of status-
based discrimination from evictions of Roma families from restituted
apartments to status-based dierentiations between debtors in dierent
standing in post-2008 crisis measures.
In addition to these similar long-term characteristics, our overview
also emphasized dierences between the two cases, pointing out how
local political regimes’ reactions to the same waves of global economic
pressure resulted in dierent economic regimes and housing policies on
the ground, as well as in dierent constellations of political polarization.
Chapters 4 and 5 delve deeper into the two cases, showing how local
initiatives to politicize housing tensions developed from and navigated
these contexts.
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© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_4
4
Housing Contention inBudapest
is chapter follows the main threads of housing-related tensions and
respective movements across the three main phases of Hungary’s postso-
cialist transformation described in Chap. 3: the change of regime and
transition in the 1990s, the debt-driven growth of the 2000s, and the
post-2010 period of national conservative supermajority governance. e
political expressions of these tensions vary across periods and eld posi-
tions—some being characterized more by silent coping, others by con-
tinuous organization or intermittent eruptions of demonstrations.
However, the tensions themselves are relatively stable across time, located
structurally either at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, where the more
extreme forms of housing poverty produced by commodication are evi-
dent, or in low- to middle-income groups, for whom housing access
through homeownership (the main route to housing access in a super-
homeownership system) remains limited, and who even as owners often
struggle to pay maintenance costs.
For housing poverty, the tensions in this chapter are mainly manifested
in struggles with homelessness, a lack of social housing, and two aspects
of the geographic peripheralization of low-income groups: evictions
related to urban regeneration and peri-urban informal dwellings. For

88
low- to middle-income groups, the chapter traces two main symptoms of
limited housing access: the problem of debt and the forex debtors’ move-
ment after 2008 and initiatives concerning cooperative and rental dwell-
ings (such as the Tenants’ Association, social housing agencies, and
cohabitation).
The 1990s: Hierarchical Privatization,
thePeripheralization ofPoverty,
andtheInstitutionalization
ofHomeless Assistance
As indicated in Chap. 3, the privatization of state housing was key to
shaping the unequal structures of the postsocialist housing system in sev-
eral ways. First, in addition to existing hierarchies of state housing distri-
bution, privatization arose in a hierarchical manner, providing more
“privatization gifts” to more auent households. Second, in inner-city
tenant houses dilapidated due to reduced maintenance budgets of state
maintenance companies, new owners inherited maintenance tasks but
seldom had the nancial means to tackle them. e privatization of social
housing by local governments to cover up budget decits signicantly
reduced the number of social rentals. Meanwhile, the liberalization of
utility prices, coinciding with a wave of unemployment and underem-
ployment during the transition crisis, made monthly costs unaordable
for many households. e closure of workers’ hostels and other forms of
state institutional housing immediately made homelessness starkly visible
within the city. e following section outlines the typical tensions and
conicts created by that situation, from the least visible to the explicitly
political.
The Silent Peripheralization ofHousing Poverty
Faced with the above mentioned processes, many newly unemployed
industrial workers, commuters, and low-income large families were
I. Florea et al.

89
pushed to move toward areas with lower housing costs—cheaper, run-
down inner-city districts, urban peripheries, or rural areas (Illés, 2006:
175). Local governments’ attempts at market-based urban regeneration
programs in inner-city districts—in a context where spontaneous market
processes produced insucient investment in poor areas, and state pro-
grams to promote investment partnerships with large investors remained
the main route to gentrication (Czirfusz etal., 2015)—added to this
eect. e new municipal urban rehabilitation plan of 1997 explicitly
prioritized owners, businesses, and investors over sitting tenants, and the
uneven distribution of municipal rehabilitation funds contributed to dif-
ferences between newly refurbished and newly impoverished areas
(Jelinek, 2019). e late socialist antigovernment consensus between
sociologist critics of urban poverty and planners eyeing dilapidating his-
torical inner-city districts split in this period. Experts previously engaged
in socialist rehabilitation programs now employed their expertise in pri-
vate consultant rms for market-based projects (Jelinek, 2019), while
sociologists emphasized the unfavorable social eects of market-based
urban rehabilitation (Erő etal., 1997).
One major result of housing peripheralization was the concentration
of urban poverty (with a high proportion of Roma families) in run-down
inner-city neighborhoods. Another result of peripheralized households’
eorts to stay close to the opportunities provided by capital was the
growth of informal dwellings in peri-urban areas. In research targeting
former allotment gardens in the eastern agglomeration of Budapest,
András Vigvári found that the rst and largest wave of households that
built informal dwellings in the area arrived in the early 1990s, having
been pushed out of more central locations owing to unemployment, util-
ity debt, and the closure of workers’ homes (Gagyi and Vigvári 2018).
As the following sections highlight, inner-city evictions and the self-
organization of homeless people produced conicts that catalyzed the
postsocialist institutionalization of social housing policies and homeless
assistance. e “trickling down” of housing poverty to peri-urban and
rural areas did not appear as a politicized issue in the early 1990s, but the
situations it created had long-term eects in terms of both silent coping
strategies and the politicization of poverty. e transformation of peri-
urban allotment gardens into informal dwelling areas started continued
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

90
throughout the next decades and became a regular receiver of new resi-
dents pushed out by successive waves of housing crises. e concentra-
tion of postsocialist poverty, and especially the Roma poor, in rural
pockets of underdevelopment became a recurring topic of social policy
debates, and ultimately a main reference point for anti-Roma discourses
promoted by new-right movements and the new-right Jobbik Party in
the 2000s (Szombati, 2018).
Responses toInner-City Housing Poverty
andHomelessness: Self-Advocacy, Volunteer Social
Work, andProfessional Homeless Assistance
As described in Chap. 3, by the late 1980s, homelessness had already
become the most visible and shocking aspect of housing problems. Eects
of the transformation crisis—as described in the introduction to this
chapter—only made the situation worse, while the cessation of police
repression made homelessness starkly visible in highly frequented inner-
city public spaces, propelling homelessness to the foreground of transi-
tional urban politics. is section discusses three main types of actors
involved in struggles around extreme housing poverty: aected people’s
own initiatives, professional social work activity by politically embedded
civil society groups, and volunteer helpers.
From the abovementioned three groups, those actors who assumed a
dominant role in the institutionalization of homeless assistance were pro-
fessional civil society groups with strong connections to new political
parties. Some of these initiatives involved former liberal intellectual dis-
sidents who were active in civic groups addressing issues of poverty, and
they later became important actors in liberal politics as politicians or
professional policymakers. e Foundation for the Support of the Poor
(SZETA) was the most emblematic of these groups. Péter Győri, a SZETA
activist and a sociologist working on housing, was one of the main found-
ers of organizations such as the Social Committee for the Homeless and
the Shelter Foundation, which were civic initiatives responding to crisis
situations and homeless people’s own actions. ey later became impor-
tant models and transmission points for broader social policy programs.
I. Florea et al.

91
Another part of professional civil society groups involved was charities
with connections to the Conservative Party (Hungarian Democratic
Forum) founded by the conservative wing of intellectual dissidents.
Unlike liberal dissident discourse and activism, engaging with extreme
forms of urban poverty such as homelessness or poverty linked to ethnic
discrimination, as in the case of the Roma, was less evident in the conser-
vative agenda. e social work profession, established after 1989, had
stronger links to liberal circles and was in conict with the conservatives
who formed the rst postsocialist government (“the problem of home-
lessness belonged to the opposition,” Győri & Matern, 1997: 113). e
most important partner in the eld of homeless assistance for conserva-
tive governments, the Hungarian Maltese Charity Service church charity
(Malta), was invited to form a partnership by the rst conservative gov-
ernment in 1990 when it was unable to manage an acute shortage of
allied professional organizations. (Other church charities also became
progressively active in homeless assistance, including the Hungarian
Evangelical Fellowship, led by a liberal dissident, Gábor Iványi.)
Promoted by professional civil society organizations, a complex system
of homeless assistance evolved in the following years, involving shelters,
drop-in centers, and social work programs. Homeless assistance became a
legal obligation for larger local authorities, and the general issue of home-
lessness was shifted from the realm of policing to social policy (Misetics,
2017b). Both Malta and the Shelter Foundation’s rst projects became
models for later social policies, and their founders built careers as policy-
makers and directors of institutions of homeless assistance and homeless-
ness prevention in Budapest and nationwide. Changes in the political
balance between their allied parties dened the development of these two
branches of professional homelessness initiatives. e rst wave of insti-
tutionalization in homeless assistance occurred under a conservative gov-
ernment, while Budapest was under liberal local government. As a result,
Malta became more focused on rural and national-level institutions,
while Budapest’s institutional system became dened by the line started
by Shelter Foundation, in collaboration with a liberal local government.
Despite dierences in political alliances, professional collaboration
remained good between the two branches, shaping social policy across
electoral cycles.
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

92
In addition to professional organizations, actions by people aected by
housing poverty played a key role in politicizing the issue, creating the
space for civic organizations to step in as negotiators. e founding of the
Social Committee for the Homeless was a reaction to the initiative of a
workers’ hostel resident opposing the Budapest Municipality’s plan for
signicant rent rises. is person, Tibor Ungi, became the only homeless
member of the Committee. Later, with the support of the Shelter
Foundation, he founded the newspaper Fedél Nélkül, written, edited, and
distributed by homeless people (Győri, 2010a: 42).
Homeless people also staged demonstrations in 1989 and 1990, as a
reaction to railway stations’ decisions to close their gates for the night
during winter. Former dissident intellectuals stepped in as mediators in
negotiations with the municipality, and as (co)organizers of new, often
short-lived interest groups (such as e National Front of the Poor, or the
National Council of the Disadvantaged; Sebály, 2021). SZETA and Péter
Győri played an important role in securing a former Workers’ Guard bar-
racks as a temporary home for the homeless people who in autumn 1989
protested the closure of Keleti railway station.
In the beginning, relations between homeless people and social work-
ers were unclear in the management of the barracks (Győri (2010a: 36)
quotes one of the inhabitants speaking to a social worker, saying, “What
are you doing here?” (…) “On what grounds do you guys tell me when I
can come in?”). Later, however, the barracks were established as the rst
ocial homeless shelter after 1989, run by the Shelter Foundation, an
NGO founded by the municipality and professional civil society groups.
Its daily operations were rst supported by volunteers, then by part-time
and full-time paid sta. Starting from this rst shelter, the activity of the
Shelter Foundation developed fast to include various branches of social
work and a growing network of shelters integrated through a common
agenda of social policy. From 1990, this process was helped by Péter
Győri’s work as a local government representative in the Budapest local
council. By 1991, the Shelter Foundation took over managing entry into
the municipality’s workers’ and nurses’ hostels and started to use them for
homeless housing—a process that involved conicts with the municipal-
ity as well as the hostels’ inhabitants. In 1993, under the professional
leadership of Péter Győri, the Budapest Methodological Center for Social
I. Florea et al.

93
Policy (BMSZKI) was founded as an integrated homeless service provider
for Budapest, with the municipality to maintain it.
Malta’s involvement with homelessness was also sparked by homeless
people’s actions. When railway stations again closed their gates in autumn
1990 and the situation started to become tense, the rst conservative gov-
ernment reached out to Malta. is choice was motivated by Malta’s good
professional reputation (e.g., it took care of the temporary housing of East
German refugees in 1989), its lack of obvious political involvement, and
its Christian ideological background that placed it close to that of the
government (Győri, 2010b: 133–135). Soon, with the support of the
Ministry of Social Welfare, Malta set up its rst homeless shelter.
Resistance by squatters to eviction was another movement by people
aected by housing poverty that professional organizations joined in vari-
ous ways. Poor families squatting in state apartments, usually of inferior
quality, became frequent during the late socialist crisis of state housing.
Evictions became widespread after privatization. As many of the urban
poor in Budapest were Roma, the eviction of squatters also had an ethnic
dimension. Roma organizations founded after the regime change put the
issues of housing poverty, evictions, and urban segregation on their
agenda (rst in Miskolc by the Committee against Ghettoes, and then in
Budapest by the Roma Civil Rights Foundation). SZETA and the Shelter
Foundation regularly provided legal and professional advice and staged
protests. One important—although unsuccessful—movement of com-
mon cause with the Roma Civil Rights Foundation was to oppose a law
that criminalized squatting in empty local government apartments in
1999. Malta also gained its rst homeless families’ shelter by joining pro-
tests against the eviction of 22 Roma families in the 14th district in 1991.
Seeking to avoid scandal and to get rid of the squatters, the local govern-
ment oered the building to Malta (Győri, 2010b: 136–137). After the
rst shelters, Malta developed into a large civic provider that worked in
partnership with the state, with a politically less controversial prole.
In addition to aected people and professional civic organizations, vol-
unteers also played a signicant role in the process of institutionalizing
homeless assistance. Citizens assisted homeless demonstrations, and the
rst civic institutions of homeless assistance were largely built by unskilled
volunteers. As Győri and Matern (1997: 123) put it: “Characteristically
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

94
enough, the marginal groups of the homeless were helped by relatively
marginalized people. Some helpers, however, were social workers, soci-
ologists, teachers, housewives, divorced mothers, and young people seek-
ing a place to live.”
One main characteristic of the institutionalization of homeless assis-
tance that stands out in retrospect is that professional actors became
dominant over volunteers and homeless people (“we made them into cli-
ents,” Győri reected on the formation of the Shelter Foundation (Győri,
2010a: 35)). Professional groups’ strong political connections also implied
that the institutionalization of homeless support was informed by the
dynamics of party politics, although professionals maintained collabora-
tions across political divisions. Reacting to these factors, the criticism of
top-down structures of homeless assistance, as well as links between
homelessness-related activism and party politics, assumed an important
role in successive forms of contention.
Another notable factor that stands out in the long run is the structural
limits that homeless assistance encountered in the overwhelming force of
housing commodication and shrinking social housing policy. Writing in
2003, Péter Győri characterized BMSZKI as
“an institution of a regime change where (…) the baselines of the new
market economy have not been complemented yet by the guarantees of
solidarity. (…) is placed BMSZKI (…) in a situation where it simultane-
ously has to answer the imperative not to let anyone freeze to death and
face the problems of the masses who are losing their safe housing—without
having the means, as a social care institution, to solve them” (Győri, 2003: 5).
An important aspect of these limitations were the tensions between
homeless assistance as an insucient measure to help the poorest, and its
broader background in the housing access problems of low- to middle-
income earners. is tension has already made themselves felt in the early
process of homeless assistance formation. ose “nurses, teachers, boiler
heaters or cleaners” (Győri, 2003: 44) who lived in the municipality’s
workers’ and nurses’ hostels and resented the hostels’ being opened for
homeless housing were part of those social strata. At the same time, the
potential for a broader alliance between these forms of housing activists
I. Florea et al.

95
was also signaled by the presence of low-income volunteers who engaged
in homeless assistance initiatives. How struggles concerning the harshest
forms of housing poverty relate to low- to middle-income earners’ hard-
ships in accessing aordable housing remained an important question in
housing politicization in subsequent decades.
Participative Initiatives inSocial Housing andSocial
Self-Build
In addition to the top-down professionalization tendency in social hous-
ing policies and homeless assistance, initiatives to provide solutions for
housing poverty through participative solutions were also conducted by
civil society and professional groups. Important alliances between social
work professionals and people aected by housing poverty toward a hori-
zontal management of social housing were formed in the seventh district
in 1992–1993. ese attempts only achieved limited success (securing up
to nine apartments for families in need). However, the second, the Circle
of Applicants for Social Housing, entailed an innovative progressive
model whereby local government social workers helped social housing
applicants to organize not only as a pressure group but also as a social
housing agency. is agency was run in partnership with the municipal-
ity, with the participation of people in need of social housing (Sebály,
2021). Although short-lived, this model served as an important example
of a participative model for social housing agencies.
In addition to conicts over social housing and policy, civil society-
based house-building programs started in the 1990s. Mostly aimed at the
rural poor and (sometimes urban) large families, the Home and Homeland
Foundation used the international model of Habitat for Humanity to
help those in need by building houses, oering technical and nancial
help combined with self-build (also in Budapest). Rooted in former
right-wing dissident circles, this initiative was connected to conservative
politics, and it emphasized local popular traditions of house-building
based on mutual help (kaláka) next to a need for active self-help by poor
people themselves. In 1996, Habitat broke with Home and Homeland
owing to its lack of transparency and to its connections with the extreme
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

96
right. Habitat established an ocial branch in Hungary. Habitat Hungary
continued social house-building programs until 2008, when it turned
more toward maintenance, nance, and policy work.
The Dissipation ofStruggles Based onState Tenant
Status: TheTenants’ Association
One of the main forms of organization that addressed the housing prob-
lems of low- to middle-income earners in the regime change years was the
Tenants’ Association. Founded in 1988, the Association was formed to
represent the problems of tenants in state-owned Budapest apartments,
who faced mounting problems with maintenance owing to cuts in state
funds that reduced the capacity of state maintenance companies (Győri
& Matern, 1997).
e Association’s membership grew to several thousand in a few
months; it managed to win several legal cases and enjoyed relatively broad
media success owing to the salience of the maintenance issue and a gen-
eral atmosphere of dissent against socialist governance (Győri & Matern,
1997: 108–109). However, in the long run, its possibilities remained
dened by the contradictions of market transition. In a general situation
of lack of funds because of public debt pressure, late socialist mainte-
nance companies were incapable of meeting tenants’ needs even in the
face of organized pressure. Instead, the problem of maintenance was
eventually “solved” by externalizing it to tenants themselves by privatiz-
ing the apartments. As better housing units were privatized rst, with the
progress of the privatization process, the remaining state tenants con-
sisted increasingly of those in poorer social strata. When facing the
dilemma whether to continue to represent tenants and try to survive on
a member basis where members are less able to pay membership fees, or
rather to follow the interests of the most active members who now looked
toward privatizing their own apartments, the Association decided to turn
into a multiple interest representation group in the eld of housing main-
tenance. is led to hardships in formulating a coherent agenda. Adding
to that, the political alliances the Association formed through closed-
door lobbying during the last years of the Kádár era backred after the
I. Florea et al.

97
regime change, when housing policy responsibilities were shifted between
ministries as part of a struggle between old bureaucracy and new expert
groups linked to new parties. As a result, the Association lost its status as
interest representation partner for housing politics (Győri & Matern,
1997: 116).
A Long-Lasting Structure ofMaintenance-Related
Interest Representation: TheAlliance
ofHousing Cooperatives
Another, more enduring organization that dealt with maintenance issues
for low- to middle-income social strata during the regime change was e
National Alliance of Housing Cooperatives. e Alliance was set up as
part of the top-down process of creating housing cooperatives by the
socialist state. As explained in Chap. 3, housing cooperatives involved a
structure wherein the state provided plots, the national savings bank
acted as investor and developer, and residents became owners of their
apartments. e cooperative format was maintained as a nationwide top-
down system of maintenance and interest representation. e National
Alliance of Housing Cooperatives acted as the top coordination body of
this system and was an ocial partner of the government in shaping
housing policy.
While the number of housing cooperatives remained relatively stable
in the decades following the regime change (as some were liquidated but
others split), the Alliance has lost members (from 1200 cooperatives in
1990 to 800in 2018, LOSZ 2018). e cessation of top-down funding
shifted the economic burden of representation onto the shoulders of
members, which created a vicious circle with the gradual erosion of the
Alliance’s special partnership with authorities. is situation also contrib-
uted to maintaining a hierarchical operation with relatively low participa-
tion by members and active expert representation at the top. Nevertheless,
the Alliance remained a strong player in both housing and cooperative
policy for about two decades after the regime change. Its inuence was
mostly exerted in closed-door negotiations with government bodies and
other stakeholders, to which the Association was invited as the main
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

98
representative body and civil expert on housing cooperatives and later
private condominiums (the legal form that most previous state tenant
houses took after privatization), thus representing hundreds of thousands
of households. Only after 1998, when the rst Orbán government started
to dismantle earlier systems of interest negotiation, did this position of
the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives start to erode. After 2010, the
supermajority Orbán government canceled the system of social consulta-
tion and introduced a new system of invitation-based “strategic partner-
ships.” Even here, the Alliance’s remaining inuence and connections
were sucient to make it the only organization to receive a strategic part-
nership in the eld of housing management and maintenance. However,
by this point the partnership was reduced to an empty form: the Alliance
could comment on policy plans, but its comments were rarely considered
(LOSZ 2018).
In terms of housing privatization, a main issue from the perspective of
the Alliance was that it was carried out through forming private condo-
miniums instead of cooperatives. is allowed the state to sidestep the
expertise and interest representation power of the then still strong coop-
erative network and outsource mounting maintenance costs to new own-
ers, often without their knowledge:
“ere was an enormous interest in privatizing these [buildings degraded
due to lack of funds for maintenance], so the state doesn’t have to carry on
the responsibility. (…) is meant that there was a sudden explosion in the
number of condominiums in Hungary (…) due to more than 800,000
privatized apartments—and the state made use of the fact that these new
condominiums didn’t have any interest representation. Which turned out
to be a great problem for the new owners, because it was only when the rst
general meeting of the rst year arrived that they realized the extreme sums
they were supposed to spend on maintenance and refurbishment, for which
condominiums had no available funds. And by the time they realized this,
the story was already over; there was no buyback obligation by the state.”
(LOSZ 2018)
By 2000, the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives decided to include the
interest representation of condominiums, too, into its activities. is
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99
boosted their membership to more than 1400 cooperatives and condo-
miniums (LOSZ 2020). Besides providing welcome aid to its eroding
inuence, this move made the Alliance the largest organization address-
ing the problems of housing maintenance that have accumulated since
the 1980s and swept under the carpet by privatization.
For a long time, the Alliance remained the most signicant organized
representative that dealt with housing-related problems of low- to middle-
income earners. Although its main focus was on maintenance, its activity
also extended to proposing new forms of housing access. Reecting on
the conditions of their constituency and inspired by examples from inter-
national networks they entered in the early 1990s, the Alliance worked
out proposals for aordable rental cooperative housing, and from 1998,
it attempted to introduce them into housing policy.
Mortgage-Based Homeownership: ASilent Challenge
As explained in Chap. 3, under the super-homeownership system created
by privatization, acquiring a home became a challenge for new house-
holds. After the market freeze in the transformation crisis, reforms suc-
cessfully established institutional frameworks for the private housing
market. Some public funds were allocated to social housing construction
and reducing utility prices, and some to savings benets targeted at mid-
dle classes (Misetics, 2017a: 275). However, these measures did little to
cover the unmet need for about 40,000 new apartments by the end of the
1990s (LOSZ 2018). e Orbán government’s state-aided housing loans
boosted housing lending for middle-income strata after 1998, causing a
rise in new constructions, but the subsequent socialist government dis-
continued the loan subsidy program owing to lack of funds in 2004. e
long-accumulated demand for housing loans in low- to middle-income
groups contributed to a boom in risky foreign-currency (forex) loans in
the second half of the 2000s, creating the conditions for a debt crisis
after 2008.
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100
The 2000s: TheMortgage Bubble andHousing
Contention inLeft- andRight-Leaning
Anti-Neoliberal Movements
In terms of housing struggles, the most important development of the
2000s was the mortgage bubble that aected hundreds of thousands of
households and grew into a national economic stability problem after
2008. Other manifestations of housing poverty and the housing access
problem also invited various forms of contention. In the context of hous-
ing movements, a major new element was the rise of broader rightist and
leftist movements that questioned the legitimacy of the postsocialist neo-
liberal system. ese movements constituted important reference points
for housing initiatives and a source of alliances for activists.
Social Urban Rehabilitation Efforts
While urban rehabilitation in the 1990s prioritized market-based devel-
opment, the 2000s brought a reorientation of professional actors toward
the inclusion of social aspects. is was due to increasing acknowledg-
ment of the social eects of previous regeneration programs and to EU
cohesion funds after Hungary’s accession in 2004. As Jelinek (2019)
explains, cohesion funds were conceived to counteract the polarizing
eects of European neoliberalization and favored exactly the type of
socially sensitive urban rehabilitation programs that Hungarian planners
and sociologists favored at the turn of the decade. e Magdolna Program
for inclusionary urban regeneration in the eighth district of Budapest was
the rst such program, becoming a national model for rehabilitation pro-
grams funded during the 2007–2013 EU period. While in the long term,
the program’s social aspect had limitations (owing to conicts with con-
servative local governments as well as to market-based real estate appre-
ciation) (Jelinek, 2019), its long-term involvement with social integration
in the district created a base of locally embedded civic networks that
assumed an important role inlocal oppositional politics by the end of
the 2010s.
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Real Estate Speculation
If the eighth district was the main example of social urban rehabilitation
through the Magdolna Project, political scandals made the seventh dis-
trict the most famous case of real estate speculation in the 2000s. is
central district with many historical monument buildings in a dilapi-
dated state was the site of the rst urban rehabilitation program during
the 1980s. After privatization, the contrast between its historical value
and run-down state was particularly apparent in houses owned by the
local government. During the 2000s, scandals erupted around the local
government’s handling of such buildings. In a series of cases, the local
government withdrew maintenance to force out tenants and bring down
prices, and then it sold buildings to companies connected to local gov-
ernment members at cheap prices. ese assets were then sold to oshore
companies and from them to foreign buyers (NOL 2008).
While many tenants were pushed out of the inner city by this process,
the scandals bore less of a social than a party political character, with
socialist mayor György Hunvald being sentenced to jail in 2008, and
several liberal and Fidesz representatives also being investigated. ÓVÁS!,
an association of planners, historians, and other intellectuals, stressed the
loss of the historic core of the Jewish Quarter. Together with the National
Oce for Heritage Protection and Budapest’s chief architect, they
opposed the local government’s rehabilitation plan that allowed the
destruction of heritage buildings to make space for new investments.
Despite their complaint, the plan was voted in by a majority of Socialist
Party and Fidesz representatives (ÓVÁS!, 2008).
ÓVÁS! also supported another type of action that thematized the dis-
trict’s shady deals. Between 2004 and 2006, the squatter group Centrum
occupied several buildings in the inner city, including the aected area of
the seventh district. As an anarchist group embedded in the broader alter-
globalization scene, Centrum framed occupations as eorts to open an
autonomous space within the capitalist market. For the (relatively short)
time of the occupations, Centrum operated the buildings as showcases of
an alternative anticapitalist movement culture—from free meals and hor-
izontal meetings to art shows and information distribution (Gagyi,
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

102
2016). Although Centrum symbolically sided with tenants against real
estate speculation, and Centrum members’ other activities involved soli-
darity actions with the homeless (like Food not Bombs! or the Night of
Solidarity), their direct alliances primarily included intellectual groups
like ÓVÁS!, alter-globalist activists, and NGOs, as well as cultural work-
ers who supported the idea of squats owing to their experiences in Western
capitals.
While Centrum’s attempts to establish a culture of political squatting
in Budapest were not successful, in the emptied buildings of the inner
seventh district, several pubs appeared that used the squatter aesthetic as
a means to achieve a cheap yet cool design. ese were established by
start-up entrepreneurs from the cultural scene, and they soon started to
operate as busy cultural and nightlife centers (Csizmady & Olt, 2014).
ese “ruin pubs” of Budapest later grew into a major attraction for tour-
ists brought in by newly established cheap airlines. In the face of this new
inux of party tourism, the “ruin pubs” worked as a rst wave of gentri-
cation that soon grew into an unstoppable source of “overtourism” in
the district (Smith etal., 2019). By 2021, the few large ruin pubs that
remained from the 2000s era constitute a minority among a sea of com-
mercial entertainment venues, hostels, and Airbnb apartments in the
area. e transformation of the district is a continuous point of conict
with remaining permanent residents, while Fidesz-related companies’
takeover of commercial spaces meets fading resistance from previous local
entrepreneurs—many facing bankruptcy owing to pandemic-related
lockdowns.
New Types ofHomeless Advocacy: Man ontheStreet
andtheCity Is forall
By the second half of the 2000s, a new activist group began to thematize
the issue of homelessness as a political question. Inspired by the US tradi-
tion of community organization and embedded in a wave of urban activ-
ism connected to the alter-globalization movement, activists of the
Hungarian branch of the international Humanist Movement funded the
organization called Man of the Street in 2004. Working as an activist
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103
group of 10–15 members, their aim was to break the issue of housing
poverty out of the frames of charity, institutionalized homeless assistance,
and social policy, and present it as a political issue that concerns all citi-
zens (Udvarhelyi 2008). Aiming to educate participants to engage per-
sonally with political issues, Man on the Street’s most successful event
was a regular vigil held in a busy inner-city passageway, where homeless
people and supporting activists spent the night together. In addition to
political communication, the event’s main aim was to create a situation
where homeless and non-homeless people could spend time together and
communicate.
Man on the Street wished to reclaim politics from the institutionalized
realm of electoral politics, and engagement with homelessness from the
institutionalized systems of social care and social policy. is stance,
backed by the direct action focus of the 2000s wave of the alter-globalist
movement, and in many ways similar to the dissident activism of late
socialism, was taken by Man of the Street as a claim for renewal addressed
to the social institutions built by former dissidents:
“Man on the Street introduced a completely new framework and practice
of civil participation when at our demonstrations average (and mostly
young) citizens with no ‘expertise’ and without any obvious aliation to
any professional organization or political party started making demands
toward all levels of government and the general public about an issue that
had previously been dened strictly as a ‘problem of the social worker’”
(Udvarhelyi 2008: 160).
While Man on the Street represented a turn toward grassroots horizontal
politics, it still operated on a middle-class base. In a signicant move in
2009, Man on the Street activists together with homeless people created
the organization e City is For All (Misetics 2017). is was not a uni-
directional process initiated by Man of the Street activists, and theirs was
not the only organizational expertise. As Gyula Balog, cofounder of e
City is For All, aected by homelessness explained:
“For 14 years, I was an activist organizer with Alcoholics Anonymous. I got
to know Man on the Street in 2006, and when I understood that they are
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

104
made up solely by intellectual youngsters, I told them to fuck o. en in
2009 they found me again and proposed organizing something together.
So, this is how e City is For All came together. (…) In socialist times, I
used to work in agitation. I was a propagandist; I went to training sessions,
I worked as a journalist, and basically I was doing community organizing
my whole life, so this type of work suited me.” (e City is For All 2018)
e core steering group of e City is For All consists of 30–50 people.
With membership uctuation, the organization has had hundreds of
members over the years. e group has a policy of not formalizing its
status legally. Its constitution aims to maintain a majority of homeless
members and an internal organization where leadership roles are held by
homeless people (Misetics 2009, Udvarhelyi 2012). One illustrative
group policy following from that principle is that only homeless mem-
bers can represent the group publicly. e City is For All’s denition of
the issue of homelessness is primarily political; it denes housing depriva-
tion as a violation of the right to housing. In line with this approach,
while it provides some forms of direct assistance, more typically it uses
methods of protest such as campaigning, occupations, and anti-eviction
chains to support its political demands.
Since 2009, e City is for All has grown into one of the most inu-
ential activist organizations in the postcrisis waves of progressive activ-
ism. roughout the 2010s, it created a strong network of volunteers and
allied organizations and has spawned a series of sister organizations by
institutionalizing particular directions of its activities. ese organiza-
tions are Street Lawyer, a group of lawyers providing legal counseling and
representation; the From Street to Housing Association, an NGO that
collaborates with local governments to renovate run-down social housing
units and uses them to house homeless families and which operates a
social housing agency and temporary work agency for homeless people;
the School of Public Life, which oers training in activism and advocacy
across the country; and Living Independently—In a Community, a grass-
roots disability rights group (Udverhelyi 2018: 5–6). rough its cam-
paigns and by broadening its alliances, e City is For All became a
central actor in the new left political scene that started to develop during
the 2000s. Both its claims for housing rights and its model for
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105
community self-organization became important inspirations for opposi-
tion politics after 2010.
Debtors’ Organization during theForex
Mortgage Crisis
By 2009, hundreds of thousands of families who took up foreign
currency- denominated (forex) loans in Swiss Francs during the 2000s
saw their monthly budgets destabilized by the sudden spike in their
installments caused by the sudden appreciation of CHF versus HUF—a
situation made graver by the depreciation of their houses as collateral
owing to the freeze of the housing market. Soon, debtors started to orga-
nize into information groups to learn about the nancial and legal condi-
tions of their situation and to nd ways to resolve it. While some groups
continued information sharing and mutual support (Chamber of
Debtors1, 2018), others initiated collaborations with lawyers over a
growing number of mortgage-related court cases (Chamber of Debtors
2018, T.A., 2018, Kásler, 2016), or organized street demonstrations and
actions against evictions. To express their demands in political form,
most of these groups relied on the vocabulary of nationalist anti-
neoliberalism, which by this time had become the dominant framework
for expressing popular grievances in the face of postsocialist neoliberal
politics.
In its 2010 election campaign, the issue of forex debt was merged into
Fidesz’s political narrative of a “national freedom ght” against foreign
powers and particularly against nancial capital. After the elections, help-
ing forex mortgage crisis victims resist foreign banks became a political
message by which the new supermajority Fidesz government continued
to address the social grievances previously voiced by new-right move-
ments. In addition to consultations with the Hungarian Banking
Association, the government conducted public consultations with repre-
sentatives of debtors’ advocacy groups such as White Chimney Sweepers,
Home Defenders, and the People’s Financial Supervisory Authority
(Index 2009). When communicating the preparation of debt crisis mea-
sures after 2010, Viktor Orbán himself used language similar to that of
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

106
debtors’ groups, claiming that those who took forex mortgages were
“deceived” by the banks (Napi Gazdaság, 2011). In practice, however, as
explained in Chap. 3, the measures served elite and upper middle-class
interests, and debtor groups soon found themselves in a position where
they needed to oppose a government that spoke their own political
language.
Plans forRental Housing Development
Addressing another aspect of the problem of housing access for low- to
middle-income households—the same problem from which the forex
debt crisis emerged—the Alliance of Housing Cooperatives worked
throughout the 2000s to integrate its proposals for rental housing into
broader collaborations with successive Socialist–Liberal coalition govern-
ments. e Alliance employed its knowledge of international cooperative
rental models and its expertise in Hungarian cooperatives and condo-
miniums, including issues of maintenance, energy eciency, and social
policy aspects such as rental subsidies (LOSZ 2018). Other expert groups
were also included in the process, examining the implications of demo-
graphic projections, nancing, industrial structure, local production of
construction materials, or issues of labor supply such as professional
training. is complex strategy for housing construction, which included
rental housing, was abandoned in 2009 owing to the nancial crisis and
the political delegitimization and removal of socialist Prime Minister
Ferenc Gyurcsány.
After 2010: Housing Struggles
intheOrbán Regime
e two most visible conicts in housing struggles after 2010 developed
in the aftermath of the forex mortgage crisis and the government’s crimi-
nalization of homelessness. Meanwhile, a new boom in the housing mar-
ket after 2015 produced a spike in real estate prices, which renewed the
pressure of peripheralization on the poor and created growing
I. Florea et al.

107
dissatisfaction among middle-class youth. In terms of movement context,
struggles around housing poverty and middle-class housing problems
were connected to both new left and opposition politics throughout the
opposition movements of the 2010s and became central issues in the
2019 local elections.
On assuming power, Fidesz started a reorganization of the economy in
favor of a state-based national oligarchy. Its symbolic politics still hon-
ored the discourse of the new-right anti-neoliberal movement wave of the
2000s, but the eect of its practices was to limit and fragment new-right
movement organizations and political structures. is shift eectively
stied the voices of groups that had previously politicized social griev-
ances in a nationalist anti-neoliberal framework. is dynamic also
aected forex debtors’ groups. Meanwhile, Fidesz stepped up anti-poor,
anti-migrant, and anti-minority politics as a means to reinforce the views
of the Hungarian majority that its governance benets. e criminaliza-
tion of homelessness was part of this tendency.
Forex Mortgage Debtors’ Advocacy after 2010
In the early years following its electoral victory in 2010, Fidesz presented
its debt management program as a process that would save Hungarian
borrowers from “unfair conditions” set by foreign banks and Socialist–
Liberal governments. However, as explained in Chap. 3, in practice its
measures served to restabilize the economy and the banking system, and
gain space for national capital in banking. Debtor groups soon started to
criticize the measures for their lack of eective help, and later remem-
bered their role in Fidesz’s political campaign with bitter disillusionment
(Baranyai 2018: 59–60). Jobbik, an opposition party with strong con-
nections to former right-wing movements that also had social demands,
expressed its support for debtors in the form of speeches, participation in
anti-eviction live chains, and by providing institutional help such as orga-
nizing a parliamentary hearing for debtors in 2012. However, facing a
supermajority government, Jobbik was unable to provide debtors with
eective help, and its support later came to be seen by many debtors’
advocates as mere electoral rhetoric.
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108
e main institutional channel through which debtors could contest
their situation was litigation, which became the main front of their strug-
gle. Debtors led around 60,000 lawsuits between 2013 and 2016
(Portfolio, 2017). As most debtors lacked expertise in the nancial and
legal complexities of forex mortgaging, the rst movement leaders to
emerge were typically debtors who could eectively interpret and contest
their situation. While Csizmady etal. (2019) found the most common
education level among debtors to be vocational school, our interviews
conrm Szabó’s (2018) observation that leaders are typically small entre-
preneurs, administrative personnel, or (often rst-generation) profession-
als. Leaders often achieved their status through their own legal cases
against banks, which became encouraging examples for others. Over
time, experts who did not have forex loans themselves—lawyers, judges,
and some politicians—also joined the struggle. Lawyers formed groups
with shared experience of cases and collaborated in trials. As a lawyer
working for banks in the rst half of the 2010s, Lajer (2019) mentions
that coordination among debtors regarding litigation far superseded that
between banks. At the same time, instances of irrelevant or false legal
advice as well as proteering by selling clients standard plaint services
were also present (Kuti 2019, T.G., 2018).
e structure of the movement consisted of small groups organized
around dierent leaders. Intergroup politicking, including self-serving
competitions between leaders, maintained long-term fragmentation in
the movement. e number of actively engaged members in the groups
remained small, rarely exceeding ten, while their social media groups
reached several hundred. e largest demonstration, organized by Árpád
Kásler, a debtor who obtained the rst favorable ruling against a bank,
reached 10,000 attendees in 2013, while most demonstrations remained
within several thousand or hundreds. However, what is notable in con-
trast to post-2010 protests is that debtors’ demonstrations spread across
municipalities and smaller cities across the country and were not limited
to the capital.
e path of debtors’ litigation was eectively cut by a series of Supreme
Court rulings and following legislation in 2013–2014, by providing a
retroactive legal denition of forex lending that annihilated debtors’ main
arguments against the legality of loan contracts. ey dened the debtors’
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109
intent as a desire to take greater risks for cheaper loans (thus negating the
argument that banks provided insucient information on risks) and
introduced the possibility to correct contracts retroactively by eliminat-
ing extra costs unilaterally imposed by banks (thus dismissing the argu-
ment that exchange rate charges and interest rates unilaterally imposed by
banks were unfair and contracts thereby invalid). After the rst forex loan
law, 13,000 debtors’ lawsuits were closed. After the retroactive redeni-
tion of the borrowers’ intent in forex contracts, most remaining debtors’
suits out of the around 60,000 started since 2011 were lost (Madari 2018).
As explained in Chap. 3, the debt management measures that were
introduced based on this legislation (mainly the recalculation of debt
based on Central Bank medium rates and the conversion of forex debt to
forint) helped wealthier debtors and aided domestic actors to gain a larger
share of the domestic nancial market but provided little help to low- to
middle-income debtors in arrears. After the Forint conversion, the gov-
ernment communicated that the forex debt problem had been solved.
Remaining problematic debts were purged from banks’ portfolios through
outsourcing to debt collection companies. In this context, some lawyers
sought solutions by appealing to the European Court of Justice. Debtors’
activist groups continued their self-help and protest actions in an atmo-
sphere of growing fatigue and desperation. After the unfavorable Supreme
Court rulings, their protests targeted government buildings, banks, and
bailis’ oces as well as the homes of powerful gures of the political–
economic regime such as Viktor Orbán or Hungarian bank CEO Sándor
Csányi (Index 2013, Ittlakunk.hu, 2013, Krónika 2016, Kuti 2019).
While marginalized in Fidesz-dominated media, debtors’ protests were
also ridiculed in liberal opposition media for their protest style and lack
of nancial expertise. ey were also described as a threat due to the
extreme political right’s support for their cause (444.hu, 2013; Index,
2010). Faced with legal and political obstruction and slowed by mem-
bers’ economic hardships, debtor activism lost heart and was reduced to
the most active core of the remaining groups. For the parliamentary elec-
tions of 2018, most of these groups entered an alliance called the Chamber
of Debtors. Although this was the largest alliance in their history, its
outreach was limited by individual groups’ small size and low mobiliza-
tion power; its inauguration demonstration only amounted to a few
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

110
hundred people. In an attempt to turn to political means after other
forms of struggle were rendered ineective, the Chamber of Debtors
reached out to all opposition parties and asked them to sign their propos-
als.1 After Fidesz’s supermajority victory in the 2018 elections, this politi-
cal wing of the Chamber was discouraged. Some members continued to
work through other means, including new collaborations with the
Socialist Party and (so far unsuccessful) attempts to reach out to the
European Parliament to make the forex debt issue part of the EU’s anti-
corruption investigations of Hungary.
While debtors’ groups produced a signicant volume of bottom-up
expertise on their situation (Kiss, 2018), their struggles remained marked
by a strong discrepancy between the levels of expertise drawn on by banks
and regulators and those available to aected debtors. In addition to
existing power dierences, this discrepancy also highlights a lack of alli-
ances with high-level critical expertise, which dierentiates these strug-
gles from other post-2008 anti-debt movements, such as the Croatian
Frank Association (Rodik, 2015), the Spanish Platform of Mortgage
Victims (Sabaté, 2016), or the international Change Finance movement.
Apart from the fact that better-situated debtors (to whom higher-level
expertise was more readily available) were helped by debt management
policies and thus were not motivated to engage in conict, this lack of
alliances was also due to political factors. Despite some attempts to build
connections with debtors’ movements—the Hungarian Social Forum
was part of the initial coalition around Home Defenders, the student
movement HaHa organized an Occupy event together with some debt-
ors’ groups, and e City is For All participated in Debtors’ Chambers’
meetings—leftist groups were discouraged from forming such coalitions
by right-wing rhetoric, the focus on homeownership, and debtors’ resis-
tance to taking on homelessness as their own issue. Meanwhile, liberal
experts and civic initiatives who engaged with the debt crisis considered
forex debt to be an unfortunate but legal construct and instead focused
on helping debtors to regain their capacity to pay.
1 e proposals included a ban on evictions, the withdrawal of forex loan laws, making housing a
constitutional right, and several proposals for institutional changes that could reduce the risk of
debt crises (Adóskamara 2018).
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111
The Criminalization ofHomelessness andtheInclusion
ofHousing Poverty Struggles inOpposition Politics
As explained in Chap. 3, in 2010 the Fidesz government entitled local
governments to ban homeless people from designated areas. First applied
in the eighth district of Budapest, this law was soon complemented by
Budapest Municipality, which introduced a ban on sleeping in public
spaces in 2011. Large civic organizations working in homeless assistance,
social policy experts, and e City is For All condemned the criminaliza-
tion of homelessness and called for social measures to ease housing pov-
erty instead. e most visible action was an occupation of eighth district
mayor Máté Kocsis’ oce in November 2011 by e City is For All and
their allies. Occupants were evicted and charged with misdemeanors, but
the event was largely publicized. Kocsis rejected demonstrators’ claims,
stating that they wanted to let people sleep on the street while the munic-
ipality sought to oer them solutions and was spending on new shel-
ters—a reference to the program on new shelters with detention functions
mentioned in Chap. 3 (Index, 2011).
In December 2011, parliament made living in public spaces illegal
nationally, and prosecutions, including the issuance of nes, started
against thousands of people (Udvarhelyi, 2014: 823). e City is For All
and its allies organized demonstrations and petitions, pressuring the
Constitutional Court to reject the law. As explained in Chap. 3, the
Constitutional Court ruled that punishing the homeless for being home-
less is unconstitutional; but in March 2013, an amendment to the con-
stitution was passed by the supermajority government that allowed bans
on living in public spaces, making Hungary the rst country to constitu-
tionalize the criminalization of homelessness (Udvarhelyi, 2014). e
City is For All, along with human rights lawyers’ groups and other allies
led a case against anti-homeless legislation at the European Court of
Human Rights, continued to monitor legal actions against the homeless
and organized petitions and calls for action nationally and international-
ly.2 While these eorts could not change the anti-homeless regulation
2 In 2012 and 2013, UN special envoys condemned the criminalization of homelessness in
Hungary. In 2013, e City is For All participated in a hearing at the European Parliament, repre-
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

112
that had been written into the constitution, they achieved several results.
e City is For All won a court case against the demolition of homeless
people’s shacks in 2014, creating a precedent that reduced the number of
demolitions in subsequent years. It also collaborated with the Budapest
Police in reducing anti-homeless discrimination in identity checks (e
City is For All 2017). In 2017, e City is For All’s data showed that
although the law on rough sleeping as a misdemeanor was still in place, it
was no longer enforced (e City is For All 2017).
In 2018, a further aggravation of anti-homeless regulations was intro-
duced into the seventh modication of the constitution, which made
living in public space a misdemeanor punishable by incarceration. is
time, the Constitutional Court accepted the measure, despite the Shelter
Foundation reporting that shelters operate at full capacity nationally and
cannot provide new placements (Habitat 2019). While the new measure
did not mention shacks, police had been patrolling and distributing leaf-
lets to people living in shacks before it came into force (Kovács, 2019).
Several professional groups, from lawyers, social workers, and psycholo-
gists to medical doctors expressed their opposition to the law (Merce.hu,
2018). Social policy experts and human rights lawyers expressed their
opposition to a new court practice whereby homeless people were only
allowed to attend their own trial through a video call from the prison
(Győri, 2018). Even though earlier established dierences in terms of
political alliances were apparent in professional civic organizations’ reac-
tions, their condemnation of the constitutionalization of anti-homeless
legislation was unanimous. Miklós Vecsei, president of the Hungarian
Maltese Charity Service, also spoke against it (HVG, 2018). In response,
Fidesz communication grouped Vecsei together with prominent profes-
sionals in homeless assistance such as Péter Győri or Gábor Iványi, who
were sympathetic to liberal politics. “ey all came from the fake civil
society organizations and thinktanks controlled by the liberals, promot-
ing neoliberal economic philosophy and social policy,” claimed an article
in the government-backed daily Magyar Idők (2018), which also called
these organizations “a Marxist group.”
sented by a homeless member. In 2014, allied organizations from 14 cities over the world organized
demonstrations against anti-homelessness laws (e City is For All 2014).
I. Florea et al.

113
Data gathered by the Shelter Foundation and e City is For All
showed that anti-homeless legislation kept aected people away from fre-
quented areas (and thereby out of the reach of the remaining social ser-
vices), yet this did not reduce the number of people living on the street,
owing to the continuing lack of social housing and the bad conditions or
low accessibility of shelters. Social workers and human rights lawyers
monitoring cases of police warnings signaled that the prevalence of such
cases dropped after the rst weeks, which reinforced the understanding
that the measures were primarily for intimidation and political commu-
nication. Police ocers ordered to perform anti-homeless actions also
often did not support the idea of punishment instead of social help
(Kovács, 2019, e City is For All 2018).
Besides its struggle against anti-homeless regulation, e City is For
All continued to work on other planes too. Between 2009 and 2017, it
provided consultancy to hundreds of people aected by housing poverty,
impeded hundreds of evictions, and reached favorable court decisions in
several cases where children were taken from their families because of
housing poverty. In 2016, it started a campaign for public toilets in
Budapest (e City is For All 2017). Between 2017 and 2019, it worked
with tenants threatened by eviction in a tenth district neighborhood,
reaching an agreement in the cases of ve of the six families it supported
(Sebály, 2021: 32).
e City is For All also played an important part in putting housing at
the center of opposition politics by the end of the 2010s. Its yearly Walks
for Housing increasingly involved middle-class constituencies pressured
by the new boom in housing prices. In the run-up to the 2018 parlia-
mentary elections, e City is For All signed an agreement of support
with all opposition parties except Jobbik over its housing program.3 It
also stepped up as a highly visible actor in post-2010 demonstrations
against the Orbán regime. While demonstrations were dominated by lib-
eral middle-class constituencies, members of e City is For All promoted
3 e program’s six points were the constitutionalization of the right to housing; the re-regulation
and expansion of state-supported rental housing; the introduction of a national subsidy for utility
costs and debt reduction; the re-regulation of the private rental sector to make it more secure and
accessible; the institutionalization of the right to housing of families with children; and the decrim-
inalization of squatting and homelessness (e City is For All 2017).
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

114
a political agenda focusing on social rights and citizens’ self-organization.
In 2017 and 2018, e City is For All supported the campaigns of inde-
pendent candidates (one of them was Péter Győri) in interim local elec-
tions in the eighth district. At the 2019 local elections, e City is For
All’s cofounder Éva Tessza Udvarhelyi joined the team of eighth district
independent candidate András Pikó as head of campaign. In this work,
she drew on her experience of the two interim election campaigns, her
background in community organizing, knowledge sharing with the inter-
national municipalist movement, as well as the embeddedness of local
civic networks facilitated by the Magdolna Program. Among other oppo-
sition candidates, Pikó won, in large part because of the unanimous
political support guaranteed by the unied 2019 opposition coalition.
However, his was also the success of a community-based campaign, rely-
ing heavily on direct voter contact and involving civic volunteers next to
campaign workers (Udvarhelyi, 2019). At the same 2019 local elections,
e City is For All also supported the successful campaign of Budapest
opposition mayor candidate Gergely Karácsony. Its 2019 Housing March
was the main campaign event in which the issue of housing was a central
feature of Karácsony’s agenda. After the elections, Udvarhelyi stayed to
work with the eighth district local government on community organiz-
ing, while another e City is For All cofounder, Bálint Misetics, joined
Karácsony’s oce as chief adviser on social and housing policy.
A New Real Estate Boom after 2015: Struggles
andSilences
As explained in Chap. 3, the second half of the 2010s brought a new real
estate boom, owing to favorable state policies as well as a new wave of
international investment, and the spread of Airbnb apartments in
Budapest central districts serving a new state-aided boom in tourism. e
resulting spike in real estate and rent prices brought a new wave of periph-
eralization of lower income households—from middle-class buyers turn-
ing to lower-quality central districts to low-income groups being pushed
to substandard urban or peri-urban informal housing.
I. Florea et al.

115
Conflicts over thePeripheralization
ofHousing Poverty
Besides serving as a national model for anti-homelessness policies and
contestations, the eighth district was also one where the new real estate
boom produced the sharpest increase in prices. is was attributable both
to a new middle-class inow and to the stepping up of large-scale urban
regeneration projects such as the Corvin redevelopment project that had
been stopped by the 2008 crisis and the Orczy Quarter, a new state-
backed development project around a new campus of the National
University of Public Service (Czirfusz etal., 2015). ese developments
reinforced the concentration of urban marginalization in pockets of low-
quality housing, which has continued since the 1970s (Ladányi & Virag,
2009). e Orczy Quarter project was especially sensitive in this context,
as it directly targeted an area with a high density of poor Roma house-
holds and it was presented by Máté Kocsis’ local government as convert-
ing the district into a “university town” instead of “a ghetto full of
criminals” (Kocsis 2012, quoted by Czirfusz etal., 2015: 70).
Two residential blocks housing poor families in the neighboring 10th
district became an arena of conict in this process. ese blocks in Hős
Street bore the mark of previous waves of poverty peripheralization as
well as of newer eighth district policies by which Máté Kocsis’s adminis-
tration forbade social assistance for drug addicts and then “cleared” the
eighth district of drug users using police force. Drug dealers and users
started to use Hős Street buildings, and the street became a symbol for
poverty and crime. In 2017, the mayor of the 10th district requested
government assistance in demolishing the Hős Street blocks. From the
funds it received, the local government oered residents compensation
that was insucient to buy even low-quality Budapest apartments,
threatened them with eviction, and signed a plan to dedicate a signicant
amount of funds to building a fence around the blocks, equipped with
live surveillance, to control drug-related crime. is caused widespread
uproar, from social workers, opposition politicians, and Roma rights
organizations to debtors’ advocates. In contesting the plan, Hős Street
inhabitants were assisted by an association founded by social workers that
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

116
has worked in the area since 2014. In 2019, the inhabitants refused to
accept the compensation payments for their apartments, and in February
2020, they achieved a favorable court decision whereby the sports com-
plex to be built in place of their homes did not constitute a public interest
investment that could justify their eviction (Népszava, 2020). However,
in March 2020 the Counter Terrorism Center was granted government
funds to demolish the blocks and transform the area for its operations
complex (Index, 2020).
New Initiatives forCohousing, Cooperative Housing,
andSocial Housing Agencies
Housing pressures increasingly felt by middle-class renters were expressed
not only in support for e City is For All’s Walks for Housing or opposi-
tion candidates’ housing programs but also in a proliferation of new
middle- class initiatives concerning various models of cohousing. In 2018,
we interviewed people engaged in seven such initiatives in Budapest, six
of which involved people already living together. e initiatives ranged
from students’ or young adults’ groups to cohousing projects for the
elderly, a temporary community house for divorced mothers, and an ini-
tiative for rental cooperatives that aimed to go beyond cohousing and
become a scalable model of accessible housing (Cohousing, 2018).
Another initiative by a foundation and started in 2016 is a cohousing
home for young healthcare workers, in response to the gap between their
wages and housing prices (Bíró Alapítvány, 2020). Community Living
Hungary, founded by a group of architects, works to popularize the idea
of cohousing and facilitate the organization of housing communities.
While all these initiatives share an ambition to go beyond temporary
solutions of room rental and combine reductions in housing costs with
the social and ecological gains of collective dwelling, there is a dierence
between those seeking to enhance middle-class options at a certain point
of the life course and the rental cooperative initiative that conceives its
project in terms of the larger aim to decommodify housing. is project
belongs to an alliance between professional organizations and cooperative
initiatives that have proposed nancial and institutional models for
I. Florea et al.

117
scaling rental cooperative housing in Hungary (Jelinek & Pósfai, 2020).
e model is intended to create accessible rental housing for groups with
stable but low incomes and reduce the exposure of housing needs to spec-
ulative markets. In addition to grassroots organizing and consultancy col-
laborations with authorities, the rental cooperative project includes
collaboration with unions. Following international examples of housing
cooperatives started by unions, this work aims to connect workplace
advocacy by promoting worker-owned and controlled nonprot housing
solutions.
Targeting rental needs of those in lower income strata, Habitat
Hungary and the Metropolitan Research Institute drafted a proposal in
2013 for a social housing agency to allow the use of privately owned
empty apartments for accessible rental housing (Hegedűs & Somogyi,
2013). An architects’ professional association, the Association for Home
Building (TLE) has emphasized the importance of rental building since
2015 and produced a program for a public benet rental building model
in 2019 (TLE, 2019). Habitat Hungary has campaigned against the
rental housing black market and for an accessible rental market through
regulation, tax benets, and nonprot housing associations since 2017
(Habitat, 2020).
Opposition successes in the 2019 local elections created new possibili-
ties for collaborations with local governments on proposals for accessible
rental housing. In partnership with the From Streets to Home Association,
the local government of Budapest’s rst district initiated a social rental
agency in 2020. Placed in one of the most expensive districts of the capi-
tal, the program primarily targeted public workers employed in the dis-
tricts whose wages did not allow buying or renting close to their
workplaces (Telex, 2020). Besides state rentals, the program aims to
involve owners whose apartments are empty, either because they cannot
invest in renovations or because they do not have the capacity or interest
to rent them out. In March 2021, From Streets to Home together with
the Metropolitan Research Institute initiated a municipality-wide pro-
gram along the same lines. ese plans collided with a bill proposed by
the governing party that would have obliged local governments to priva-
tize their housing assets. is move, interpreted by opposition commen-
tators as motivated by the interests of prominent government-backed
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

118
gures to keep or gain access to rst district spaces at a favorable price,
could have blocked plans for the social housing agency and further aggra-
vate the housing crisis (Civilizáció, 2021). From Streets to Home and
allied organizations carried out a broad campaign to resist the bill. In the
end, it was enacted in a softened form, and the Constitutional Court
ruled even this unconstitutional (Sebály, 2021), so work on the social
housing agency could continue.
Next to civic and professional groups, the issue of rental housing was
also agged by government and market actors. In early 2020, the govern-
ment announced a new housing program to facilitate the revitalization of
rustbelt areas and the building of accessible rental housing. Despite plans
for rental housing have been reduced in favor of apartments for sale, by
2020 the need for rental housing had become a prevalent topic owing to
market actors recognizing increasing demand as well as to the eects of
the pandemic. A major business conference on housing, organized by the
nancial newspaper Portfolio in September 2020, focused on rental hous-
ing, including accessible rental (Portfolio, 2020).
New Context: Opposition Local Governments
andtheCovid-19 Pandemic
After the 2019 local elections, the new Budapest mayor Gábor Karácsony
halted evictions from ats owned by the municipality and together with
several local governments won by the opposition party (such as the eighth
district) removed local anti-homelessness regulations. Political gestures
over homelessness soon became an interface for political conicts with
the government. In personal attacks against opposition local government
leaders, government-backed media claimed that they supported sleeping
on the street or that Karácsony was assisted by e City is For All and
George Soros to establish homeless shelters in Fidesz-majority districts to
attract leftist votes for the 2022 elections (HírTV, 2020a). References to
crime, garbage, and homeless people living in public spaces became a
recurrent topic of campaigns against opposition local governments
(HírTV, 2020b). Local conicts, like the refusal of the mayor of district
I. Florea et al.

119
23 to allow e City is For All’s sister organization, From Street to
Housing, to set up a mobile home were also framed in terms of this
political conict, the district’s mayor arguing that locals did not want
homeless people in their neighborhood (Napi.hu, 2020). In another case,
a homeless shelter operated by Gábor Iványi’s Evangelical Fellowship
church was threatened with closure after the state took the Fellowship’s
church status and subsequently cut state funds for its social operations.
While opposition groups started a public campaign in support of Iványi,
Fidesz media framed the conict as being about liberal politics instead of
a social issue (e.g., Origo, 2020).
Another issue where the context of new opposition local governments
and the eects of the Covid-19 pandemic intersected was the re- regulation
of Airbnb rental apartments. Re-regulation was motivated by the eect of
the pandemic on the tourism and hotel industry, a sector where compa-
nies with government ties are very active. Reacting to a request by the
Hungarian Hotel and Restaurant Association, the government’s tourism
agency proposed regulation of short-term apartment rental. e govern-
ment supported the proposal but outsourced decisions to local govern-
ments. is came at a time when many Airbnb apartments stood empty
or shifted toward cheaper long-term rental because of the pandemic, con-
tributing to a fall in rental prices especially in central districts (Merce.hu
2020). e regulation of Airbnb had also been part of Karácsony’s
agenda—a point promoted by e City is For All and chanted in slogans
at the Walk for Homes that contributed to Karácsony’s campaign.
Together with other new left organizations, e City is For All initiated
a campaign for regulations to prioritize social housing needs. Karácsony’s
mayoral oce organized hearings where all stakeholders were present and
emphasized the eort to reach an understanding that serves the public
interest. In the end, Airbnb’s own lobby groups proved stronger and hin-
dered any decisions that would harm their interests.
As the examples mentioned above show, through opposition successes
at the 2019 local elections, connections between housing issues, opposi-
tion movements, and opposition party politicians were strengthened. On
the one hand, this provided more scope for experimentation (as in the
case of the social rental agency) and raised the prole of political cam-
paigns by housing groups (as in the case of the anti-Airbnb campaign).
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

120
On the other hand, it also allowed for electoral logic to dominate housing
issues—as seen in the thematization of homelessness in terms of a politi-
cal conict between the conservative government and the liberal opposi-
tion. Meanwhile, although pandemic eects temporarily reduced rent
levels in the capital, and a nationwide moratorium on household debt
was imposed as a pandemic measure, continuing market and state invest-
ments in real estate and urban regeneration projects signaled a new wave
of urban commodication. Next to the plan for rustbelt development, a
primary example of this new wave became the “Student City.” A campus
development project that was originally planned by the state-backed
domestic construction industry, this plan became the target of campus
development for the Chinese state-owned Fudan University, nanced in
large part by Chinese loans (Daily News Hungary, 2021). Here, too, con-
troversy over the Fudan campus became a campaign topic in the 2022
elections, with criticisms of the plan dominated by the logic of opposi-
tion politics. In the campaign, symbolic opposition in terms of the East–
West geopolitical binary or of Chinese companies versus the “Hungarian
economy” overshadowed potential critiques of labor relations or the oli-
garchic structure of the plan, even for the new leftist movements involved
in the opposition alliance. Similar to the new politicization of homeless-
ness, or the Airbnb campaign that remained on a symbolic plane, the
Fudan controversy also signals a situation where the stakes of political
campaigning in the face of the 2022 elections overshadow closer engage-
ment with specic interest positions in housing issues.
Conclusion: Multiple Actors
andField Transformations
As other observers have previously remarked (Sebály, 2021), the postso-
cialist history of housing movements in Hungary remains marked by
fragmentation. In the framework of the structural eld of contention
approach proposed in this book, this chapter interpreted this fragmenta-
tion as a situation where relatively constant areas of tension—housing
poverty and low- to middle-income households’ housing access—are
I. Florea et al.

121
politicized at dierent movements by dierent groups embedded in vari-
ous alliances and political frameworks. It also marked areas of political
silence—such as that on the peripheralization of housing or the mortgage
boom in the 2000s—as signicant in how tensions play out over time. In
the relationships between actors, the chapter identied silent parallelisms
as well as explicit alliances and conicts. It showed that in instances of
politicization, similar tensions could be associated with dierent political
views and alliances, as it could be with liberal or conservative homeless
assistance systems in the 1990s or blocked communication between
debtors’ groups and leftist housing activists in the 2010s.
In a historical overview, the chapter traced major transformations of
the eld of housing contention that reorganized actors’ positions and
generated new types of engagement. In the 1990s, such were the intensi-
cation of housing poverty and problems of those in low- to middle-
income social strata related to maintenance and housing access, to which
new initiatives for homeless assistance, struggles around social housing,
and the formation of tenants’ and cooperative associations were responses.
In the 2000s, examples included the piling up of risky forex mortgage
debt in low- to middle-income households and the appearance of a new
generation of middle-class activists who questioned previous models of
social policy and built new models of housing poverty-related advocacy.
After 2008, the bust of the forex mortgage bubble and the new conserva-
tive supermajority government set the context for a new constellation of
housing struggles. is was marked by the parallel struggle of forex debt-
ors and increasing collaboration between leftist housing activism, middle-
class opposition demonstrations, and progressive opposition parties.
Chapter 6 reviews how the trajectories of housing movements across
these transformations relate to the Romanian case, and what a compari-
son between the two eld constellations can tell us about the potential
uses of the structural eld of contention approach.
4 Housing Contention in Budapest

122
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Open Access is chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
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I. Florea et al.

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© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_5
5
Housing Contention inBucharest
Like the previous chapter, this one follows the main areas of housing
tensions—housing poverty and access for low- to middle-classes—and
the mobilizations linked to them. It follows these tensions across
Romania’s rst two decades of post-1989 privatizations, the period of
post-2008 crisis management, and the start of a new growth cycle in 2015.
As the following sections show, the forms of politicization and expres-
sion of these tensions by dierent groups in Bucharest transformed across
time, reecting tumultuous political changes at the national level that
were much more unstable than in the Hungarian case. Beyond the two
main areas of housing tensions, the chapter emphasizes the changing
dynamics of political alliances across hierarchies of housing conditions
from severe forms of housing poverty at the bottom to shifting positions
for fragmented low- to middle-income groups and for middle- to high-
income groups interested in residential investments.

128
Responses toPrivatization andLack
ofHousing Access Prior tothe2008 Crisis
Homelessness asaSilent Aspect oftheField
With the regime change in 1989 came the privatization of state housing,
the liberalization of utility costs, privatization of state companies, and
successive waves of layos. In this context, many low-income households
became unable to cover rising utility costs and private market rents,
which also led to loss of homes and evictions. As Chap. 3 showed, this
process was coupled with the diculty of accessing social housing. us,
tens of thousands of households were evicted (Blocul pentru Locuire,
2019), pushed into severe poverty at the edges of large cities such as
Bucharest or in rural areas (Stănculescu & Berevoescu, 2004; Fleck &
Rughiniș, 2008), or forced to build informal housing as the only aord-
able housing option (Berescu et al., 2006). ese structural tensions
between housing needs and privatization leading to severe poverty were
primarily addressed through the charity work of humanitarian and reli-
gious NGOs that emerged in the early 1990s. ese tensions were framed
as a humanitarian crisis in the early 1990s, when homelessness became
visible in large cities. Foreign-sponsored charities—for example, the
French- and Italian-sponsored SamuSocial and Parada in Bucharest as
well as Save the Children—dominated the eld. Unlike the situation in
Hungary, homelessness support was thus almost entirely subsumed to
charity work, oering mobile medical assistance, daycare centers, and a
few night shelters. Meanwhile, the decentralized state authorities
retreated, oering very few night shelters around the entire country
(Florea etal., 2015c).
Since then, homelessness has remained a silent aspect of the eld of
housing contention, with no political mobilization of the homeless and
no organizations with homeless people as representatives alongside social
work professionals. But the issue is voiced publicly during conicts sur-
rounding evictions when evictees oppose being expulsed from their
homes and made homeless. Much more often, homelessness is addressed
by individual households through occupations of empty houses or
I. Florea et al.

129
informal buildings on empty plots on the outskirts of cities (Florea etal.,
2015a; Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019). In and around Bucharest, many
plots left empty by those who beneted from property restitution await-
ing more protable periods to build or sell have been occupied by people
in need. Opposition to evictions, occupation of empty houses, and build-
ing informally on empty plots are all aspects of explicit or silent struggles
against (temporary) homelessness. ey were all voiced later in the hous-
ing rights struggle.
Informal housing remained a silent aspect of the eld of housing con-
tention for a long time. According to estimates based on 2001 census
data, about 900,000 people at the national level lived in informal arrange-
ments in rural areas, urban peripheries, and inner cities (Berescu etal.,
2006). is meant hundreds of thousands of people living in self-built
shacks, small houses, and self-refurbished empty buildings on properties
they did not own and had no authorization to inhabit or build. Diverse
areas of informal housing, ranging from a few shacks to groups of over
100 people in small homes, existed and remain today near the outskirts
of Bucharest.
Household Debt asaSilent Challenge
As discussed in Chap. 3, household bank lending penetrated Romania
later than in Hungary, due to the later and slower privatization of banks.
It reached a smaller proportion of the population before the 2008 crisis
and was accessible mostly (although not exclusively) to middle- to higher-
income households. In 2005, out of a total population of about 20 mil-
lion, fewer than 100,000 were bank borrowers, and only about 6000
were in arrears. However, the number of borrowers doubled annually
until 2009.
Moreover, forex lending (mostly euro-, followed by dollar- denominated
loans), represented most of the precrisis lending to households and
reached predominantly middle- to high-income debtors. Unlike Hungary,
borrowers of Swiss franc (CHF) bank loans represented a small propor-
tion. For example, according to the National Bank, in 2015, from a total
of about 500,000 people with housing credits, more than 300,000 had
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

130
foreign currency loans, but only about 31,000 had housing credits in
CHF (Banca Națională a României, 2020). Debtors on lower incomes
typically had consumer or hire-purchase loans for buying household
goods. ese were smaller, less regulated, riskier, and more expensive
loans, poorly monitored by the authorities, despite being widespread in
the years before the 2008 crisis.
As early as 2007, bank debtors were aected by hikes in their monthly
installments on variable interest rate loans and in their exchange rates on
forex loans. Individual debtors started questioning their banks about
these changes and about the clauses allowing them in the contracts they
signed. In this initial phase, debtors negotiated individually with the
banks and sought individual resolutions (Florea etal., 2015b).
Mobilization Around Evictions
andUrban Regeneration
e leftist alliance around housing issues in Bucharest emerged in the
early to mid-2000s, during the precrisis real estate boom and during a
time of speculative transformation of the city. e national political
sphere was dominated by center-right neoliberal coalitions in continuous
conict with the social-democratic coalitions that nonetheless also passed
neoliberal measures. Traian Băsescu, the former mayor and pioneer of
gentrication in Bucharest became president in 2004. e national dis-
course was dominated by promises of better lives associated with privati-
zation, the arrival of foreign capital, and the EU accession planned for
2007 (Gabor, 2012). However, local realities were often criticized for
failing to meet such expectations. Roma rights and advocacy NGOs con-
demned abuses by local authorities, including brutal evictions, utility
cuts, and refusal to develop public infrastructure in poorer neighbor-
hoods with a higher percentage of Roma inhabitants (European Roma
Rights Center, 2002).
Multiclass youth groups such as street artists, cyclists, and subcultural
and neighborhood groups were forming at that time, some under the
inuence of the wave of alter-globalization movements in the late 1990s
to early 2000s. At that time, the size of these groups ranged from a few
I. Florea et al.

131
individuals to around 100 participants. Many but not all members were
educated, many were from low but stable and low- to middle-income
families, but some were from precarized working-class backgrounds. e
multiclass aspect of these youth groups thus did not manifest as a wide
gap in class dierences but in subtle ways. e strong precarization eects
of the post-1989 privatization waves (overlapping with a reduced
pre-1989 level of inequality compared to Hungary) brought together
young people from dierent backgrounds. ese groups attempted to
improve their conditions and inuence the urban transformations taking
place around them. Some criticized the rise of the car culture, the gated
communities, and other manifestations of the speculative urban develop-
ment of Bucharest (Asociația Komunitas, 2006, 2007; Evacuați din oraș,
2009; Ia o cameră și lmează ceva!, 2011). Several civic and professional
groups, urban ecologists, and academics, including the Association of
Urban Transition, religious groups, and architectural heritage lovers, also
claimed access to the benets of urban growth and the decision-making
processes (Florea, 2016). At the same time, after the implementation of
the law for restitutions in 2001, the media was reporting violent and
often racialized evictions from restituted buildings in Bucharest and the
main cities. ese events highlighted the social cost of the urban develop-
ment processes at the time (Florea et al., 2015a; Lancione, 2018;
Popovici, 2020).
In 2005, against the background of this multilayered political constel-
lation, thousands of people were evicted from the historical center of
Bucharest while the area was being regenerated as a tourist district. Many
evictees were in precarious situations and displaced without adequate
relocation. e new private owners of restituted buildings raised rents,
evicted former (mostly precarious and many Roma) state tenants, and
embarked on real estate redevelopments. is mass eviction process con-
tinued for about a year. At that time, Mayor Adrian Videanu, a member
of the center-right coalition in power at the national level, publicly
announced that those lacking the economic means to live in Bucharest
should not expect any support from public authorities and should leave
the city. us, expectations of the better life promised by the EU and
global economic integration contrasted with the everyday realities of lack
of access to decision-making and the (re)distribution of resources.
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

132
Moreover, as Chap. 3 has shown, evictions from homes have continu-
ously accompanied urban transformations in Bucharest and the largest
Romanian cities since 1989. Owing to their disproportionate eect on
Roma households, the evictions were rst politicized and condemned by
the Roma rights movement. Since their establishment in the 1990s,
Roma rights NGOs have written reports, media material, and petitions
on the topic aimed at public authorities from the local to the interna-
tional levels. Some of these outputs became well known in academic and
left-leaning circles. Consequently, antiracism and attention to the Roma
struggle against disproportionate housing precarity continued to be an
important layer of the eld of housing contention in Bucharest and
Romania.
In the mid-2000s, evictions provoked by property restitution and gen-
trication became more visible in the central areas of Bucharest as well as
in areas of new real estate developments (Evacuați din oraș, 2009). In this
context, evictions became politicized by diverse actors. Some of these
actors, for example the Association for Urban Transition, were formed in
the academic context of urban studies. Anarchist and feminist groups
were formed through intersections with global waves of organization
stemming from the alter-globalist movement. Others, for example
Ofensiva Generozităţii (the Generosity Oensive collective), were formed
in the context of the arts universities, with surging interest in social issues.
Still others, for example the NGO Komunitas, were formed at the inter-
section of all of these. Most of these groups initially had around 20–30
members and close supporters. ey were all from younger generations,
at university or completing their studies in the early 2000s, but most
remained materially precarious. All shared an interest in urban transfor-
mations and their social impact.
e context that brought these actors together in 2006 was the ongo-
ing eviction process provoked by property restitutions, aecting numer-
ous families from the Rahova-Uranus semi-central neighborhood. e
Generosity Oensive collective gained a small grant for an artistic project
in the area from an alliance of companies with interests in gentrication
there. e collective made a public call about the project, and other
groups and organizations interested in urban issues joined. rough their
intra- and intergroup negotiations and through their continuous
I. Florea et al.

133
interactions with neighborhood families, the initial scope of the project
was transformed. e art project soon turned into a basis for community
organizing, with the aim of delaying evictions from property restitutions
and ensuring the housing rights of those at risk. e reliance on donors
with interests in gentrication was overcome in a couple of years, but art
projects and collectives remain an important part of housing mobiliza-
tions today (Lancione, 2017a; Florea & Popovici, 2021).
e interaction between the Rahova-Uranus inhabitants and the
groups involved in the anti-eviction resistance was transformative. It
facilitated a cross-class alliance that would remain a working principle as
well as a continuous challenge for housing struggles (Michailov &
Schwartz, 2013; Schwartz, 2014). While Rahova-Uranus inhabitants
were building a community of resistance to evictions, the Generosity
Oensive and the other groups extended the alliances around it through
a wide range of artistic, educational, political, and media activities.
Between 2006 and 2009, the groups and organizations interested in
urban social issues (such as the youth groups, the civic and professional
groups mentioned before, the groups politicizing evictions), had at least
partially compatible political logics and at least temporarily compatible
structural positions. ese made possible a form of cooperation among
groups active in diverse causes linked to what they identied as the “right
to the city.” Initially facilitated by the Association of Urban Transition,
the cross-class and multiethnic alliance called the Platform for Bucharest
was set to ght speculative development and the uneven allocation of
resources in the city.
One of the main collective projects of the Platform for Bucharest was
to create the Pact for Bucharest—a strategic document to guide the devel-
opment of Bucharest. It included green public infrastructure, public
transportation, conservation of built heritage, and universal access to
housing among its main points. e groups that supported the Pact
engaged with the main party candidates in the coming local elections
(namely the National Liberal and Social Democratic parties), who prom-
ised to support the Pact and work for a better development path if they
were elected (Salvați Bucureștiul nostru, 2008).
e general and local elections in 2008 preceded the onset of the global
crisis eects. e same coalition of right-liberal parties retained power at
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

134
the national level, while in Bucharest a candidate supported by the Social
Democratic Party won the city hall for the rst time since 1992. However,
once the newly elected candidates took oce, they abandoned the Pact
for Bucharest. While all parties in power seemed to support the same for-
prot path for urban development, the Platform for Bucharest alliance
found itself in an outsider position, with little space for negotiation.
Conditioned by the limitations of this position, the groups in the alliance
engaged in new types of action: some intensied their open contention
(sometimes together and sometimes separately from the other groups),
some intensied their community organizing eorts, while others orga-
nized street performances, or occupied municipal council meetings. e
outcomes of these developments are discussed in the next section.
Housing Struggles During theCrisis of2008
andtheFollowing Austerity Period
In 2009, the right-liberal government took a 20-billion-euro loan from
the IMF, the European Commission, the World Bank, and EBRD, con-
ditioned by a commitment to stability goals, including that of austerity.
At the same time, the government launched three national housing pro-
grams, all based on credit, with a generous budget allocation: the Prima
Casă (First Home) program of state-guaranteed mortgages for rst time
homebuyers; the Banca pentru locuinţe (Housing Bank or Bauspar) pro-
gram for housing-related savings and credit, with state-covered bonuses;
and a broad program covering 50% of the costs of the thermal insulation
of the almost 85,000 blocks of ats built before 1990in Romania. ese
programs revealed a dierentiated class orientation. ose who could
access and aord them required approximately a medium income, pro-
vided by jobs mostly concentrated in urban centers (Guga, 2019). e
three programs stabilized the real estate market, the market for housing
credit, and the construction market, limiting the drop in prices. e
facilitation of further household lending was embedded in the architec-
ture of the programs. At the same time as new lending was being facili-
tated, no legislative changes were passed to protect debtors who took out
I. Florea et al.

135
loans before the crisis and were struggling in arrears. Budget allocations
for public social housing were insignicant compared with those for the
three programs, which remained the main housing programs until 2020.
Housing, Urban Regeneration, andHeritage Protection
e crisis and the subsequent austerity programs came with an intensi-
cation of racist and anti-poor discourses of the political leaders, which
channeled anxieties about redistributive scarcity against the most vulner-
able. is wider context, enhancing fractures and narrowing the space for
negotiation, was reected in the positioning of the Platform for Bucharest
alliance. Its housing rights groups intensied community organization
eorts in neighborhoods with high eviction risks. Its heritage protection
groups intensied their attack on local authorities, framing “protection”
and “heritage value” in nationalistic and, at the same time, pro-European
terms (Florea, 2016). e latter groups, consisting of about 100 active
participants and several thousand supporters, became the most visible
members of the Platform. eir rising visibility was also due to their
compatibility with some of the mainstream discourses on urban develop-
ment, as well as to the increasing political involvement of the urban pro-
fessional class that represented most of their constituency.
e heritage protection groups dominated the alliance’s internal and
external communications, with messages dierentiating between the
“deserving” and “undeserving” poor. It blamed inhabitants of heritage
buildings who were in precarious situations for their insucient appre-
ciation of heritage value. ese were mostly racialized accounts of the
inhabitants, which legitimized their eviction from buildings with heri-
tage value in the central areas of Bucharest. Moreover, most of the
heritage- protection groups were supporters of “civilized” Western-style
urban development and nationalist nostalgia for the interwar develop-
ment of the city (see Chap. 3). Such views were directly opposed to those
of the housing rights groups and to the organizations ghting racism and
social inequality. Toward the end of 2010, this led to the breakup of the
Platform for Bucharest alliance.
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

136
Activists in most groups of the alliance—the discontented—had tempo-
rarily similar structural positions: most were younger than 30, many
(although not all) were students in higher education or had recently gradu-
ated, and most were in precarious situations (although at dierent levels of
precarity, from poor to low but stable income, to middle class). is allowed
them to come together in the years before the 2008 crisis. However, after
the onset of the 2008 crisis, their dierent class opportunities (and there-
fore class aspirations) linked to the level of remuneration within their pro-
fessions coalesced into divergent political logics. After the separation, each
side continued to build alliances based on class opportunities. e main
groups of the heritage protection movement followed upward career paths
as urban professionals who started to work with academics, and owners and
managers of buildings with heritage value (Codreanu etal., 2014). In con-
trast, the core groups of the housing rights contention went on to work
with communities of the frontline of urban gentrication, with antiracist
solidarity as an important element of their alliance.
In 2009, the locals most involved in Rahova-Uranus decided to turn
the former neighborhood disco into a community center, known since
then as “LaBomba” (2009), and later formalized as an NGO.e estab-
lishment of the community NGO marked a new phase of organization,
reaching out to other neighborhoods with high risks of eviction. LaBomba
was evicted in 2011, following the restitution of the building to a con-
tested private owner. e solidarity seen in the response to the eviction
was unprecedented in Bucharest: dozens of people from the support
groups were present in opposition to the eviction, and wrote media mate-
rial about it. is solidarity response was an indicator of the widening
support network in the growing housing rights mobilization.
is process continued throughout the post-2008 austerity years,
when certain cross-class alliances seemed more possible owing to general-
ized economic insecurities and national political dissatisfaction. During
this time, many of those aected by evictions and those giving direct
support to the evictees became politicized. e LaBomba community
center was not only a gathering place in 2009–2011 but also a point of
reference in this process, beyond its eviction. As evictions continued to be
visible in the central areas of Bucharest, they represented moments of
politicization among supporters and opponents of urban regeneration
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137
(Codreanu etal., 2014; Popovici, 2014). Reacting to the same conditions
of the incipient crisis and to the same uneven urban development, the
politics of the groups in the Platform for Bucharest diverged and the
coalition broke up. Heritage protection and housing rights groups fol-
lowed opposing political logics in the same eld, embedded in the
dynamics of the national political landscape, which aected their emerg-
ing opportunities dierently since they had started from rather noncon-
icting class positions.
Debtors Caught Between Political Silence
andContention
e diculty of building and maintaining alliances across dierent posi-
tions, or overcoming even subtle class dierences, was also visible in the
development of political responses to growing household debt. With the
onset of the crisis, the number and percentage of debtors in arrears
increased: from mid-2008 to mid-2009, the number of people in arrears
doubled to more than 170,000. However, the total of their arrears hardly
represented 1% of the total sum lent by banks to households—meaning
these rst nonperforming loans were smaller in value. Nevertheless, from
about 900,000 bank debtors in 2012, about 25% were in arrears (Banca
Națională a României, 2020). In 2014, the total arrears peaked above 8%
of the total sum lent. is meant that households with larger loans and
on higher incomes also accumulated credit arrears during the austerity
period. Among the debtors, those with mortgages (credit mostly in euro
and lei) were in fact the most protected from defaulting (Banca Națională
a României, 2020). In addition, most were in the middle-income cate-
gory, with the means to access lawyers and knowledge or to lobby for
their interests. us, defaults on mortgages and repossessions did not
reach high numbers in Romania: for example, in 2015, the National
Bank reported about 300 house repossessions at the national level (ibid.).
Before, during, and after the crisis, debtors’ grievances were occasion-
ally voiced in public debates by dierent types of debtors (mortgage
holders and debtors with consumer loans with houses as collateral, con-
sumer loans with variable interest rates, various loans in foreign
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

138
currencies, and debtors in arrears). eir grievances were expressed in a
range of ways from silent negotiation to open contention. e latter form
was mostly expressed through court trials and media communications by
debtors’ lawyers.
Starting in 2009–2010, middle-class debtors pursued individual and
group legal actions against banks that issued credit contracts with unlaw-
ful clauses allowing unclear variable interest rates. Approximately 600
debtors (most of them with euro loans) initiated collective legal action
against the Erste banking group. About 100 debtors (most of them with
CHF loans) organized class action proceedings against Pireus, OTP,
Raieisen, Transilvania and Bancpost, and about 1500 debtors (most
with euro loans) organized collectively to pursue Volksbank (Chiru,
2010; Florea etal., 2015b; Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF, 2018).
Despite winning some individual court cases (several over mortgages)
and being a more privileged group than debtors with hire-purchase and
nonbank consumer loans, the bank debtors’ power to advance their
claims was limited in the period during and after the 2008 crisis. In 2010,
the National Bank, advised by the IMF, rejected the debtors’ plea to leg-
islate (or grant obligatory consequence on all similar trials to) court deci-
sions favoring debtors against banks. e National Bank thus responded
to repeated calls for protection from the Romanian Association of Banks
against the debtors, acting in the limited space of maneuver allowed by
the market dominance of the banks represented by the Romanian
Association of Banks.
In addition, the hindrance to debtors’ collective organization came
from the dierences between debtor categories: those without arrears, on
better incomes (most of the mortgage holders fell within this category),
who were always the majority, supported some of the austerity measures
to maintain their asset prices and a stable exchange rate for their forex
loans (Ban, 2014). Consequently, the austerity measures hit the debtors
on lower incomes harder. In contrast, CHF debtors were a smaller group,
most of whom were hit by a new spike in exchange rates in 2015. is
occurred when other precrisis debtors had already settled their renanc-
ing schemes and postcrisis debtors had already borrowed on better condi-
tions. us, being relatively isolated at that time, they were less powerful
in negotiations. After their initial silence in the eld of housing
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139
contention, the debtors’ subsequent mobilization remained separate from
that of the housing rights groups. Despite reacting to interconnected
aspects of the structural transformations linked to the 2008 crisis, there
were no links between the two movements.
Evictions andHousing Struggles During thePost-2008
Austerity Years
As explained in Chap. 3, the rst set of strong austerity measures was
adopted in Romania in 2010. e right-wing government at that time
(the National Liberal and Democratic Parties) froze vacancies and cut
pensions and salaries in the public sector, which also led to cuts in private
sector salaries. e most devastating austerity measures were passed in
2011, based on legislative proposals lobbied for by representatives of
employers’ organizations. ese meant changes in the Labor Code and
Social Dialogue legislation, practically dismantling labor unions, destroy-
ing sector-wide collective contracts, and generally reducing the bargain-
ing power of workers while advancing work exibilization. ese measures
continued and accelerated long-term processes of post-1989 economic
restructuring and EU accession. e changes aected many workers,
including urban professionals and those in middle-income categories,
and had lasting eects on the Romanian labor force (Guga, 2017, 2019).
At the same time, continuous frictions and realignments took place
between the three main political parties at the national level (the
Democratic, National Liberal, and Social Democratic Parties). is tur-
moil was also reected in several waves of protests around the country.
In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the massive national-level anti-
austerity (2012) and environmental protests (2013) represented impor-
tant points of politicization, wherein new activist groups formed or
became more politically involved. Some of the left-leaning groups, such
as several feminist groups, an anarchist group, and several artists’ groups
interested in social and political issues, joined the housing rights mobili-
zation. With their active participants and supporters, this added a couple
of hundred supporters to a growing housing rights movement. e latter
was already becoming visible beyond the Rahova-Uranus area and beyond
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

140
single protests against evictions. is happened in a structural context in
which soaring real estate prices, overcrowding, utility arrears, and high
rents relative to incomes also became relevant to signicant segments of
the middle class.
In the environment of political turmoil during those years, the hous-
ing rights groups continued their work of community organizing and
reach out. Multilevel political frictions and limited access to resources
(for organizing as well as for activists’ everyday livelihoods) made the
period dicult for forming and maintaining alliances. Nevertheless, the
housing rights mobilization passed through several phases of politiciza-
tion and managed to grow in visibility and numbers in just a few years.
As mentioned in the previous section, the LaBomba community cen-
ter was evicted in mid-2011 following the contested restitution of the
building. Manifestations of solidarity with the Rahova-Uranus commu-
nity were strong. ey were immediately reected in the mass media, on
the cultural scene, and in the human rights advocacy coalitions. ese
networks of support maintained and enhanced the mobilization’s cross-
class dimension: it involved a range of members from the activists in the
most precarious situations, artists facing precarity, journalists, to better-
o academics, NGO workers, and supporters living abroad. Soon after
the eviction, the women aected by it and the supporting artists who
witnessed it documented the experience of the community in the form of
a political theater play.
e play premiered in early 2012 and it was subsequently performed
for free in dierent contexts. It became a tool to reach wider audiences,
both the usual theater public and groups facing housing deprivation. It
thus included cross-class outreach. e play was also staged by the hous-
ing rights groups to mobilize other communities at risk of eviction and to
publicize such experiences, which are usually kept silent and marginal-
ized (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019). is proved to be an important tool
in the development of a housing movement, especially when negotiations
with the local and national authorities responsible for housing policies
were narrowed. e play premiered when the anti-austerity protests were
already widespread, with thousands of people taking to the streets daily
in several cities despite the winter cold. e protests were joined by peo-
ple of dierent ages, professional backgrounds, and even those
I. Florea et al.

141
approaching medium-level incomes that were still insucient to guaran-
tee material security.
Part of the middle class was also hit by the austerity measures. is
included bank debtors in arrears who already numbered more than
200,000 nationally, but who actually represented a small category relative
to the 31.4% of the entire population in utility arrears.1 A wave of young
workers and students who were in precarious situations or facing instabil-
ity under austerity, and whose politics mostly—although not only—fol-
lowed leftist lines, participated in these protests. As mentioned earlier in
this section, several joined the core organizers of the housing rights
groups, others joined leftist groups supporting the housing mobilization,
while others developed new feminist, queer, or critical art collectives.
Waves ofRight-Leaning Politicization: Architectural
Heritage Protection andNatural Heritage Protection
In the midst of the anti-austerity protests, the year 2012 was politically
tumultuous, with changing governmental coalitions, local elections in
June, and parliamentary elections in December. Under general dissatis-
faction with the austerity measures, the strong neoliberal government
fell, and a coalition including the Social Democrats took oce.
Nevertheless, a technocratic antipolitical line was also gaining visibility:
one of the key spokespersons of the heritage protection groups took part
in the local electoral campaign for Bucharest mayor as an independent
candidate. e heritage protection movement’s visibility, alliances, and
resources were activated for this endeavor. e declared aim of the cam-
paign was to advance architectural heritage protection as a major princi-
ple in Bucharest’s development.
e campaign was one of the most important moments for the devel-
opment of the heritage protection movement. It reached national media
visibility and almost 40,000 active supporters of the electoral campaign
out of Bucharest’s registered population of about two million. However,
1 at is more than 6,000,000 people, without counting all those who disconnected or were forci-
bly disconnected because they could no longer aord the costs. Utility arrears have been the most
widespread form of household debt in Romania in recent decades.
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

142
despite antagonizing the mayor in power and other competitors, the
activist candidate and his platform proposed an urban development
model very similar to the prevailing one. It was based on creating an
attractive environment for global investors: “e built heritage represents
the commercial capital of the city. It confers identity to the city. And
identity is what attracts investors and tourists in global competition”
(Dan apud Florea, 2016).
Nicuşor Dan, the activist candidate, did not win the elections in 2012,
but his candidacy and the activism around it prepared the ground for the
heritage protection movement’s involvement in electoral politics. It also
represented an opportunity for the political coalescence of its predomi-
nantly urban professional middle-income constituency. In the following
years, this coalescence found a favorable political constellation and struc-
tural situation at the national level, growing into the third most powerful
party in Romania, the Save Romania Union (Uniunea Salvați România:
USR). is path represented a further move away from the anti-austerity
and housing for all stances, opening the door to antagonistic interactions
in the eld of housing contention. As mentioned in Chap. 3, USR
became a neoliberal party with a strong stance against the poor that was
sometimes masked by more progressive discourses from some of its iso-
lated members.
Another wave of contention was manifested at the national level in
2013 around environmental issues. e new coalition government and
the president agreed to support a large gold mining operation, using a
controversial extraction method involving cyanide. is extraction proj-
ect in the mountain village of Roşia Montană, in central Romania, was
pushed by the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (a heavily nancialized
Canadian company) and had been blocked by villagers and environmen-
tal activists since the late 1990s. Moreover, in 2013–2014, the govern-
ment and the president agreed to support Chevron and a few other oil
and gas companies to commence explorations for shale gas all around the
country, using a controversial deep-well fracturing extraction method
(“fracking”). e Social Democratic Party rejected both projects while in
opposition but approved them when it returned to power (in alliance
with the National Liberals). Protests were sparked in August 2013, when
the parliament tried to fast-track the approval of the projects. Protests
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143
spread in several cities and in the aected villages, with tens of thousands
of participants in Bucharest every night until the end of 2013. ey rep-
resented another wave of politicization of various categories of protesters
and witnesses: the locals directly aected by the extraction projects, with
their long-term supporters, organized into groups leaning either to the
nationalist right (as protectors of national riches) or to the left (as oppo-
nents of capitalist exploitation) or right liberals (self-identied as antipo-
litical environmentalists); in the major city, low- to middle-class protestors
ranged from extreme right to right liberals to leftists.
Housing rights groups joined the protests from the start and new
housing rights supporters were politicized through these environmental
protests. However, in a few months the balance of power between the
groups of protestors inclined clearly toward the right. Activists connected
to the housing rights mobilization, carrying anticapitalist and anarchist
banners, were attacked by extreme-right groups also taking part in the
protests. Such confrontations took place on several occasions and in sev-
eral localities. e most visible environmental groups and right-liberal
NGOs, often spokespersons for the protests, scarcely condemned the
aggressions. is signaled a deeper division in the dynamics and political
logics of the protests. While groups competed for visibility and leadership
of the protests, the more radical leftist positions were aggressively
excluded. Anticapitalist critiques were silenced by both the liberal and
the nationalistic groups. e latter reformulated some anticapitalist
claims as opposition to foreign capital.
As the progress of the two extractive operations was stopped in 2014,
those who had gained the most visibility and inuence at the end of the
protests were several right-liberal groups and NGOs linked to the heri-
tage protection movement. ey presented themselves as, and they were
generally portrayed as saviors of the historical heritage of Roşia Montană
(Florea & Rhodes, 2018). ey were linked to the social media page
Uniţi Salvăm (United we save) which became very popular, reaching
more than 50,000 followers. eir ascension also reected the strength-
ening of the urban middle-class positions in national politics, with all the
main parties competing for their support. Moreover, Uniţi Salvăm came
to be the communication platform on which USR promoted itself at its
formation in 2015–2016.
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

144
e exclusion and silencing of the leftist groups in the environmental
wave of contention destroyed the prospect of alliances between structural
positions that had seemed possible only two years earlier, during the anti-
austerity contention wave. However, the housing mobilization was able
to use the politicization process of these tumultuous years to grow in
terms of visibility, supporters, and outreach. It subsequently established a
clearer political entity under the Common Front for Housing Rights,
collaborating with housing activists from other cities and several autono-
mous groups and spaces in Bucharest. We discuss this process in the next
section.
Building theCommon Front forHousing Rights
intheContext ofClass Fractures
e years 2013–2014 were foundational for the housing rights move-
ment. One of the most active community organizers in Rahova-Uranus
was evicted following a property restitution trial in early 2013. Solidarity
reactions came from the wider support networks of the housing rights
mobilization (discussed in the previous sections). ese reactions ranged
from supporting the evicted family in maintaining a protest camp on the
street for several days to organizing a protest march and to ensuring
media visibility. is time, the media reports sided with the evicted fam-
ily, which was hardly the case before the 2008 crisis. From this intensied
mobilization, the Common Front for Housing Rights (FCDL) was estab-
lished. It involved 20–30 active members, most with previous experience
in housing rights activism (some since the early years of the Generosity
Oensive collective, and some politicized during the anti-austerity wave).
e Rahova-Uranus community of resistance remained an important
part of the FCDL, both in terms of continuous membership and as an
example for further mobilization. e FCDL was thus based on a cross-
class alliance between aected members, long-term activists, and more
recently politicized activists (from the new leftist groups formed in the
anti-austerity contention wave), mostly from educated low- to middle-
income backgrounds. In addition, the FCDL continuously reached out
in other locations in attempts to prevent evictions and to raise awareness
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145
of housing injustice. Its social media page soon reached more than 2000
supporters from diverse backgrounds who were quite active in dissemina-
tion, material support, and occasional involvement. It had strong con-
nections to a group of housing rights activists and evicted families from
the city of Cluj-Napoca, who had formed in 2010. e two groups were
very similar in their principles, claims, constituency, size, and visibility.
ey were initially connected through common friends in the wider left-
ist networks and through reciprocal support. e connection between
the two groups became a pillar of housing contention in the years to come.
e FCDL claimed housing as a fundamental right for all and a con-
cern for many aected by uncertainty, overcrowding, and excessive hous-
ing costs. us, the FCDL placed cross-class solidarity, collective
organizing, experiences of those evicted or at risk of eviction, and atten-
tion to intersectional struggles at the center of its organization. In the
FCDL’s internal and public communication, it reected on the condi-
tions of women as homemakers, as well as on institutional racism, age,
disability, precarious income, and lack of free time. Along these lines, in
an ongoing process and challenge, FCDL members sought to develop
wider and more diverse alliances and articulations. is was a primary
goal, along with reaching out to families and communities at risk of
eviction.
In September 2014, about 100 people were evicted from a restituted
building on Vulturilor Street, close to the city center, where they had
lived and worked for decades as a multiethnic Roma and non-Roma
community. Because of previous preparation with FCDL activists and
the determination of the evictees, massive resistance was put in place.
Actions ranged from refusal to leave to pressure meetings with the local
authorities responsible for ensuring social housing. Several evicted fami-
lies decided to set up tents (and later wooden huts) in front of their for-
mer homes and mark them with protest banners. ey decided to resist
inside these huts until the local authorities assumed their responsibility to
allocate adequate social housing to evictees. is would mark the largest
and most enduring protest camp in the recent history of the housing
rights movement, and it lasted for two years. is entailed ensuring the
everyday logistics of the camp, preparing media communications, orga-
nizing protests, and actions to put pressure on local authorities. It also
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

146
entailed the forming of emotional connections between the evicted fami-
lies, and activists experienced in community organizing.
Just as in the previous case of Rahova-Uranus, Vulturilor also became
a landmark of housing rights mobilization. It led to new solidarities, vis-
ibility, and to an interconnected politicization of the activists, resistance
community members, and numerous supporters (Vişan et al., 2019).
Moreover, it strengthened the housing mobilization’s link to antiracist
struggles, which still had the potential to create broad and diverse alli-
ances. Antiracism remained a basis for housing mobilizations, especially
as the evicted community, with members of Roma ethnicity, maintained
strong antiracist “solidarity not charity” rhetoric in its activism. e resis-
tance to Vulturilor eviction—led by women—also widened the scope for
alliances with growing feminist networks, attentive to housing as part of
women’s reproductive work. is was happening against a structural
background where competition over advantageous positions intensied
on all scales from the strengthening of the (both liberal and extreme)
right at the national level to growing rural–urban fractures, and to every-
day discourses against the poor legitimizing unequal growth.
During the 2014 presidential election campaign, several parties allied
with the aim of strengthening the right-leaning political pole at the
national level. eir campaign was used as an attack on those who were
considered undeserving poor. Moreover, the right-liberal campaign
pitched the urban right-leaning voters against the alleged rural Social
Democratic Party (PSD) voters, urban professionals against rural laborers
represented as lazy, and workers in the private sector against those in the
public sector. is generated a political constellation that again exacer-
bated antagonisms between structural positions and especially class posi-
tions. e strengthening of the right also involved choosing Klaus
Iohannis as a presidential candidate: he was another ex-mayor and pro-
moter of gentrication, a beneciary of property restitutions, and land-
lord to a foreign bank’s local branch. Having hitherto proven himself to
be an ally of German, Austrian, and Luxembourgian foreign direct invest-
ment (FDI) interests in industrial platforms in central Romania, he was
also a symbolic representative of Western-style development. He won the
2014 presidential elections, and continued to support a favorable envi-
ronment for FDI and to reduce social services and redistribution further.
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147
us, in the Romanian postcrisis context of deepening inequalities,
the solidarity around Vulturilor Street resistance was exceptional. is
was also linked to the increased politicization of the left that was possible
through the 2012–2013 waves of anti-austerity protests, despite the later
strengthening of the (neo)liberal-right.
After 2015—Housing Struggles inaPeriod
ofHigh GDP Growth
The FCDL’s Responses toaNew Wave ofUrban
Middle-Class Protests
As the resistance to Vulturilor Street eviction turned into a protest camp,
it became the central (although not only) preoccupation of the FCDL for
the next two years. e community of resistance became part of the
FCDL, just as the Rahova-Uranus community of resistance did previ-
ously. It thus became part of the permanent cross-class, multiethnic pro-
cess of development of the housing movement. It mobilized an
unprecedented level of solidarity and support (Lancione, 2017a; Popovici,
2020). is meant about 20–30 housing rights activists and supporters
being constantly present on the ground, enduring the cold months, and
solving logistics challenges such as cooking hot food for those living in
the protest camp. It also meant visibility in the media and in the art
scene, political attention from several members of parliament, institu-
tions on several scales, and a diversity of supporting groups and organiza-
tions. Indeed, recently formed or strengthened groups with similar
political anities joined, reecting the widening of the eld of new leftist
politics. Moreover, even some groups from the heritage protection move-
ment and some of the hitherto uninvolved homeless assistance charities
supported the resistance. is fact signaled a favorable eld for (at least
partially) redistributive ideas—similar to the precrisis context of expecta-
tions of general improvement of living conditions for all.
However, this process of solidarity-building in the eld of housing
contention was to be challenged again, in November 2015, when massive
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

148
protests were sparked by a deadly accidental re in a Bucharest music
club. One of the main meeting and organizing spaces for FCDL at that
time, the leftist-anarchist collective Claca was located in the same com-
plex of old buildings with the music club. After the re, it was closed. e
FCDL and its supporting groups joined the wide protests taking place in
the aftermath of the deadly re at the Colectiv music club. Known as the
Colectiv protests, they gathered mostly young, educated, middle- and
high-income groups; they especially commemorated the young profes-
sionals and artists who lost their lives or were injured in the re. e main
claims were for the resignation of several authorities accused of corrup-
tion and incompetence. Resignations were actually received from the
prime minister and the district mayor. Two weeks after the re, a new
government was formed, represented as technocratic and apolitical, and
thus uncorrupted.
e FCDL joined the leftist voices that commemorated the death of
club workers who were in precarious situations and inhabitants of the
building complex where the re broke out. is was an old, partially
reconverted factory, used not only for clubs and rehearsal spaces, but also
for improvised housing.2 Leftist voices also honored the inhabitants in
the Roma and ethnically diverse neighborhood of Colectiv who risked
their lives to save those who were hurt in the re. ese groups, including
the FCDL, tried to make space for progressive claims in the protests: safe
buildings not only for entertainment but also for housing, safer working
conditions for precarious workers (such as the cleaners of the music club),
and social housing allocation for those in improvised housing. As a fol-
low- up, the FCDL and its support network organized the occupation of
an empty public building, under the slogan “ousands of empty houses,
thousands of people living on the street. Where is justice?” e FCDL
tried to create space for social justice in the Colectiv protests asking for
justice. In the midst of the protests, some of the leftist groups that sup-
ported the FCDL view intensied a process of party formation that later
established the Demos party, which remained a supporter of housing
rights claims.
2 A few years after the re, the area became dominated by luxury apartments traded through global
real estate intermediaries.
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149
e occupation of the public building marked yet another important
moment for the housing mobilization in terms of radicalizing its partici-
pants and supporters. is strategy was continued in the following year
with a hunger strike of the evicted women. ese radical actions comple-
mented the everyday work of creating and disseminating informative
materials to reach frontline communities and possible allies. is work
included producing a documentary lm about restitutions, another the-
atrical play about dierent experiences of housing precarity, a website and
social media page, and later a book project about the Vulturilor Street
anti-eviction struggle.
Scaling UpHousing Struggles: TheBlock forHousing
e year 2016 marked several new directions for the FCDL. On the one
hand, the Claca collective, which lost its space after the Colectiv club re,
managed to open a new and larger cooperative space with a bar and the-
ater (Popovici & Macaz, 2018). It hosted a range of events, including
FCDL debates and dedicated party nights, attended by a wide audience
and members of the Rahova-Uranus and Vulturilor Street resistance com-
munities. For the next three years, the new space became an eervescent
environment for reaching new audiences, forming new activist groups,
and maintaining and enlarging alliances. Diverse leftist groups, artistic
collectives, feminist and queer groups, grassroots initiatives, and social
services organizations found a sometimes challenging and confronta-
tional yet enhancing and transforming space there.
At the same time, after two years of sustained action, the Vulturilor
Street protest camp was dismantled, and its members were evicted by the
district authorities. Several protestors were nally allocated social hous-
ing, together with other eligible households on the waiting lists (which
are strictly prioritized according to points and verication). is was a
celebrated victory, as the local authorities, which usually allocate very few
if any social housing units each year, had responded to public pressure.
However, the most vocal protestors were only given the option to move
into a night shelter for homeless people, where they continued to engage
in protest activities. Moreover, some of the Rahova-Uranus resistance
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

150
members were nally able to access social housing, while many had to
move out in the face of restitution evictions (Frontul Comun pentru
Dreptul la Locuire, 2018). us, the intensity of organization around the
two resistance communities lowered.
ese local-level developments and national-level frictions between
the PSD, PNL, and the technocratic government created the structural
context for the housing rights mobilization to scale up and engage more
methodically on the national and international levels. roughout 2016,
the technocratic government showcased its transparency and anticorrup-
tion allegiance by undertaking consultations with civil society organiza-
tions on several policies, including the National Strategy on Housing.
Large charities involved in social assistance, and representatives of advo-
cacy NGOs involved in urban and rural development were invited.
FCDL members took part in the consultations, together with Social
Housing Now—the group of housing rights activists and aected fami-
lies from the city of Cluj-Napoca. As mentioned, the two groups were in
close contact and had supported each other ever since the formation of
the FCDL; they were both formed to oppose evictions, advocate for
social housing, and organize together with aected groups. In addition to
aected families, both groups included experts on urban social issues who
were invited to participate in the consultation process. us, through the
National Strategy on Housing consultations, the housing rights move-
ment conducted its rst consistent negotiation scaled up from the local
to the national authorities over policies, and legislation. It then con-
structed a base of expertise and legitimacy on which it continues to build
(in 2021).
e two groups lobbied members of parliament to change the Housing
Law to prioritize the allocation of social housing for the 25% of the
Romanian population below the poverty line (Vincze et al., 2017).
Aected members of both groups participated in negotiations with mem-
bers of parliament, engaged with the press, and recorded their stories on
lm (Lancione, 2017b; Foundation Desire Romania, 2016). In parallel,
both groups started using legal tools and administrative court cases to
condemn local administrations for blocking access to social housing for
certain precarious categories. Moreover, both groups became involved in
the European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and to the City,
I. Florea et al.

151
which they had previously joined; aected members were always present
at the European Action Coalition meetings. is represented an attempt
to engage with global processes and simultaneously with similar groups
active in Central and Eastern Europe facing similar housing issues.
On this common base, in 2017, the FCDL, Social Housing Now, and
four other groups and NGOs active in several localities, formed the Block
for Housing. It was established as a national platform for housing rights,
with intersectional principles and a clear antiracist stance. e member
groups and NGOs had a left-leaning political position. ey were active
on issues of social justice, access to public services, and redistribution,
organizing with communities and families facing housing precarity or the
risk of evictions. eir complementary expertise ranged from litigation to
community organizing, from campaigning to social research. Together
they were in direct contact with several hundred aected people and had
several thousand followers and supporters. e groups were initially con-
nected by personal contacts and anities. e Block for Housing plat-
form aimed at extending the grassroots work of the groups to a national
scale. New topics such as tenants’ rights and the lack of aordable rent
became voiced by the Block member groups more clearly than before.
is has remained the main platform for housing rights mobilization on
a national scale ever since, with actions and gatherings in the cities of
Alexandria, Bucharest, Cluj, Focșani, Giurgiu, Iași, Mizil, Timișoara,
and Valea Seacă.
The Heritage Protection Movement
andMultiscalar Politics
In parallel with the above developments, the heritage protection move-
ment evolved into the activist arm of a local political party established in
mid-2015, Uniunea Salvați Bucureștiul (USB, Save Bucharest Union).
Claiming expert knowledge on building safety, permits, and regenera-
tion, it was an active part of the Colectiv protests and an active supporter
of the new technocratic government. In 2016, merging with the United
We Save social media platform, it expanded beyond Bucharest, as the
USR.With the 2016 general elections, the USR became the third largest
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

152
party in parliament. us, this new party, which became successful based
on the post-2008 protest wave, absorbed the heritage protection move-
ment. As discussed above, that movement had rst arisen in opposition
to, and then in support of, urban regeneration projects. Consistent with
this path, its constituency was mostly urban middle class—a category
that continued to improve its circumstances following the crisis. Indeed,
none of the postcrisis governments were unfavorable toward this cate-
gory, but some were more favorable than others (Petrovici & Poenaru,
2017). e heritage protection movement took on the role of supporting
and legitimizing the claims of the USR and its constituency.
Moreover, two NGOs linked to the heritage protection movement
were invited as experts to the consultation process initiated in 2016 by
the technocratic government on the National Strategy on Housing. In
this consultation process, the dynamics on multiple scales overlapped.
Some of the participating charities and advocacy NGOs had links beyond
the national scale, owing to their foreign donors and organizational struc-
ture. rough these links, they engaged global actors such as the World
Bank as well as construction companies and commercial banks in the
consultation process. Furthermore, they legitimized housing policies pro-
posed by the World Bank, presented as apolitical and thus incorruptible
and infallible (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2018; Florea & Dumitriu, 2018).
is alignment between technocratic logics on the local and global scales
smoothed the path for national policies on housing—and associated poli-
cies on real estate, land use, urban and rural development—favorable to
real estate and nancial investors (Economica.net, 2016). ese charities
and NGOs, including the two linked to the heritage protection move-
ment, have retained this legitimizing role ever since.
However, the actual negotiations between actors in the consultation
process in 2016–2017 were tense, signaling increasingly antagonistic
political logics in the eld of housing, as described below. Neither of the
contributors had their proposals passed into legislation. e National
Strategy on Housing had still not been adopted in 2021, after several
changes of government. us, political struggles on the national scale
delayed both the implementation of World Bank advice on housing
(Inchauste etal., 2018), and the public housing programs advocated by
activists.
I. Florea et al.

153
In late 2016, the general elections were won by the PSD, thus ending
the technocratic government. e PSD remained in power until 2019,
when it was ousted. However, the neoliberal USR party arose to become
the third party in parliament, strongly associated with young urban
middle- class voters (IRES, 2019). In early 2017, this urban middle-class
constituency started protests opposing corruption and the Social
Democratic government, which they perceived as backward. USR imme-
diately joined the protests and adopted many of their slogans. e right-
liberal president also joined the protests and was welcomed. CEOs of two
foreign banks that were involved in public contracts for the state-backed
housing credit programs joined the protests and they were well received.
Other multinational CEOs also joined or expressed their support (e.g.,
McDonalds). ese predominantly middle-class protests become a tool
in the political struggle between the PSD (predominantly in alliance with
national capital interests) and the technocratic and liberal parties (pro-
moting neoliberal policies favoring global capital). e alignment
between the protestors and these political and economic powers reects
the structural positions of their constituency (Poenaru, 2017): they rep-
resented mostly urban middle-class professionals, usually employed in
multinationals based in urban centers and among the very few workers
who could aord to access bank credit (Petrovici & Poenaru, 2017).
eir alignment was also the reection of a longer process of winning
them over and building alliances from above by the major right-liberal
parties, intensied in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. e heritage pro-
tection movement played a mediating role in this process.
In February 2017, the FCDL and other leftist groups still attempted to
engage with the anticorruption discourse and to give it (as in 2015) a
social justice dimension. ey called upon the protestors to oer solidar-
ity in an eviction situation taking place at the same time and in the vicin-
ity of the protests; the call remained unanswered. e two mobilizations
continued separately by advancing conicting structural/class interests
and by occupying opposing sides of the political spectrum (Voicu, 2017).
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

154
Housing, Debt, andWage Struggles Since 2015
e beneciaries of the new household credit boom were those in similar
structural positions as the Colectiv and anticorruption protestors.
However, CHF debtors from the previous credit wave were still among
the losers of the precrisis aspiring middle class. Most of their grievances
and claims for protective regulations remained unresolved by any govern-
ment. In addition, the CHF exchange rate spike in 2015 hit them harshly
(Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF, 2018). Despite often being on the
brink of losing their homes, the CHF debtors did not interact with the
housing rights mobilizations.
Nevertheless, since 2015, CHF borrowers have broken the silence over
debt in the eld of housing contention. ey rst organized as a social
media group with more than 20,000 users, and then as the Grupul
Clienților cu Credite în CHF association. is formal organization staged
protests, disseminated press releases, set up a website and social media
pages, and held events. However, its protests were on a small scale, with
about 100 participants (about the number of active members in the asso-
ciation). Moreover, at the end of the austerity period, the government
implemented specic policies to support better earners and, in this con-
text, debtors with mortgages, including most CHF debtors, became more
protected. Since 2016, an in-kind repayment law has allowed mortgage
holders to negotiate better renancing conditions with the banks, while a
few households have actually used the law to exit debt through reposses-
sions. Since 2017, amendments to the housing legislation have allowed
repossessed mortgage holders to access a special category of public hous-
ing. e legislation thus granted them privileged access to the very lim-
ited public housing stock over households in more precarious situations
awaiting social housing. is development led to competition between
categories of applicants for public housing that translated into a silent
and involuntary antagonism in the eld of housing contention between
the debtors’ interests and the housing rights struggles.
us, the FCDL and the leftist groups supporting it did not manage
to signicantly inuence the most visible mobilizations of the post-2015
growth cycle on the one hand, and did not try to engage with debtors’
I. Florea et al.

155
mobilizations on the other. e parallelism with the debtors’ mobiliza-
tions was mostly due to the FCDL’s focus on lower-income households
and on addressing the issue of household debt in terms of high housing
costs. It only came to research the process of nancialization and house-
hold lending in 2017, under the inuence of partner groups in the
European Action Coalition for the Right to Housing and the City.
Nevertheless, the FCDL and its close leftist groups expanded into new
alliances based on solidarity between those in dierent structural posi-
tions in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, and housing conditions, form-
ing the abovementioned national platform, the Block for Housing.
In 2018, the Block for Housing started forging alliances with several
labor union federations and confederations (such as Cartel Alfa, the
Federation of Commerce Unions, several public workers’ unions, and an
independent organization of care workers) based on the strong intercon-
nectedness between housing, income, and labor conditions. is process
was made possible by the growing concern of the labor unions regarding
the calculation formula for the minimum wage. It occurred under struc-
tural pressure from Romania’s global market integration as a source of
cheap labor and favorable ground for investors, which held about half of
Romania’s workers at minimum wage level. e minimum wage was, and
in 2021 still is, far from covering living costs (Guga et al., 2018).
Moreover, the same structural pressure of being favorable ground for
investors maintained high housing costs (such as utilities, furniture,
repairs, rent, and credit)—the largest cost category in the monthly bud-
get of the average Romanian household. us, as the labor unions strug-
gled for a wage calculation based on actual needs, they had to turn their
attention to housing costs. Simultaneously, the Block for Housing con-
sidered wages and housing costs, tackling the wider topic of housing
access for all low- to middle-income categories.
Ending theSilence onInformal Housing in2017
e national engagement and expansion of the housing rights groups
produced not only the Block for Housing but also new conditions for
antagonism, which revealed hitherto silent aspects in the eld of housing
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

156
contention. Informal housing was such an aspect. In 2017, larger chari-
ties and advocacy NGOs previously involved in the consultation process
for the National Strategy on Housing started holding public debates on
the topic. e main organizers were globally connected NGOs such as
Habitat for Humanity Romania, Pact Foundation, the CeRe Association
sponsored by the Romanian American Foundation, and the MKBT
Association, which specialized in consultancy for urban regeneration
projects. ese NGOs were previously involved in charity, micro-credit,
or educational projects in areas of informal housing—all legitimized as
humanitarian intervention. ey were established in the 2000s and 2010s
with foreign donors to focus on charity work, education, and advocacy
on social issues. Since 2017, they hosted a series of high-prole confer-
ences with invited speakers from the World Bank, the government, aca-
demia, commercial banks, and construction companies. e audience
was diverse, including people from the NGO sector, academics, and rep-
resentatives of local and regional institutions. e goal of the events, as
observed from consistent eldwork, was to lobby for fast-tracked legisla-
tive changes that would accelerate the formalization of informal hous-
ing sites.
is process was permitted by a national context of economic growth
where in certain informal housing areas, inhabitants managed to over-
come severe poverty. According to an interview and a group discussion
(conducted in 2019) with social workers in the above NGOs, inhabitants
of informal housing areas managed to gather some resources for better
housing conditions, usually through work migration abroad. At the same
time, there was increased interest from the EU, the World Bank, and the
United Nations Development Program in formalizing informal settle-
ments and most importantly in clarifying and formally registering prop-
erty rights. In a new postcrisis boom context, the political and economic
signicance of peri-urban land and property has changed: as the Ministry
of Economy stated in its public communication, formalizing and regis-
tering these properties was envisaged as a way of facilitating credit for
those in poorer and rural social strata (Economica.net, 2016). New
European funds (the CESAR program) were allocated for such endeav-
ors, to facilitate future land marketization and nancialization (ibid.).
I. Florea et al.

157
e National Agency for Roma became a partner institution in this
process and one of the main proponents of the legislative changes,
acknowledging a disproportionate number of Roma households living in
informal housing. e institution was also interested in showcasing some
progress on the National Strategy for Roma on the occasion of Romania’s
Presidency of the Council of the European Union in 2019. In this lobby-
ing and legislative process, the proposed path for formalization included
granting micro-credit to informal households to pay the high costs of
authorizations and registrations. Households lacking the means to cover
the costs or to access credit, and those at risk of long-term indebtedness
were left out of the discussions. Legitimized through their charity work
in informal housing areas, the NGOs thus backed proposals that would
have led to housing nancialization for those in low-income social strata
who accessed micro-credit.
Since 2018, housing rights groups in the Block for Housing national
platform have entered the debate, challenging the NGO initiators, their
proposed solutions based on micro-credit, and their partnerships with
private and transnational interests. e Block’s main criticism was that
the majority of households in severe poverty lacked the resources for for-
malization and they were being continuously pushed to margins through
evictions. is criticism was based on years of experience with evictions
leading to homelessness, with only informal solutions accessible to the
evictees. e Block’s actions on the issue included media releases, publi-
cation of its own analyses, participation in high-prole conferences to
break their consensus, writing letters to host organizations, and engaging
with members of parliament, the National Agency for Roma, and the
Ministry of Development.
us, informal housing became a visible part of the eld of housing
contention at the intersection of an accelerated legislative process, an insti-
tutional context where the issue could be addressed, and the development
of the Block for Housing scaled up to the national level, drawing on both
the theoretical expertise and the experience of aected groups. e issue of
informal housing was voiced as a confrontation between larger charity
NGOs and their allies on one side, and the housing rights groups on the
other, making further confrontations in the eld possible. Moreover,
opposing the indebtedness of lower-income households in informal
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

158
housing conditions intensied the Block for Housing activists’ engagement
with the issue of debt and nancialization. is also created the possibility
of a wider understanding of the structural factors aecting housing condi-
tions for various social categories with which the Block could ally.
Housing Struggles Since thePandemic Years
e Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s policies addressing it
intensied previous dynamics in the eld of housing contention. With
the government freezing the minimum wage, pension, and social aid lev-
els, as well as shrinking social services, the groups collaborating as the
Block for Housing intensied their direct support for families aected by
evictions and loss of livelihoods. Facing this challenge, current housing
movement activities are marked by severe limitations to resources, pro-
tests, face-to-face meetings, and dissemination of information. is also
poses a new challenge for their cross-class character. Moreover, the groups
in the Block for Housing must face a strengthened anti-poor and racist
public discourse promoted by all the right-leaning parties, including the
USR, which represents the educated urban middle class. In the context of
the pandemic, the poor and the Roma have been portrayed as dangerous
and backward (Vincze & Stoica, 2020).
To respond to these limitations, the groups in the Block for Housing,
including the FCDL, have further intensied their alliance formations
since 2020. ey have sought national, regional, and international involve-
ment on issues related to housing, housing costs, and wages. For example,
they participated in the protests organized by several labor unions in the
main Romanian cities and disseminated their messages to a broader audi-
ence. ey held online events with members aected by housing precarity
and members of labor unions. ey wrote articles for and stayed in con-
tact with leftist media platforms in East and Central Europe united in the
Eastern European Left Media Outlet. ey have often participated in the
internal and public meetings of several transnational networks dealing
with essential work, migrant labor, and care work: e Transnational
Social Strike, Migrant Coordination, and Essential Autonomous Struggles
Transnational. Members of the FCDL and the Block for Housing also
I. Florea et al.

159
intensied their publication of academic papers, explaining the social and
economic implications of dierent housing policies and conditions
(Zamr etal., 2020; Vilenica etal., 2021; Vincze & Florea, 2020; Vincze,
2020, 2021a, 2021b) to address those in more auent and educated
classes and potentially leaning to the left. ese actions also involved seek-
ing professional campaigning knowledge from PR specialists and cam-
paigning platforms for wider reach to local authorities and major national
parties. e aim was to push for faster access to social housing for appli-
cants on social housing waiting lists. is campaigning knowledge was
used to support one of the FCDL’s most active aected members (the
main organizer of the Vulturilor Street anti-eviction mobilization) in her
campaign for the local council during the 2020 elections. However, in a
national context dominated by the liberal-right parties and policies to
privatize what was left of the public health, education, and social services
sectors, these actions had a very limited impact.
e increased challenges of this context are also reected in the trans-
formation of the First Home subsidized credit program. e year 2020
brought new general elections and the installation of a new government,
which leaned even further toward the neoliberal right. is government
changed the First Home program into the New Home program, making
it available for more expensive homes and larger loans. As explained
above, these loans were, and continue to be, accessible only to those with
higher incomes, who represent a small proportion of the population and
are mostly concentrated in the main cities. us, the divisions between
categories of debtors are maintained, limiting their capacity to organize.
As mentioned in Chap. 3, there is currently a limited and even risky
political environment for action for left-leaning groups and mobiliza-
tions, due to increased policing and stronger anticommunist voices reach-
ing government positions through the USR party. To respond to this
context, a new path of action was opened: one member and one sup-
porter of the FCDL—both Roma women who experienced evictions—
ran as candidates for the local council elections in Bucharest in 2020.
ey had campaign support from other left-leaning groups as well.
Although they did not win seats on the targeted councils, their cam-
paigns served as a training ground for public campaigning and future
engagement with electoral politics.
5 Housing Contention in Bucharest

160
Conclusion: ADynamic Field ofAlliances
andConflicts, Silences,
andPolitical Expressions
is chapter has followed the main areas of housing tensions and their
expression across the sociopolitical changes of three postsocialist peri-
ods. e main political expressions of housing poverty covered in this
chapter are struggles against evictions and lack of social housing in
Bucharest, which is especially addressed by the left-leaning groups
formed since the mid-2000s and which have coalesced since 2013
around the Common Front for Housing Rights. Unlike the Budapest
case, homelessness remained a silent aspect of the eld, addressed
mostly by charities. However, at times, with eld transformations, char-
ity organizations became involved in contentious actions. Similarly,
informal housing remained a silent aspect of the eld for a long time,
until it was politicized by various organizations in divergent positions
on the left–right spectrum.
In the case of low- to middle-income groups, the chapter showed
that housing costs became politicized through claims about wages and
utility prices rather than by direct focus on housing access. It also illus-
trated that, with eld transformations, these groups’ issues partially
overlapped with those of housing poverty (in the cases of evictions
linked to restitutions and urban regeneration whereby working-class
families are precarized). e chapter also illustrates areas of common-
ality between low- to middle and middle to high-income conditions,
owing to eld transformations. First, some mortgage holders and forex
credit holders, who were privileged groups of debtors, lost their live-
lihoods in the 2008 crisis and the subsequent austerity. Unlike the
situation in Budapest, household debt remained largely silent, with a
short period of manifest political organizing. A second area of over-
lap between low- to middle- and middle- to high-income earners was
illustrated by the heritage protection movement, with a constituency
ranging from low- to middle- income to high-income groups, which
politicized urban regeneration projects and changed in response to eld
transformations.
I. Florea et al.

161
e chapter showed that this dynamic and entangled eld of making
and unmaking alliances, of silences and politicized expressions, also
reects a dynamic political context at the national level, with changing
party constellations, despite following the same global market integration
path for Romania. is is dierent to the Hungarian case presented in
Chap. 4, with an epochal shift from the postsocialist hegemony after
2008 and a stable Fidesz party supermajority since 2010. More detailed
lessons from the comparison of the two cases are presented in the next
chapter, illustrating the benets of examining them through a structural
eld of contention approach.
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I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_6
6
Structural Fields ofContention
inHousing Struggles: Comparative
Lessons
In Chaps. 1 and 2, we laid out a proposal for a structural eld of conten-
tion approach to housing movements. is approach examines conten-
tion in terms of interactions between multiple actors and their structural
contexts, including non-intentional relations and tensions that remain
politically silent. Chapter 3 overviewed the historical dynamics of hous-
ing conditions in Budapest and Bucharest in terms of their long-term
structural contexts of uneven development. Chapters 4 and 5 looked at
housing contention in Budapest and Bucharest, showing how dierent
actors have politicized housing-related tensions across the structural and
political transformations since 1989. Below, we discuss lessons from
comparing the two cases, pinpointing the relevance of the conceptual
tools that follow from the structural eld of contention approach.
Our arguments in this chapter are organized around specic insights
into two cases where the structural eld of contention approach revealed
a relationship between movements’ politicization of housing tensions and
their structural background. We also show how the comparison of the
two case studies claries the specic benets of this approach. We do not
oer these conclusions as generalizable theoretical statements, nor do we
claim that our conclusions from the perspective of a structural eld of

168
contention cover all possible aspects of the empirical state of housing
contention in the two cases. Instead, we conceive them as specic heuris-
tics following from a eld of contention approach to movements that
may be of use to anyone who seeks to understand how politicized
responses to structural pressures are formed.
Structural Areas ofTension
Our rst conclusion after reviewing the connections between forms of
housing contention and their background in housing conditions was that
in both Budapest and Bucharest, macro-level processes produced specic
areas of tension that were relatively constant throughout the decades fol-
lowing 1989, and were at the center of contention after 2008. ese were
housing poverty, accumulating at the bottom of the housing hierarchy,
and the problem of housing access for low- to middle-income groups.
ese areas of tension are similar in the two cases, owing to the similari-
ties of postsocialist housing systems. Despite small changes that relieve or
intensify some aspects of these systems at certain points, they constitute
lasting characteristics following from an unbroken tendency of commod-
ication across dierent postsocialist regimes. ese tensions are addressed
by dierent forms of housing contention at various points, and are rele-
gated to political silence at others.
As described in Chapter 3, the macro-level conditions of housing in
Hungary and Romania have been characterized by long-term tendencies
toward uneven development, the dominance of owner-occupied housing
after 1989, and recent global trends of housing commodication and
nancialization. In line with these global trends and exacerbated by the
crisis of state socialist systems, state funding for housing plunged with the
collapse of socialism. e rapid privatization of state housing after 1989
resulted in a housing system characterized by extremely high levels of
homeownership—a high level of owner-occupied housing, very limited
public housing, and a weakly regulated, often informal rental market. In
this system, the main route to housing access became homeownership,
which entailed a need for increased household borrowing, leading to
exposure to debt risks. Another aspect of commodication concerned
I. Florea et al.

169
urban regeneration programs. Unlike socialist regeneration projects,
urban regeneration after 1989 became primarily market-driven. Market
priorities in urban regeneration remained an important driver of housing
tensions in the two capital cities, from the destruction of historical heri-
tage buildings to the marginalization or outright eviction of poorer
dwellers.
Tensions around Severe Forms ofHousing Poverty
e most visible tension that followed from this structural environment
was the production of severe housing poverty at the bottom of the sys-
tem. e privatization of housing transferred growing utility and main-
tenance costs to residents who often lost their jobs owing to the
transition crisis. is was coupled with a lack of social housing or access
to housing for those who could not buy. Moreover, the risks of utility
and mortgage debt rose over time, pushing many into worse dwelling
conditions, or ultimately to the streets. Despite the development of
social assistance systems, the problem of homelessness that shocked the
public when it appeared in 1990 became a stable characteristic of post-
socialist housing. Another, less visible form of severe housing poverty,
which also existed under socialism but was reinforced and expanded
after 1990, was informal housing. is involved self-built, low-quality
dwellings in peri-urban areas as well as squatting or semi-legal occupa-
tions of empty apartments. Struggles around the dwindling supply of
social housing were another characteristic form of the politicization of
housing poverty. Evictions became a specic point where these tensions
transformed into open conict—from the privatization of social hous-
ing to evictions related to utility or mortgage debt or the forced destruc-
tion of informal dwellings.
In both Hungary and Romania, intersections with ethnic divisions
constituted an important aspect of postsocialist housing poverty. As
described in Chapter 3, owing to long-term structural conditions, pov-
erty levels are especially high among the Roma, and ethnic discrimina-
tion contributes to their material and social marginalization. Consequently,
the Roma have been among those most severely aected by postsocialist
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

170
housing poverty. e eects of housing peripheralization—the concen-
tration of poor households in low-quality housing areas, peri-urban
informal housing, or poor areas of the countryside—hit Roma commu-
nities particularly hard in both countries. Contention around these situ-
ations often arose when ethnic and social characteristics intersected, as
they did in anti-eviction struggles or in urban regeneration programs
where the social eects of commodication created lines of ethnic
division.
The Problem ofHousing Access forLow-
toMiddle-Income Groups
Another main area of housing tension was the situation of those in low-
to middle-income groups who had relatively stable incomes but could
not aord to buy a home. is tension was manifested in two main
domains. e rst was the problem of rental housing, which could have
provided an alternative form of housing access and therefore surfaced
recurrently as a focus of housing contention. e other main domain in
which this tension was manifested was in household debt, owing to the
reliance of people in these social strata on loans to buy or repair homes.
While this issue manifested as a lack of loan accessibility in the years fol-
lowing the regime change, in the 2000s, the accumulation of risky house-
hold loans grew into a major problem that burst into the open after the
2008 crash. e solutions proposed by state and market actors did not
resolve the structural gap that promoted the accumulation of household
credit risk, and has remained a constant characteristic of the two housing
systems ever since.
e main forms of politicization of this housing tension in the two
countries diered signicantly. In Romania, the forex mortgage boom of
the 2000s generally remained limited to relatively well-situated middle-
class households, whereas in Hungary, it penetrated large segments of the
lower middle class. Consequently, in Romania, the problem of forex debt
after 2008 was expressed in the relatively well-positioned self-advocacy of
middle-class debtors. By contrast, in Hungary, the problem of forex
mortgages constituted a social crisis involving hundreds of thousands of
I. Florea et al.

171
families and was widely politicized at a national level—rst by vocal sup-
port in conservative politics, and then by debtors voicing their discontent
with debt-management measures. e period after 2008 also saw a wave
of politicization of the housing access problem of low- to middle-income
groups in Romania. Yet here, instead of an issue of forex debt, this basic
tension came to be thematized as a problem of incomes not covering
housing costs. After 2008, there were repeated waves of union demon-
strations over wages, and collaborations between unions and leftist hous-
ing groups particularly emphasized housing access as part of the wage
struggle. Meanwhile, in Hungary, parallel with debtors’ movements, new
alliances between leftist housing groups, middle-class youth under pres-
sure from rising housing costs, and progressive opposition politicians
started to thematize low- to middle-income groups’ housing problems in
terms of the state regulation of accessible rentals.
Different Political Contexts ofHousing
Contention after 2008
In both Hungary and Romania, the 2008 crisis produced changes in
national politics and new waves of political mobilizations, both of which
inuenced the conditions of housing contention. Yet, while the macro-
structural background of housing-related tensions was relatively similar
in the two countries, the characteristics of the political changes induced
by the crisis diered signicantly. ese dierences were linked to the
specic political evolution of local regimes across late socialist and post-
socialist structural transformations and they produced dierent condi-
tions for the political orientation and alliance options of housing
movements in the two capitals.
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

172
From Postsocialist Liberal Hegemony
totheOpposition Movements against theOrbán
Regime inPost-2010 Hungary
In Hungary, regime change was dominated by a liberal power bloc. It
consisted of an alliance between liberal dissidents and their post-1989
party, Western capitalists and international lender organizations, ex-
socialist managers and technocrats interested in privatization, and the
strong reformist section of the Socialist party that governed socialist mar-
ketization reforms. is alliance established an FDI (foreign direct
investment)-led model of external integration that shifted toward debt-
led development in the 2000s. e contender power bloc, which pre-
ferred protectionist policies and the accumulation of national capital,
remained in a dominated position throughout these years, from which it
developed a right-wing anti-neoliberal discourse. is discourse became
a vocabulary for the expression of social discontent in popular right-wing
anti-neoliberal protests by the late 2000s.
e eects of the 2008 crisis sealed the implosion of an exhausted and
de-legitimated liberal hegemony, leading to the sweeping victory of the
Fidesz party in 2010. Relying on a parliamentary supermajority, Viktor
Orbán’s government engaged in a type of crisis politics that simultane-
ously served to manage the crisis of capital from core countries, created
room of maneuver for state-backed domestic capital, and diversied
nancial dependence away from Western sources. In this context, while
pre-2010 anti-austerity protests were channeled into a conservative polit-
ical victory, post-2010 demonstrations targeting crisis eects merged into
a more general stream of liberal protest against the supermajority Orbán
regime. In face of the regime’s explicit anti-poor stance, these protests
included social issues among their demands. Nevertheless, these were
subordinated to a pro-democratic, pro-Western, pro-market agenda,
characteristic of the political discourse of the (previously dominant) lib-
eral bloc.
I. Florea et al.

173
The Alliance between Post-2008 Movements
andLiberal Politics inRomania
In Romania, in contrast to Hungarian socialist marketization, the social-
ist regime reacted to the problem of indebtedness with a policy of extreme
austerity serving debt repayment to retain independence and resist inter-
national lenders’ pressure for marketization. Instead of opening up, the
Romanian regime maintained intensive industrialization and centralized
power. is provided no scope for the development of a pro-liberalization
power bloc like that in Hungary. After the 1989 regime change, former
socialist cadres who gained power continued the politics of delayed priva-
tization and protectionism. is direction was changed when contender
liberal forces were strengthened through external alliances during the EU
and NATO accession process in the late 1990s, and subsequently, neolib-
eral reforms were accelerated. In this process, neoliberal politics formed
an alliance with liberal intellectuals and employed a strong anticommu-
nist discourse in their struggle against the Social Democratic Party. is
alliance presided over the debt-ridden growth of the 2000s, and the
austerity- led crisis management of the years following 2008.
e aftermath of 2008 brought intensied conict between liberal
coalitions supported by macrostructural conditions and socialists
attempting to salvage their power by relying on domestic capital and
political networks built in previous decades. In this context, protests that
initially combined anti-austerity stances with expressions of disillusion-
ment with postsocialist politics were channeled into support for liberal
parties in their struggle against socialists. In this struggle, socialists were
described as communist traditionalists who blocked Western-type devel-
opment, supported by a network of corruption and a political alliance
with the uneducated poor. Unlike the situation in Hungary, this frame-
work was explicitly dissociated from the social perspectives of post-2008
middle-class protestors and it combined pro-liberal statements with
antagonism toward the poor.
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

174
Positioning ofLeftist Housing Groups inVarious Post-
2008 Political Environments
In both countries, the wave of post-2008 middle-class politicization
strengthened leftist segments of middle-class activism, including activist
groups with leftist aliations who built alliances with disenfranchised
groups and thematized housing-related grievances in political terms. For
these actors, the varied contexts of post-2008 politics oered dierent
possibilities for alliance formation. In Romania, leftist housing activists
came into conict with demonstrators’ shift toward right-liberal posi-
tions. is was manifested in both general protest politics, as well as in
specic instances of conict in housing campaigns, such as a clash with
heritage protection groups over the eviction of a Roma family from a
heritage building. As a result, leftist housing activism separated from the
general wave of post-2008 demonstrations and continued to pursue the
more marginal but ideologically explicit politics of cross-class advocacy
and alliance making.
In Hungary, by contrast, the social demands of leftist housing activism
were included and amplied in the general wave of post-2010 middle-
class protests. Similar to previous socialist dissident liberalism which also
emphasized social demands, post-2010 oppositional liberalism became
open to leftist stances. Housing in particular was an issue where opposi-
tional politics met social demands. is was due to the advanced frame-
works of leftist housing activism prepared by a group named e City is
for All, including their good relations with and recognition by liberal
circles. It was also due to the deepening of the housing crisis, which had
also aected educated middle-class youth. Leftist housing activism made
the right to housing a slogan to embrace both severe housing poverty and
new middle-class anxieties. While Romanian leftist housing activism
went on to build a network with an explicit anticapitalist and antiracist
prole, separate from the political institutionalization of post-2008
middle- class politics, in Hungary, it was integrated into the dynamics of
wider opposition politics. is included founders of e City is for All
entering political positions after opposition victories in the 2019 local
elections, as well as various collaborations with new opposition local
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175
governments. In this context, the relationship of Hungarian groups to
market-oriented oppositional politics took the form of tactical collabora-
tion or parallel action rather than open conict.
Integration ofDebtor Groups into Various Fields
ofPost-2008 Politics
Debtor advocacy provides another illuminating example of post-2008
political contexts marking the positioning of housing mobilizations in
the two countries. In both countries, debtors who took on forex loans
before 2008 and suered spikes in debt repayments owing to post-2008
changes in currency rates mobilized to claim state relief for their situa-
tion. In both countries, debtors’ groups focused on retaining homeown-
ership and optimizing their situation under the conditions provided by
the system. However, dierences in the distribution of forex mortgages
and in alliance options oered by dierent post-2008 political contexts
produced very dierent forms of debtor politics in the two countries.
In Romania, debtors’ struggles were mainly limited to individual bar-
gains and litigation, with the notable exception of households with CHF-
denominated loans, who organized collectively and staged several protest
events. Debtors’ attachment to existing models of homeownership was
evident in their support for some austerity measures (in the hope that
these would ameliorate currency rates and maintain asset prices).
Moreover, although mortgage defaulters were few, their middle-income
position and better interest representation capacity allowed them to lobby
successfully for certain favorable legislative changes. ese, in turn,
allowed them access to the very limited public housing stock, thus plac-
ing them in direct competition with precarious social housing applicants.
Among more auent and nondefaulting mortgage holders who bought
to rent and hoped to improve their situation as landlords, this eect was
even more prominent. Living in urban centers with better paid jobs,
often in multinational rms, they were integrated into the right-liberal
framework, supporting the anticorruption protest wave against socialists
and the poor. us, they came into opposition with leftist housing activ-
ism. While they organized to secure their positions, their struggles
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

176
implied no connection to the defaulting and struggling debtors, whose
visibility thus waned.
In Hungary, the large number of CHF-denominated mortgages led to
a major social crisis after 2008 that aected a large number of lower-
middle and working-class households. is coincided with the collapse of
the liberal power bloc and the run-up to the successful election campaign
of Fidesz in 2010. In this context, debtors’ activism, which spoke the
language of the right-wing anti-neoliberal movements of the 2000s, was
embraced and promoted by Fidesz’s electoral campaign as part of the
“economic freedom ght” it promised against the dominance of Western
capital. However, after 2010, Fidesz’s management of the debt crisis pur-
sued nancial stabilization supported by domestic actors in nancial
markets instead of social goals. While the more auent debtors were
saved, debtors whose problems were not alleviated turned against Fidesz.
is phase of the struggle, however, was eectively silenced by the
government.
Debtors andLeftist Housing Groups: Two Cases
ofPolitical Fracturing ofPost-2008
Housing Movements
Unlike Western or Southern European cases where anti-debt housing
movements became a major reference point for anti-austerity and prode-
mocracy movements, in Hungary and Romania, debtors’ mobilizations
did not develop a signicant connection with leftist housing movements.
While debtors’ groups in both countries maintained a right-wing ten-
dency bound to the idea of homeownership, they connected to dierent
versions of conservative and liberal right-wing politics. In addition to a
reluctance to engage with right-wing frameworks, leftist housing groups’
distance from debtor politics also reected the class-based character of
housing movement alliances. While leftist housing groups prioritized alli-
ances with those struck by the most severe forms of housing poverty,
debtors’ activism represented middle- and lower middle-class segments.
ese segments occupied intermediate positions in housing hierarchies,
which could sometimes be considered to compete with the needs of the
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177
poor as much as to support their demands for housing rights. is ambi-
guity of potential political positions came to be decided by political sup-
port for right-wing versions of post-2008 politics, facilitated by debtor
groups’ preferences for homeownership and participation in former
right-wing movements.
e fracturing of housing movement alliances across dierent patterns
of post-2008 politics in the two countries contradicts the dominant nar-
ratives on post-2008 housing activism. Referring to examples of progres-
sive movements such as PAH in Spain, these narratives consider post-2008
reactions to housing-related tensions an organic part of progressive anti-
austerity movements (e.g., Di Feliciantonio 2017; Fields 2017). In our
two cases, groups who address housing issues from leftist perspectives
need to work with or deal with right-wing tendencies in post-2008 move-
ments. ese appear either in the form of explicit conicts as in Romania,
or implicitly, as in Hungarian housing groups’ oppositional alliances.
Meanwhile, the issue of mortgage debt, which has been framed by
Western progressive movements as a major point of anticapitalist mobili-
zation, was not integrated with leftist frameworks in these cases, and
debtor movements remained caught between right-wing political alli-
ances and marginalization.
Translating Tensions into Politicized Demands:
TheRole ofMiddle-Class Expertise
andInstitutional Interfaces
Our case studies conrmed the long-term insight of social movement
studies that structural tensions do not generate movements by them-
selves. Although the areas of tensions described above characterized both
postsocialist housing systems, neither the long-term presence of these
tensions nor their intensication in certain periods led to mobilizations
in themselves. Instead, we found that tensions were politicized in specic
moments when they intersected with the formation of activist and politi-
cal alliances between dierent types of actors.
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178
In some cases—such as the birth of a new participative model of home-
less advocacy in Hungary in the 2000s or art projects in gentrifying
neighborhoods that formed the basis for later anti-eviction campaigns in
Bucharest—the formation of these alliances was not linked to changes in
housing tensions. Instead, it followed from changing conditions of activ-
ist mobilization through the arrival of a new generation of educated but
often precarized middle-class leftist activism that sought new forms of
participative politics beyond existing structures such as social assistance,
volunteering, or institutionalized art spaces. In most other cases, politici-
zation occurred at points where tensions were intensied, for example,
during evictions, the spike in homelessness in the 1990s, or the mortgage
debt crash following 2008. However, even in these cases, resistance by
those directly aected seldom led to forms of contention that would
express structural problems as a political issue, formulated in such a way
as to address institutionalized levels of political debates. Instead, educated
middle-class activists’ capacity to translate instances of conict into
broader institutional–political frameworks was key to the formation of
politicized forms of housing contention. Debtors’ groups, especially the
production of expertise in Hungarian debtors’ circles, provide the closest
example to movement frameworks produced by the aected groups
themselves. Yet, here too, the help of professional allies was key to inter-
preting debtors’ situations and translating their problems into institu-
tionalized vocabularies (predominantly litigation). Conversely, the lack
of expert allies impeded the expression of debtors’ demands in terms of
broader critical frameworks and arguably made them more vulnerable to
cooption and silencing by right-wing politics.
Reviewing the development of housing contention in the two coun-
tries, we found that all points where long-lasting areas of tension became
politicized were linked to connections between three main factors: some
form of housing deprivation, (educated but often precarious) middle-
class political activism and expertise, and institutional interfaces where
structural tensions could be projected in terms of demands tailored to
denitions of public interests and their institutionalized management. In
each of the cases we reviewed, middle-class expert activists played a key
role in translating housing tensions to demands that t existing institu-
tional frameworks.
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179
e existence of institutional interfaces with which housing activists
could directly engage in relation to their problem—such as social hous-
ing for housing poverty, litigation for forex debtors, or municipal regula-
tion for anti-Airbnb campaigns—appears to have been a crucial condition
for politicized expressions of housing contention. At the same time, these
interfaces also restricted contention to forms that t their institutional
logic—a fact often criticized within housing activist groups. Such criti-
cisms were made by e City is for All in the case of the formal system of
homeless assistance, by debtor activists in terms of the inadequacy of
solutions achievable through litigation or political advocacy, and by
renewing initiatives for noncommodied forms of housing to provide
alternatives to the redistributive or market-based solutions oered by
existing institutional systems.
What stands out regarding activist groups’ potential to make headway
against these limitations are examples of movement institutions that,
once established and solidied, could become actors in their own right,
able to dene agendas beyond existing institutional interfaces and create
new institutions backed by some form of social power to maintain those
frameworks. In several cases, such initiatives could facilitate longer pro-
cesses of politicization across changes of structural contexts and transfor-
mations of the contention eld. Some illustrative examples are the new
wave of homeless advocacy organizations in Hungary that was established
in the 2000s and then came to the forefront of resistance to anti-homeless
legislation after 2010, or the similar alliance between middle-class activ-
ists and people aected by evictions in Romania, which later could engage
with new types of challenges such as the World Bank program for hous-
ing formalization. e enduring capacity of the Hungarian National
Alliance of Housing Cooperatives to act as an interest representation
body in the eld of housing policy, decades after the collapse of the social-
ist system that set it up, is another example of advocacy-based institu-
tional capacity. New initiatives for building institutional frameworks for
cooperative or social rental housing explicitly aim to create such move-
ment institutions.
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180
Dynamics ofAlliances inPoliticizing Issues
ofHousing Poverty
In homelessness-related organizing, which became the main form of con-
testing severe forms of housing poverty in Hungary, the rst wave of
politicization in the 1990s happened through collaboration between
homeless people’s own mobilizations, low-income volunteers, and (lib-
eral and, respectively, conservative) political activists. It was the expertise
and political connections of the latter that helped—and dominated—the
translation of the issue of homelessness into the frameworks of institu-
tionalized politics and subsequently into the organizational frameworks
of homeless assistance. In the 2000s, a new generation of middle-class
activists formulated a critique of this system’s embedded hierarchies. In
combination with aected actors’ own criticisms, this wave of activism
created a model, embodied by e City is for All, that attempted to com-
bine the mediating capacity of middle-class activists with majority con-
trol by aected members. In the 2010s, the importance of middle-class
alliances was reinforced by e City is for All being open to middle-class
housing problems and its collaboration with broader opposition net-
works. After opposition victories at the 2019 local elections, the group
continued its work in closer collaboration with middle-class movements
and opposition politicians, with some activists entering local government
positions and the issue of homelessness becoming an explicit collision
point between oppositional and governmental politics at the national level.
In Romania, the issue of homelessness did not become thematized at
the level of political contention and remained relegated to political silence
and the regular work of professional charity organizations. Instead, the
issue of ethnicized housing poverty, with the harshest form being evic-
tions, became a central topic of housing contention. During the 2000s,
educated low- to middle-income activists sympathetic to left-wing cri-
tiques of postsocialist development formed alliances with Roma activists
and with people aected by evictions. ese alliances provided a stand-
point that strongly linked leftist housing activism to people discrimi-
nated against in housing hierarchies. Similar to e City is for All, these
movement alliances sought to balance middle-class capacities for political
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181
representation with the inuence of directly aected members. Unlike in
Hungary, the political line established by this alliance collided with the
politics of post-2008 demonstrations, including direct conicts with the
urban heritage movement.
In Hungary, the issue of ethnicized housing poverty did not become
directly politicized as such. However, as an underlying structural area of
tension, it did produce political manifestations in various forms. e
“trickling down” of housing poverty to the countryside after 1989 pro-
duced pockets of poverty in rural areas, many of which also became eth-
nically segregated. With the reduction of state funding for housing, social
housing benets paid to such population segments constituted a remain-
ing stream of subsidies that continued to be paid to the poorest. In the
escalation of ethnic conicts in rural areas during the 2000s, this type of
state assistance was described as unfair, with claims that working
Hungarians received no benets during this period. e far-right Jobbik
party’s successful anti-Roma campaign, which helped it enter parliament
in 2010, provided one way whereby this tension found its way into poli-
tics. Other cases involved intra-city developments within Budapest. e
peripheralization of poor residents by market-based regeneration pro-
grams had a strong ethnic character in the inner districts. e social
regeneration model of the Magdolna program aimed to establish an
inclusive model in this respect. Despite its limited success, it produced
the basis of local civil society organization that came to play a signicant
role in the opposition community campaign’s success in the 2019 local
elections. In the case of the Hős street segregated area, Fidesz’s local pol-
icy of development, its more general anti-Roma, anti-poor, and pro-
policing approach, together with a plan to encircle the segregated area
with a fence (reminiscent of the anti-migration campaign that included
building a fence on Hungary’s southern border) clashed with a coalition
that linked local social workers’ advocacy to broader public indignation
and larger frameworks of oppositional political communication.
Concerning informal housing, no major form of politicization had
developed in Budapest so far, with both residents’ and local governments’
hardships remaining under the radar of political discussions. In Bucharest,
however, an occasion for politicization was created when a group of
NGOs, in partnership with the World Bank, initiated a legislative
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182
proposal to facilitate the formalization of informal neighborhoods at the
national level, which would have criminalized new informal housing.
New leftist housing activist groups from the Block for Housing reacted
by stepping up as mediators between aected communities and institu-
tionalized negotiations over formalization, in which they could partici-
pate based on their credentials earned during earlier advocacy work. ey
advocated against pushing costs of formalization on residents and instead
emphasized the need to address the problem of housing poverty causing
informalization. is instance of politicization was thus based on a local
initiative to implement the World Bank’s global agenda for formalization,
to which middle-class activists could respond as mediators based on their
knowledge of aected communities and previously gained access to the
lower ranks of institutional negotiators.
Dynamics ofAlliances inthePoliticization
ofSocial Housing
e issue of social housing has been repeatedly addressed by housing
contention in both countries by dierent constellations of alliances. In
Hungary, liberal and leftist housing activism has provided relatively con-
tinuous support for social housing since the 1990s, including instances of
collaborations with aected groups. From the 2000s on, resistance to
evictions from social housing formed a regular element of the new par-
ticipative wave of leftist housing activism, and demanding better social
housing remained a major way to translate the general idea of housing
rights into specic demands in public campaigns. Despite these connec-
tions, social housing and evictions did not become a major convergence
point of movement agency and politics, as they did in Bucharest. ere,
anti-eviction actions were key to forming lasting political and emotional
links between the aected people and middle-class expert activists. e
struggle by aected movement members to access social housing directly
connected aspects of direct action, institutional advocacy, and political
demands. e case of the most prominent Roma activist in the Vulturilor
eviction is illustrative, as she has been constantly blocked from accessing
social housing owing to her political visibility. At the same time, leftist
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183
housing groups continued to provide emotional and material support for
her struggle. Since leftist housing groups’ national convergence in the
Block for Housing in 2017, emphasis is placed on the right to social
housing of all those earning below the national average income, who are
not and have never been homeowners, with the aim of opening the eld
for wider class alliances around social housing.
Politicization around Urban Regeneration Projects
In the case of urban regeneration, we saw the following patterns of mak-
ing and unmaking alliances in the politicization of regeneration-related
tensions. In Hungary in the 1990s, the harmful social impact of market-
based regeneration programs was not expressed politically, but was noted
by experts. By the 2000s, this expert capacity combined with the possibil-
ity of EU-funded social regeneration projects produced the Magdolna
program, which became a widely known reference point for inclusive
regeneration. In 2010, the anti-poor aspects of urban development
advanced by local Fidesz governments encountered political opposition
from a broader coalition of aected groups, leftist housing activists,
opposition activists, and opposition politicians. It is worth noting that
this inclusion of the social aspect in political debates on urban develop-
ment occurred in an environment of opposition campaigning, where a
politically heterogeneous opposition was forced to collaborate to con-
front a supermajority government. In this context, contradictions
between market-based and socially oriented development could be tem-
porarily subdued in the convergence of symbolic messaging, while in the
programs of dierent parties, demands for accessible housing coexisted
with market-based approaches such as the “Smart City.”
In Romania, the tension between market-based regeneration projects
and evictions became central to the formation of the housing rights
movement. In the mid-2000s, opposition to evictions linked to the
market- based regeneration project in Rahova-Uranus was foundational
for the housing movement in Bucharest, bringing together evictees, fami-
lies at risk of eviction, those ghting to keep their homes, Roma and
anti-racism activists, artists, and social researchers. is initial cross-class
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184
coalition was also the grounds for collaboration with the heritage protec-
tion movement interested in conserving areas near the city center. e
alliance broke up because of the latter prioritizing market-oriented urban
development over social rights. e breakup claried the housing rights
movement’s position on class alliances, putting it in opposition to the
heritage protection movement increasingly absorbed by right-liberal
frameworks and development projects.
Dynamics ofAlliances inthePoliticization oftheLow-
toMiddle-Income Groups’ Housing Needs
In both countries, low- to middle-income groups’ housing access has
been a source of tension ever since the regime change; but this tension
intensied after 2008, leading to two main forms of political expression:
debtors’ contention (framed in conservative/liberal frameworks) and
housing right groups’ leftist and liberal political alliances.
In Hungary, tenants’ groups expressed the problems of this segment in
the years of the regime change according to a framework tied to previous
socialist institutional structures that lost its contours with privatization.
e Alliance of Housing Cooperatives used its institutional capacity
developed during the socialist era to represent the interests of this seg-
ment, even if this was mainly in closed-door negotiations and with
decreasing power over the years. roughout the 1990s and 2000s, these
groups’ structural need for rental housing has been promoted by the
Alliance as well as by thinktanks connected to liberal politics. By the late
2010s, this need had been aggravated, and it aected a politically active
urban middle class, who were included in the coalition between leftist
housing activism and opposition politics. Meanwhile, the same need for
rental housing started to be addressed by state and market actors with
distinct positions of interest. On the level of housing activism, a parallel
stream was the formation of new experiments and expertise in coopera-
tive housing projects, involving coalitions with labor unions. While these
developments linked the issue of rental housing to leftist and liberal
political projects, the same problem of housing access for low- to
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185
middle-income groups was also expressed in right-wing political terms by
debtors’ groups.
In Romania, the precarization of low- to middle-income segments
strongly encouraged political activism in the post-2008 mobilization
cycle. However, the politics of these activists diverged between leftist
housing groups on the one hand and the mainstream trend of political
mobilization on the other. ose in the latter movements eventually
joined the broader liberal trend of large political demonstrations, embark-
ing on technocratic or party-oriented careers. Meanwhile, new leftist
activism, with a highly educated but rather materially precarious back-
ground, mostly relied on voluntary work and solidied its anti-systemic
stance. is stands in contrast to the Hungarian case, where leftist hous-
ing politics became more integrated into formal politics after 2019.
Similar to the situation in Budapest, leftist housing activism also pro-
duced projects for cooperative dwelling as well as new coalitions
with unions.
In terms of social housing policies, the contexts of leftist housing activ-
ism diered between the two countries. In Hungary, these policies
implied a decreasing stream of funds directed solely toward the neediest,
while state support for low- to middle-income housing was mostly chan-
neled into market-based tools such as mortgage subsidies. In Romania,
the redistribution of state support for housing was increasingly directed
toward young families on stable low or middle incomes. In this context,
low- and lower-middle income groups (from below the poverty line to
below the national average income) had to compete for very limited pub-
lic housing stock. is made it challenging for leftist housing activist
groups to build solidarity. Moreover, debtors’ demands for state help, and
especially their successful lobbying for privileged access to public hous-
ing, was seen by leftist housing activists as conicting with the needs of
the poorest.
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186
Translating between Multiscalar Processes
andPolitical Demands
Conceiving local housing-related grievances in terms of multiscalar,
transnational processes and building the capacity to address them politi-
cally has been a specic challenge for housing activists. In most of the
cases we followed, the multiscalar aspects of structural tensions came to
be politicized where there was a direct institutional connection between
scales and activists that used specic capacities and alliances allowing
them to connect local grievances to processes on other scales. In Hungary,
for instance, the issue of social inclusion was introduced into urban
regeneration projects through programs linked to international institu-
tional frameworks (EU-funded social urban regeneration) and by expert
groups translating between local and European institutional contexts. In
the politicization of informal housing in Romania, a similar example to
the simultaneous presence of an interscale institutional connection and
activist translation capacity was provided by the World Bank formaliza-
tion project and leftist activists’ knowledge of local aected groups, local
administrations, and international criticisms of World Bank develop-
mental projects.
Debtors’ activism exemplies the limitations of translating capacities
across scales. While the problem of mortgage debt was deeply connected
to the international dynamics of nancialization in both countries, debt-
ors’ politics remained limited to litigation and demands for protection
addressed to the state. In Hungary, debtor activists did not interpret the
local debt crisis as part of broader international dynamics, and instead,
tended to follow right-wing politics’ focus on a specic collision between
foreign nancial interests and Hungarian national interests. Government
programs that did not help debtors in arrears were included in debtors’
narratives as a case of treason within this conict, repeating a narrative
that in earlier forms had been applied to Socialist-Liberal governments
serving Western interests. is framework could not provide a functional
dierentiation between Western and Hungarian capital or engage eec-
tively with the government’s maneuvers to reorganize relations between
the two. Hungarian debtors’ activism in relation to the EU provides a
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187
similar example. Owing to hopes placed in EU-level litigation after
domestic possibilities were removed and to impressions of better con-
sumer protection in Western countries, debtors saw the EU as a potential
guarantor and good example of debtors’ rights. Despite recurrent refer-
ences to Western nance as the cause of debtors’ suering, debtors’ groups
could not interpret and engage with the structural hierarchy between
European and national scales of the debt problem and its regulation.
In terms of building capacity to address multiscalar aspects of housing
tensions, it is also important to mention activist groups’ relations with
international partners and their various forms of institutionalization. In
the case of the Hungarian movement e City is for All, the NewYork-
based homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless played an impor-
tant role in the conceptualization of its organizational model. Other
international connections of e City is for All constituted an important
tool for applying pressure in its campaign against anti-homelessness leg-
islation. Lessons from the Spanish housing and municipalist movement
were later used by e City is for All members in Eighth district com-
munity electoral campaigns. For Romanian leftist housing groups, simi-
lar connections developed with the European Action Coalition for e
Right to Housing and the City, in which the Common Front for Housing
Rights and Social Housing NOW from Cluj have been increasingly
active. Although international collaborations and support actions have
been undertaken since the early years of the Romanian leftist housing
groups, the European Action Coalition constituted the rst common
movement institution through which local groups directly engaged with
multiscalar and multisited aspects of housing tensions. is largely con-
tributed to their political conceptualization of local grievances as linked
to structural conditions on multiple scales. In the case of leftist housing
groups’ cooperative projects, the international wave of cooperative urban-
ism that followed the 2008 crisis, and particularly the foundation of the
East European cooperative housing network MOBA, played an impor-
tant role as a forum for international collaboration, a source of inspira-
tion, and an institutional reference frame for both Hungarian and
Romanian local projects.
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188
Field Dynamics
In both countries, we have seen that relatively constant and similar struc-
tural tensions were politicized over time by a multiplicity of actors with
dierent political frameworks and alliances. In descriptions of other local
elds, this characteristic was identied as the long-term fragmentation of
housing struggles (Sebály 2021). is section describes some heuristic
tools from the structural eld of contention approach that we found use-
ful to grasp some key aspects of this multiplicity.
Some of these tools are used to examine the variety of relations between
actors (from alliances or conicts to parallel action), whereas others are
used to examine relationships between structural tensions and their polit-
icization that are typically less visible in the movements’ own narratives.
An example is the structural predominance of political silences, or
instances where the mode of politicization obscures some structural con-
tradictions in the tensions that become politicized. A third heuristic that
we found useful concerned transformations in the eld as a whole,
whereby certain contextual changes impact all actors and their relations,
thereby changing the forms of housing contention without necessarily
being reected in groups’ intentional strategies. Finally, the end of this
section describes a eld-level division in the politics of housing conten-
tion that we found characterized both cases.
Explicit Alliances, Explicit Conflicts, andParallelism
between Movements
Examples of explicit alliances included those between evictees or those at
risk of eviction, the leftist (precarious but educated) middle-class, and
Roma activists in Romania. In Hungary, they involved homeless activists
and liberal/leftist middle-class activism and expertise, as well as the coali-
tion between leftist housing activism, new middle-class movements, and
oppositional politics after 2019. Explicit conicts involved cases such as
tenant conicts with state maintenance companies in Hungary, leftist
housing groups’ struggles against evictions, a lack of social housing, new
legislative mechanisms for housing formalization, anti-homelessness
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189
policies, and conservative urban development. ey also involved debt-
ors’ struggles against banks’ demands for higher installments or
expropriation.
e most striking example of parallelism between movements was that
between leftist housing activism and debtors’ movements in both coun-
tries. In Romania, this remained an issue that we characterized in terms
of leftist activism not engaging with the debtors’ relatively narrow, tech-
nical, and politically conservative eorts to maintain homeownership. In
Hungary, this parallelism was recognized by both sides as a problem, but
remained in place despite recurrent eorts to build bridges. Here, top-
down penetration by right-wing politics and other political cultures pro-
duced dierent political perspectives on this problem in debtor and leftist
activist circles.
e other main form of parallelism we saw was the relative distance of
leftist (and in Hungary, liberal) housing activism from low- to middle-
income groups’ housing access problems. In some instances, this distance
was even manifested as a conict, such as when liberal housing activists
in Hungary transformed workers’ homes into homeless shelters or when
leftist activists in Romania opposed redistribution models that favored
young middle-class professionals. While parallelism between debtors’
groups and leftist housing activism mainly concerned the conict between
left- and right-wing political frameworks and their respective alliances, a
deeper layer of political parallelism was based on these groups’ dierent
approaches to homeownership. When leftist housing activists thematized
the problem of housing access, they did so in terms of social housing,
rental housing, and cooperative housing, all of which were formulated in
line with anti-privatization, pro-redistribution leftist agendas. is ulti-
mately went against the dominant system of homeownership. Meanwhile,
debtors’ groups maintained the goal of housing access through home-
ownership, as prescribed by the super-homeownership system, in an
attempt to resist its eects on indebtedness rather than its property
aspects. e dierent political frames and respective sensitivities regard-
ing the idea of homeownership kept these two streams of activism in
parallel. ese frames were wired into their constituents’ broader political
ideologies as well as their positions. While debtors’ groups primarily
sought to save their own investments and homes, for educated lower- and
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190
middle-class leftist activists housing struggles were linked to their broader
engagement with political agendas for left political change.
The Structural Predominance ofPolitical Silences
e most striking cases of structural tensions being concealed by political
silences were those of informal housing in Hungary and homelessness in
Romania. Although ethnic discrimination as an element of housing pov-
erty was sometimes addressed in Hungary by leftist or liberal housing
groups and by Roma advocacy, it remained beyond the focus of the dom-
inant frameworks of housing contention, unlike in Romania. Next to
these most evident cases, we also found that processes of politicization
generally did not cover the full scope of the underlying structural ten-
sions, even cases where the latter were explicitly thematized by political
initiatives. Instances of politicization typically remained visible but
exceptional in relation to the scope of structural tensions they addressed,
both in terms of continuity (as seen, e.g., in the rent issue in Hungary,
intermittently thematized over time by various groups and alliances) and
in their extent (as illustrated by the small number of activists in the leftist
coalitions concerned with homelessness or ethnic housing poverty in
both countries).
e relatively small scope of politicized activists compared with the
number of people directly aected by the issues that activist groups
addressed was characteristic of leftist housing movements as well as debt-
ors’ groups. e signicance of such groups regarding the larger, politi-
cally silent base of tensions they addressed was typically enhanced by
their access to policy negotiations. e role of Hungarian dissident activ-
ists in establishing postsocialist institutions of homeless assistance or the
recent case of Romanian leftist housing activists entering negotiations
over the World Bank program of formalization are good examples. A
major exception from the generally large gap between instances of politi-
cization and their broader structural base is the Alliance of Housing
Cooperatives in Hungary, which entailed all housing cooperatives in the
country in 1990 and continued to include cooperatives plus a signicant
proportion of condominiums in subsequent decades. e Alliance also
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191
involved an imbalance in terms of political activity, distributed between
a small active leadership and a large but mostly passive membership.
Nevertheless, it is the only organization covered in this book that had an
institutional membership relationship with the majority of the people
aected by the situation it addressed.
Contradictions Not Reflected inthePoliticization
ofHousing Tensions
We observed that the structural contradictions that dened the condi-
tions of contestation addressing a certain area of tension were not neces-
sarily reected in the frameworks of politicization that respective actors
built around them. We consider such relationships to be highly illustra-
tive of the way the dynamics of politicization relate to underlying struc-
tural and political conditions.
An illustrative example of structural contradictions that dened hous-
ing groups’ politics, but is not reected in their political frameworks, is
provided by the tenants’ movement during the late socialist era and dur-
ing the regime change in Hungary. is movement was based on the
possibility of forming civic associations, permitted by the liberalizing
reforms of the late 1980s. Using this window of opportunity, the Tenants’
Association contested deciencies of maintenance by state housing com-
panies, owing to a lack of funds following from the burden of public debt
repayment—the same situation that made later socialist political liberal-
ization possible. Although tenants mobilized to pressure state mainte-
nance companies to do long-delayed repairs, such pressure could not
change the macrostructural conditions that caused the gaps in mainte-
nance. With the progress of economic liberalization, tenants’ dierent
positions within the privatization process manifested as a political contra-
diction within the association itself, which broke into opposing camps
favoring privatization versus the continuation of tenant advocacy.
In middle-class housing activism, we found another type of structural
contradiction that attracted no political reection outside the leftist scene
but played an important role in the divergent strategies and frameworks
of dierent middle-class substrata and activist groups. is arose from
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

192
emancipatory politics by those from middle-class backgrounds (ranging
from educated but precarious to higher positions), whereby political
demands made in the name of general aims (such as urban development
or housing rights) sometimes converged or collided with middle-class
activists’ own positional interests. ese especially included the problem
of professional precarity and the potential to link housing activism to
politicized expert careers (Gagyi 2017). On the level of political mes-
sages, those on either side of this contradiction could appear to be organi-
cally harmonious, with middle-class activist expertise representing
broader interests, including those of the deprived. However, the potential
conict between these two aspects was also manifested in various forms
in our cases.
In the Romanian leftist housing groups’ conict with heritage protec-
tion activism, we saw two trajectories of dierent segments of politicized
middle-class expertise conicting through dierent political alliances and
the respective career options. In this case, the structural contradiction
between potentially emancipative political aims on the one hand and
middle-class career interests on the other was politicized by leftist hous-
ing activists. ey pointed out that middle-class urban activism allowing
members to enter political expert positions ultimately hurt the housing
interests of deprived groups. In both Romania and Hungary, leftist hous-
ing groups allied with deprived groups reected this contradiction in
their political agenda and made the control of middle-class privileges
within their own alliance structures part of their organizational practice.
However, despite this similarity, in Hungary, the positioning of leftist
housing groups relative to the same structural contradiction of middle-
class politics played out dierently, as the activists integrated into opposi-
tion politics after 2019. A similar but thus far less politically visible form
of the same relationship involves middle-class initiatives for housing
cooperatives that are building expert positions and collaborating with
local opposition governments while striving to control the eect of expert
careers tied to dominant institutions by building horizontal relations
with aected groups.
I. Florea et al.

193
Transformations oftheField
In addition to the dynamics between actors, we also found eld-level
transformations that aect the positions of each actor to be important in
terms of eld dynamics. One such transformation includes the 2008 cri-
sis, which accelerated social polarization and sharpened housing tensions,
especially in the areas of severe housing poverty, housing debt, and uc-
tuating mid-level incomes. e post-2008 eld-level transformation also
involves the political aftermath of the crisis, which solidied dierent
(neoliberal and nationalist authoritarian) regimes in the two countries,
leading to dierent dynamics in the political alliances of post-2008
movements.
Further examples of eld-level transformations in Hungary include
the Fidesz government’s anti-homelessness and anti-NGO campaigns. In
a context where anti-homelessness legislation became the primary exam-
ple of the conservative government’s punitive attitude toward poverty
and where NGO-level civil activism was seen as increasingly unable to
reverse ongoing trends, the non-NGO-based participatory politics of
leftist housing activism gained a central symbolic role in opposition poli-
tics. In Romania, a similar transformation involved the mainstreaming of
the liberal branch of post-2008 mobilizations in electoral politics, which
resulted in the Save Romania Union (USR) becoming the third largest
political party in 2016. e USR raised its anticorruption agenda above
any other social and economic demands and further advanced an
approach to social benets and services, such as housing, dedicated to the
deserving poor. ese transformations of the eld increased competition
among low- and low- to middle-income groups for public visibility and
access to social and public housing, imposing new limitations on cross-
class alliances. However, they also laid the groundwork for social and
economic struggles on the margins of the mainstream neoliberal agenda
to interconnect, beyond, and sometimes against, the anticorruption
trend. us, Romanian leftist activists began to address housing accessi-
bility and costs in connection with labor/wage struggles, and vice versa.
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

194
Resistance toDeprivation Versus Housing Access
Activism forLow- toMiddle-Income Groups:
AField-Level Division
Contemplating the relations between structurally induced housing ten-
sions and processes of their politicization, we noticed a major division
that we perceived to be a key characteristic of the way in which housing
tensions become politicized in both countries. is was the division
between a strain of politicization whereby coalitions between aected
groups and progressive (educated but often precarious) middle-class
activists address severe forms of housing poverty and the politicization of
housing access by stable low- to middle-income populations. is divi-
sion was most often expressed by silence or parallel action, and some-
times through more or less explicit conict.
On the level of relations between activist group politics, this division
can be characterized in terms of dierences in movement alliances and
activists’ positions, in education and political culture, or in relations to
homeownership. However, the overall eld of housing tensions suggests
that the consistency of this division follows from not only dierences in
the characteristics and politics of movement groups, but also major polit-
ical trends dened by the structural characteristics of housing
commodication.
In both countries, the parallel processes of housing commodication
and the waning of state funding for housing created a system that con-
stantly produces housing poverty at the bottom and makes it dicult for
low- to middle-income groups (who have inherited no extra resources) to
access housing. In national policy, the division between these two main
areas of tensions is reected in what Jelinek and Pósfai (2020) described
as the duality of postsocialist housing policies. e rst and dominant
branch of this duality involves using state intervention to promote
market- based housing solutions—for instance, through state support for
mortgages. As Pósfai (2013) emphasizes, for the housing access of low- to
middle-income groups, this area of policy provides state help that allows
these groups’ housing needs to be channeled to the market. In terms of
politicization, it creates specic tensions tied to economic boom–bust
I. Florea et al.

195
cycles and related political unrest when such augmentation of housing
marketization strikes back in the form of a debt crisis. e other branch
of the dual policy structure addresses severe forms of housing poverty
produced at the bottom of the system. is type of policy falls close to
classic redistributive models targeted at social needs, but it is increasingly
limited by the scarcity of dedicated funds. A consequence of reducing
funding is the proliferation of restrictive conditions of access, as well as
the politicized tensions around those conditions.
is diagnosis of postsocialist housing policies by Jelinek and Pósfai
(2020) resembles what Wahl (2011) identied as a false political dichot-
omy generated by the neoliberalization of Scandinavian welfare systems.
Wahl (2011) argued that the social power of organized labor to impose
decommodication of various segments of social life after World War II,
including housing, was defeated during the 1970s. As a consequence,
state policies were divided into policies of marketization and a waning
branch of welfare policies that were expected to take care of those who fell
through the gaps of market-based opportunities. is double policy
frontline, argued Wahl, helped to obscure the main underlying conict:
that the commodication of key areas of reproductive conditions
increased market control over social functions and necessarily contrib-
uted to misery at the bottom while simultaneously narrowing the capac-
ity of the remaining redistributive welfare policies.
e forms of activism targeting housing poverty and activism con-
cerned with homeownership access that we reviewed above both addressed
issues arising from the broader commodication process. However, the
positionality of the housing problems that the groups addressed and the
division between the two policy levels that they could address aected the
ways the activists could politicize these problems. As we argued above,
the politicization of housing tensions involved not only expert and politi-
cal alliances (which helped translate experiences of housing problems
into political and expert vocabularies), but also specic interfaces of exist-
ing institutional arrangements where political and expert demands could
be addressed. In housing poverty activism, the main institutional inter-
face was redistribution targeted at the bottom of the housing system, the
second branch of the dual housing policy dened by Jelinek and Pósfai
(2020). Addressing this level of housing politics, activist groups could
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

196
connect specic instances of housing needs to broader political narratives
of housing rights formulated at the level of state redistribution. At the
same time, these frameworks remained dicult to connect with struggles
of housing access fought on the level of housing access through market-
based homeownership, as in the debtors’ struggles. For the latter, the
policy interface to which their situation was tied was the market-oriented
branch of the dual housing policy structure. Dierences between the
political frameworks invoked by the two groups—envisaging the solu-
tion to housing needs through state-based redistribution models or by
guaranteeing housing access through homeownership—in essence repli-
cated the dual policy system. We can see this division as a eld-level ver-
sion of structural divisions that dene forms of housing politicization not
reected in the respective political frameworks.
By acknowledging this division as a long-term characteristic of both
housing contention elds, we do not mean to suggest that activist groups
would never recognize the connection between dierent levels of housing
problems or try to connect these issues through a broader critique of
commodication. In both Romanian and Hungarian leftist housing
groups, the idea of housing as a human right and the criticism of com-
modied housing as a means of capitalist extraction and an engine of
social inequality have always been present as a broader framework of
action. Even in liberal activism, as with Hungarian experts assisting the
homeless, the contradiction between sweeping housing marketization
and the dwindling capacity to resolve housing poverty has sometimes
been explicitly recognized. What we aim to emphasize is that despite such
reections, the structural and political division of the eld made it
extremely dicult for housing activists to politicize housing issues in
ways other than those already designated by this division. In both
Hungary and Romania, the main forms of housing activism presented in
this book mostly t into either one category or the other.
In both Hungary and Romania, new leftist groups have attempted to
connect growing housing tensions since 2008 with initiatives for new
infrastructure as part of a political movement concerned with the decom-
modication of housing. Examples include institutional models of rental
cooperatives, as well as collaborations with unions, linking workplace
struggles to the reproductive issue of housing in terms of both political
I. Florea et al.

197
demands and practical cooperative projects. ese initiatives go beyond
connecting specic actions targeted at existing institutional interfaces
through an abstract critique of commodication, and instead strive to
build new organizational infrastructures of contention that can dene
conicts of interest in terms of commodication. ese eorts highlight
the importance of movement agency in the politicization of structural
tensions. ey particularly show how activists’ politicization work also
involves building the organizational and institutional conditions for pos-
ing questions in a dierent way than those prescribed by existing institu-
tional infrastructures.
Conclusion
is chapter reviewed lessons from a comparison of Hungarian and
Romanian housing contention elds with a focus on the concepts and
heuristics that illustrate how the structural eld of contention approach
can be applied to understand the politicization of social tensions follow-
ing from structural contradictions.
In terms of the structural background of housing contention, we iden-
tied two main areas of tension that are similar across both cases and that
remained constant during the postsocialist period, with some instances of
amplication (such as the post-2008 debt crises). e rst such area
involved the problems of housing poverty accumulating at the bottom of
the housing hierarchy, and the second concerned the housing access
problems of low- to middle-income groups with insucient savings to
follow the main available route to housing access through homeowner-
ship. Contention around homelessness, evictions, and social housing
developed around tensions in the rst area, while struggles around rent,
maintenance, cooperative housing, and mortgage debt characterized
the second.
Reviewing the political context of housing contention in the two
countries, we concluded that post-2008 political developments created
vastly dierent political environments that allowed dierent openings
and alliance options for housing groups. In Hungary, movements oppos-
ing the Orbán regime after 2010 created an environment wherein leftist
6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…

198
housing groups allied with middle-class opposition movements and pro-
gressive opposition politicians. In Romania, post-2008 demonstrations
were channeled into support for neoliberal party politics. As a conse-
quence, leftist housing groups chose a more marginal but less compro-
mising line. Meanwhile, mortgage debtors who suered losses after 2008
were embraced and then silenced by right-wing politicians in Hungary.
In Romania, more auent debtors supported neoliberal policies, while
others remained mostly politically silent.
Turning to the ways in which dierent forms of housing contention
translated structural tensions into politicized forms of expression, we
concluded that each case we considered involved multi-actor alliances,
including middle-class experts who could translate housing grievances
into claims against public institutions in a form they could understand.
Conversely, each of these cases involved an institutional interface that
this translation capacity could address—from social housing systems to
courts or political parties. We noted that the enabling capacity of these
two factors can also be seen as a limitation, as they tied housing conten-
tion to existing institutional interfaces and allowed middle-class experts
and their political alliances to dominate the channels of politicization.
A specic group of heuristics that we highlighted was linked to the
dynamics of the contention eld, one of which involved a variety of rela-
tions between actors (from explicit alliances or conicts to parallelism).
Another group of insights concerned relationships between politicization
and the structural background which are less visible in approaches that
focus on single movements or intentional relations, such as political
silence or structural contradictions that escaped political reection. A
third heuristic we found useful was that of transformations of the eld as
a whole that aected all actors at the same time.
Finally, a eld-level dynamic we considered to be of specic impor-
tance in terms of the politicization of housing tensions was a specic
form that we called a “eld-level” division of housing contention. is
implied a split between left-liberal forms of activism that addressed issues
of extreme housing poverty and formulated demands in terms of redis-
tributive policies and debtor activism that joined conservative forms of
pro-market policies to demand state assistance to maintain or access
homeownership. In terms of the institutional interfaces they addressed,
I. Florea et al.

199
these two main branches of contention corresponded to what Jelinek and
Pósfai (2020) identied as a duality of market and socially oriented hous-
ing policies after 1989. We concluded that the long-term reproduction of
this split across the two countries’ political geographies revealed a specic
limitation in articulating political critiques of the process of housing
commodication, which bound the politicization of housing tensions to
existing institutional interfaces of the dual policy structure. In this
respect, we found initiatives for new or renewed movement institutions
to bridge dierent constituencies experiencing dierent types of tensions
and construct capacities for a broader anti-commodication agenda
beyond existing institutional interfaces to be particularly relevant.
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Open Access is chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/
by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction
in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original
author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons licence and
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e images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the
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licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds
the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copy-
right holder.
I. Florea et al.

201
© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3_7
7
Conclusion
After zooming in on two capitals on Europe’s peripheries, Budapest and
Bucharest, it is time to zoom out and ask what we have learned that is
relevant beyond these two cases. What insights have we gained for under-
standing and theorizing about global housing and other social struggles?
We chose these two cases for their analytic relevance beyond the region
to demonstrate how social movement and urban studies can benet from
closer attention to movements in Central and Eastern Europe, deliber-
ately making space for theorization from and on the region. While our
study of the politicization of structural changes related to the nancial
crisis in this local context is important in its own right, this book should
also be read as a response to the increasing number of calls for giving
experiences from Central and Eastern Europe a more central role in the
global circulation of knowledge in urban studies (e.g., Baća, 2021;
Grubbauer & Kusiak, 2012; Jacobsson, 2016; Jehlička & Jacobsson,
2021; Müller & Trubina, 2020; Tuvikene, 2016). We believe that our
study makes a number of contributions to this discussion at dier-
ent levels.
First, one insight from this study relates to the need for unpacking the
relationships between broader structural-political processes described in

202
contemporary housing literature through the concepts of neoliberaliza-
tion, gentrication, and nancialization and the movements that react to
them. While critical literature on housing tends to imply that researchers’
critique of these processes coincides with what housing movements see as
their target, the relations we found were less unilinear. Instead of a trans-
parent and direct relationship between structural processes and housing
movements, our analysis shows dierent forms of local institutionaliza-
tion and diversied, often contradictory modes of political reactions
embedded in longer histories of local social integration into global capi-
talist processes. We see this complexity not as specic to our Eastern
European cases but rather as an empirical basis from which we argue that
both research and political thought on housing conicts would benet.
Moreover, we see this complexity beyond the cases of housing move-
ments. From this empirical base, we develop tools that allow us to think
of mobilization not as a direct reection of and reaction to abstract diag-
noses of structural processes but instead to address movements and their
environments in terms of the complex constellations on the ground
through which general processes are manifested locally. us, we have
proposed that a more complex approach—here oered in the form of the
structural eld of contention approach—is needed to address the rela-
tions between nancialization processes, their local institutionalization,
and politicized reactions. ese cannot be fully understood without the
longer histories of integration into global capitalist processes—since the
nineteenth century in our cases—that shape neighborhoods, housing
conditions, arrangements of uneven development, the absence or pres-
ence of certain institutions and laws, dierent housing needs and oppor-
tunities for dierent social categories, as well as the power constellations
of dierent social categories.
Second, a large part of the literature has focused on progressive cases of
anti-nancialization and anti-gentrication housing movements, as well
as anti-austerity protests more generally, which in many respects share
researchers’ analysis of these processes and have political agendas with
which researchers can identify. As a consequence, social movement stud-
ies and general political thought struggle to understand nonprogressive
responses to crisis eects. Our analysis of the Hungarian and Romanian
cases reveals movements to be a complex and dynamic eld of actors on
I. Florea et al.

203
the wide spectra between progressive and nonprogressive responses and
between politically visible and invisible forms of contention, changing in
time as actors interact—among themselves and with power structures at
dierent levels. Again, as we see citizen mobilizations at various ends of
the ideological spectrum appearing in an increasing number of countries
in all parts of the world, we are in urgent need of frameworks to allow an
integrated way of analyzing contemporary social contention in its
complexity.
e framework oered in this book is not intended to formulate gen-
eral hypotheses regarding the nature of the movements in the contempo-
rary crisis but rather to provide a perspective from which the
movement-based politicization of crisis eects can be understood in rela-
tion to the local structural and political constellations of the crisis pro-
cess. is can be especially useful in the frame of the crisis eects enhanced
by the COVID-19 pandemic, leading to new rearrangements of strug-
gles, alliances, conicts, parallelisms, and silences. In terms of general
diagnoses of momentary constellations of visible mobilizations, this
ner-grained work may produce fewer spectacular statements than narra-
tives that consider unilinear relations between structural crises and pro-
gressive movement responses. Nevertheless, we believe that the heuristic
tools we build through our comparative study may enable more realistic
assessments of local movement politics and their advancement within the
broader crisis process.
ird, the comparison of the two case studies demonstrates that our
structural eld of contention approach oers a framework for compara-
tive analysis of social (such as housing) conicts and movements that is
suciently exible yet systematic to enable meaningful comparisons
across structural and political contexts. Our cases showed that the same
main areas of housing tensions become politicized in dierent congura-
tions in contexts dened by similar structural backgrounds, yet with dif-
ferent political regimes. Tracing connections between contention forms
and the respective aspects of structural transformations to which they are
linked or they address revealed a broader contextual understanding of
dierent forms of housing politicization. is showed us not only the
dierences between specic instances of contention but also how they are
linked dierently into the same broader crisis process. We think of the
7 Conclusion

204
structural eld of contention as a heuristic approach to guide research
questions on the relationships between crisis and movement responses
and make both the embeddedness and complexity of these relations vis-
ible. As argued above, we do not think of this potential as the mere addi-
tion of details on crisis-induced mobilizations; rather, we think of it as a
necessary approach to understand the complexity of crisis politics.
Fourth, in this research, we oer a distinct contribution to eld
approaches in the study of social mobilization and social movements,
allowing an integrated analysis of a multiplicity of actors whose mutual
relations and structural embeddedness are key factors in shaping move-
ment dynamics. e rst point that we stress here was the multiplicity of
actors, as emphasized by the longer tradition of eld approaches. e
second concerned relations between actors, including those that are unin-
tentional or not reected in movements’ ideological frameworks. A third
related point was that next to movements that politicize structural ten-
sions in highly visible political forms, less visible forms of contention and
political silences on existing structural tensions were also considered to be
part of eld dynamics. We believe that taking silences into consideration
is key to assessing the extent to which more visible forms of contention
give voice to existing structural tensions. is fourth aspect highlighted
relations between actors’ structural positions and the types of movement
agendas and coalitions they develop. We contextualized these by examin-
ing their mutual interactions (alliances, rejections, conicts, and absence
of interaction), as well as interactions with actors of established power
(the state, certain political parties and electoral movements), thus reveal-
ing their signicance relative to other actors in a dynamic eld. e fth
contribution of our analysis to eld approaches in social movement stud-
ies is related to the transformations of eld relations, which can (uninten-
tionally) inuence actors’ conditions as well as their internal frameworks
and agendas, and our sixth point of emphasis concerns how movements
and contention relate to the multiple scales of structural
transformations.
Finally, ever since Castells (1978, 1983), there has been great opti-
mism over what urban movements can achieve. After 2008, progressive
responses to the crisis have been celebrated as new ways of acting together
in the name of equality and democracy (e.g., Flesher Fominaya, 2020;
I. Florea et al.

205
Karaliotas & Swyngedouw, 2019). While our analysis cautions us to
restrain that optimism somewhat, we have also shown that cross-class and
cross-group alliances that hold solidaristic agendas are nonetheless possi-
ble in an ideologically polarized world. Tracing how long-term global
structural processes, local sociopolitical constellations, and activists’
eorts combine into contemporary geographies of politics can also pro-
vide better assessments of the space of maneuver for progressive crisis
responses.
Our main insight regarding housing contention in our two cases was
that despite dierent congurations of contention, long-term eld-level
dynamics reected the same two main areas of housing tensions, namely
housing poverty at the bottom of the housing hierarchy and limited
housing access for low-to-middle income households. Field dynamics
were limited by a main eld-level division marked by the duality of policy
interfaces, that is, social housing policies addressing the poor, and market-
oriented policies addressing the low-to-middle income categories.
Regarding the potential of movements to surpass this duality, we pointed
to instances of movement-based institution building where contention
produces the infrastructure that enables the formulation and upholding
of new agendas other than those suggested by interfaces for politicization
marked by duality of policy and provided by existing institutions. We
hope that this point, together with our general emphasis on multi-actor
elds and eld-level dynamics—including politically silent aspects of the
eld and their historical-structural background—can open up new paths
for political imagination as well as for comparative urban research.
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237
© e Author(s) 2022
I. Florea et al., Contemporary Housing Struggles,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-97405-3
A
Airbnb, 70, 73, 102, 114, 119, 120
Alliance of Housing Cooperatives,
97–99, 106, 184, 190
Alliances
cross-class, 2, 6, 24, 26, 133, 136,
144, 193, 205
multiclass, 3, 26
See also Coalition, models
Alter-globalist movement, 103, 132
Anticapitalist, 2, 31n3, 101, 143,
174, 177
Anti-poor, 65, 107, 135, 158, 172,
181, 183
Antiracism, 132, 146, 183
Art, artistic, artists, 26, 101, 130,
132, 133, 139–141, 147–149,
178, 183
Austerity, 10, 34, 49, 53, 63–66,
72, 134–147, 154, 160,
173, 175
B
Bed rentals, 48, 77
e Block for Housing, Romania,
149–151, 155, 157, 158,
182, 183
Bourdieu, Pierre, 24, 27–31,
27n2, 31n3
Bucharest, 1–4, 6, 10, 13, 14, 26,
36, 43–77, 127–161, 167,
168, 178, 181–183, 201
Budapest, 1–4, 6, 7n1, 10, 13, 14,
26, 36, 43–77, 87–121, 160,
167, 168, 181, 185, 201
Index1
1 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

238 Index
Budapest Methodological Center for
Social Policy
(BMSZKI), 93, 94
C
Capital
Chinese, 70
domestic, 63, 70, 172, 173
foreign, 130, 143
Russian, 70
Chamber of Debtors, 69, 105,
109, 110
Charities, 58, 75, 91, 103, 128, 146,
147, 150, 152, 156, 157,
160, 180
church charities, 91
e City is for All, 102–105,
110–114, 111–112n2, 113n3,
116, 118, 119, 174, 179,
180, 187
Cluj/Cluj-Napoca, 67, 145, 150,
151, 187
Coalition, models, 24–27
See also Alliances
e Common Front for Housing
Rights, (FCDL), Bucharest,
144–151, 153–155,
158–160, 187
Commuting, 48–50
Comparative urbanism, 13
Contention
dynamics of, 22–24, 31
field of, 2–6, 9, 11–14, 21–38,
120, 121, 161, 167, 168, 188,
197, 202–204
Covid-19 pandemic, pandemic
effects, 73, 118–120, 158, 203
Crisis
economic, 2, 25, 34, 35, 44
Great Financial Crisis, 2008,
1–4, 25, 37
management, 12, 63, 68–72,
127, 173
Crossley, Nick, 5, 22, 24, 24n1, 26,
27, 30–33, 31n3, 31n4, 36–38
CSOK housing subsidy program, 69
D
Debt
arrears, 62
crisis, 50, 68–72, 99, 105, 106,
110, 110n1, 176, 186,
195, 197
forex debt, 68, 105, 106, 109,
110, 170, 171
public debt, 49, 53, 58, 96, 191
E
Eastern Europe, 12, 60
Elections, 53, 63, 65, 73, 74, 105,
107, 109, 110, 113, 114,
117–120, 133, 141, 142, 146,
151, 153, 159, 174, 176,
180, 181
Empty houses, empty buildings, 128,
129, 148
Ethnic discrimination, 77, 91,
169, 190
e European Action Coalition for
the Right to Housing and the
City, 155, 187
European Union (EU), 10, 13, 14,
54, 56, 59–61, 63, 67, 75, 76,
100, 110, 130, 131, 139, 156,
157, 173, 186, 187

239 Index
Evictions, 46, 56, 57, 60, 66, 67, 69,
74, 77, 87, 89, 93, 105, 110n1,
113, 115, 116, 118, 128–136,
139–141, 144–147, 150, 151,
153, 157–160, 169, 174,
178–180, 182, 183, 188, 197
F
Feminist groups, 132, 139
Field
approaches, 14, 21, 22, 26, 27n2,
28, 29, 33, 204
concept, 21, 31, 31n4, 36–38
of contention, 2–6, 9, 11–14,
21–38, 120, 121, 161, 167,
168, 188, 197, 202–204
dynamics, field-level dynamics, 9,
10, 12, 14, 33, 38, 62, 76–77,
158, 160–161, 188–198, 202,
204, 205
models, 24, 26, 27, 30
strategic action field (SAF), 27–30
transformation, 14, 26, 37,
120–121, 160
Financial
crisis, 1, 2, 106, 201 (see also
Crisis, Great Financial
Crisis, 2008)
investments, 44, 59
Financialization, vii, 1, 5, 11, 12, 59,
61, 155, 156, 158, 186, 202
of housing, 1, 3, 7n1, 59,
157, 168
e First Home, Romania, 71, 159
Fligstein, Neil, 24, 27–30
Foreign direct investment (FDI), 63,
64, 75, 146, 172
e Foundation for the Support of
the Poor (SZETA), 90, 92, 93
G
e Generosity Offensive, 132,
133, 144
Gentrification, 12, 89, 102, 130,
132, 133, 136, 146, 202
Geographic peripheralization, 87
Global economic integration, global
integration, 13, 52–54, 131
Grupul Clienților cu Credite în
CHF, 8, 138, 154
H
Heritage
movement, 181
protection, 8, 135–137, 141–144,
147, 151–153, 160, 174,
184, 192
High income groups, 61, 72, 74,
127, 148
Historical context, 36
Homeless
activists/activism, 188
assistance, 45, 47, 55, 65, 88–99,
103, 111, 112, 121, 147, 179,
180, 190
criminalization of, 63, 65, 66,
106, 107, 111–114, 111n2
homelessness, 50, 55, 57, 58, 63,
65, 66, 74, 87, 88, 90–95,
102–104, 106, 107, 110–114,
111n2, 113n3, 118, 120,
128–129, 157, 160, 169, 178,
180, 187, 190, 197
shelters, 45, 66, 91–93, 118, 119,
149, 189
Household
debt, 62, 76, 120, 129–130, 137,
141n1, 155, 160, 170
lending, 73, 134, 155

240 Index
Housing
access, 58–62, 87, 88, 94, 99,
106, 120, 121, 128–134, 155,
160, 168, 170–171, 184, 189,
194–197, 205
access problem, 94, 100, 171,
189, 197
access through homeownership,
87, 196, 197
co-housing, 7, 116–118
commodification, 94, 168,
194, 199
cooperatives (post-socialist),
7n1, 54–58, 89, 169, 177,
194, 195
cooperatives (socialist), 48, 49,
97, 116–118
informal/formalization of, 7n1,
50, 60, 66, 67, 76, 114, 128,
129, 155–158, 160, 169, 170,
181, 182, 186, 190
peripheralization, 89, 170 (see also
Geographic peripheralization)
policy, 7, 8, 47–58, 71, 75, 77,
89, 94, 95, 97, 99, 114, 140,
152, 159, 179, 185, 194–196,
199, 205
poverty, 47, 50, 51, 55, 65–67,
77, 87–95, 100, 103, 107,
111–116, 120, 121, 127,
160, 168–170, 174, 176,
179–182, 190,
193–198, 205
privatization of, 49, 54–58, 88,
128, 168, 169
regime, 52–58, 77, 93, 106–114
self-built, 47–49
shortage, 44, 46–48
social, 47, 55, 69–71, 74–76,
87–89, 94–96, 104, 113, 119,
121, 128, 135, 145, 148–150,
154, 159, 160, 169, 175, 179,
181–183, 188, 189, 197,
198, 205
social housing agencies, 88, 95,
104, 116–118
socialist, 48, 49, 54
state, 46, 48–51, 54, 88, 93, 128,
168, 191
system, 48, 77, 88, 168, 170,
177, 195, 198
tensions, 3, 77, 127, 160, 167,
169, 170, 178, 187, 191–196,
198, 199, 203, 205
Housing movements/
contention, 204
forex debtors, 7, 88
fracturing of, 176–177
groups, 145, 176–177, 190
Hungary, vii, 7, 7n1, 10, 11, 44,
48–53, 56–58, 60–66,
60n1, 68, 70, 73, 87, 96,
98, 100, 110, 111, 111n2,
117, 120, 128, 129, 131,
168–174, 176, 178–186,
188–193, 196–198
I
Illiberalism, post-socialist, 11
Import-substitution
industrialization, 48
Institutional interfaces,
177–187, 197–199
Investors, 50, 57, 89, 97, 142,
152, 155

241 Index
L
Labor, 7n1, 8, 45, 48, 57, 63, 64,
72, 75–77, 106, 120, 139,
155, 158, 195
unions, 139, 155, 158, 184
Low- to middle income groups, 61,
87, 88, 99, 127, 160, 168,
170–171, 184–185,
189, 193–197
M
Malta (e Malteses), 91, 93
Man on the Street, 102–105
McAdam, Doug, 5, 23, 24, 27–30
Micro-credits, 156, 157
Middle class
expertise, 177–187, 192
middle class expert
activism, 182
Mortgage
crisis, 28, 66, 105–106
forex, 59, 66, 68, 105–110, 121,
170, 175
subsidies, 185
Multiple actors, 2, 5,
120–121, 167
Multiscalar processes, 186–187
politicization of, 186
N
National Asset Management
program (NAM), 69
National Bank
Romanian, 61, 66, 129,
137, 138
e New Home, Romania, 159
P
e Pact for Bucharest, 133, 134
e Platform for Bucharest,
133–135, 137
Police, police repression, 50, 57, 65,
66, 76, 90, 112, 113, 115
Political
context, 4, 6, 14, 73–76, 161,
171–177, 197, 203
silences, 6, 35, 38, 121, 137–139,
168, 180, 188, 190–191,
198, 204
Politicization
of crisis, 203
of housing tensions, 3, 167,
191–192, 195, 198
Population growth, 45
Post-socialism/post-socialist
housing policy, 54–58, 194, 195
housing systems, 88, 177
privatization of housing, 54–58
Professional civil society
groups, 90–92
Property
regime, 46, 51, 56, 57, 77
restitutions, 51, 56, 57, 129, 132,
133, 144, 146
Protests
anti-austerity, 3, 65, 140, 141,
147, 172, 173, 202
anticorruption, 72, 175
protest camp, 144, 145, 147, 149
R
Racist/racism, 135, 145, 158
Rahova-Uranus, 132, 133, 136, 139,
140, 144, 146, 147, 149, 183

242 Index
Real estate
development, 132
market, 44, 70, 134
speculation, 44, 101–102
Rent
accessible rents, 117, 118, 171
rental housing, 58, 106, 113n3,
117, 118, 170, 179, 184, 189
Roma, 8, 44, 46, 51, 52, 56–58, 67,
77, 89–91, 93, 115, 130–132,
145, 146, 148, 157–159, 169,
170, 174, 180, 182, 183,
188, 190
Romania, vii, 7, 7n1, 8, 10, 11, 46,
49–53, 56, 57, 60, 60n1, 61,
63, 64, 66, 70–72, 74, 75,
127, 129, 132, 134, 137,
139, 141n1, 142, 146, 155,
157, 161, 168–171,
173–177, 179, 180, 183,
185, 186, 188–190, 192,
193, 196, 198
Romanian Association of Banks, 138
S
Shelter Foundation, 90–92, 94, 112
Social Housing Now, 150, 151, 187
Socialist reforms, Hungary, 52
Social movements, 204
alliances, 5, 22 (see also Alliances;
Coalition, models)
conflict between, 5
research, 33–37
Social urban rehabilitation, 100, 101
Squatting, 1, 65, 93, 102,
113n3, 169
State maintenance companies, 49,
88, 96, 188, 191
Structural
areas of tension, 168–171
context, structural background,
4–6, 11, 21, 24n1, 34, 43–77,
146, 150, 167, 179, 197,
198, 203
structural field of contention
approach, 2, 4–6, 9, 11,
13, 21–38, 120, 121, 161,
167, 188, 202, 203 (see
also Field)
Super-homeownership system, 58,
60, 87, 99, 189
Supermajority, Fidesz, 105, 110,
161, 172
T
Technocratic government/party,
67, 150–153
Tenants, 45, 46, 49, 51, 52,
54–57, 60, 60n1, 67, 69,
70, 76, 88, 89, 96–98, 101,
102, 113, 121, 131, 151,
184, 188, 191
Tenants’ Association, 49, 88,
96–97, 191
eater, 140, 149
U
Urban
development, 3, 7n1, 13, 44–47,
131, 134, 135, 137, 142, 183,
184, 189, 192

243 Index
movements (see Housing
movements/contention; Social
movements)
poverty, 89, 91
regeneration/rehabilitation, 56,
57, 62, 70, 87, 89, 100,
101, 115, 120, 130–137,
152, 156, 160, 169, 170,
183–184, 186
urban-rural hierarchies, 44, 76
Utilities
debt, 89
price, 54, 88, 99, 160
privatization of, 54
V
Volunteers, 90, 92–95, 104,
114, 180
volunteer social work, 90–95
Vulturilor Street, 145, 147, 149, 159
W
Workers’
colonies, 45
hostels, 48, 57, 77, 88, 92
World Bank (WB), 54, 56, 60, 64,
70, 134, 152, 156, 179, 181,
182, 186, 190