Housing statistics, Eurostat, https://ec.europa eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/ Housing_statistics#Tenure_status (accessed: 15.03.2021).

PHOTOS JAREK MATLA

How Central Europe lost its right to housing, and how to get it back

Poverty, limited access to vital public services, and economic inequalities, especially within the domain of housing, are systemic phenomena: over the last three decades, a decent house that would offer adequate conditions of health and hygiene has become a luxury that fewer and fewer people can afford. The privatization of the current social housing fund, the government’s support almost exclusively for the construction of private houses and for real estate developers, the encouragement of the transformation of the living space into an investment for profit through fiscal measures favourable to this aim—all these have led to the current state of affairs.1 Europe and looked at the housing situation on other continents, it would turn out that the people of Canada, Kazakhstan, Chile and India would be equally eager to sign the manifesto for housing justice. Seen from this perspective, housing problems in Central Europe turn out to be not an endemic phenomenon, but a part of the global crisis. Former UN Special Rapporteur for the right to adequate housing Raquel Rolnik sees this crisis as “the expression and the result of a long process of deconstructing housing as a social good and transforming it into a commodity and financial asset.”5

This process is inextricably linked with the expansion of the reactionary political and economic concept of neoliberalism. Central European countries played a special role in the history of commodification and financialization of housing. By looking at this story, we can illuminate both the key features of the neo-liberal doctrine and the sources of the housing problems we are currently facing in our region.

The free market enters people’s homes The housing sector has played an important role in this story since the birth of the neo-liberal ideology. Generously financed from public funds as part of the post-war welfare policy, for the supporters of free-market solutions it has become an example of how not to organize social policy. From the 1970s, it was targeted by ideologists who were convinced that the state should drastically reduce its expenses, and withdraw from the position of regulator in various areas of social life. It was not only about savings for the budget and opening a source of potential profits for commercial enterprises. The home was a sphere in which neoliberal doctrine met directly with the personal, everyday experience of individuals, and it could serve as a space for transmission and training of the desired norms and attitudes. As a result, writes David Harvey, “all forms of social solidarity” were to be replaced by beliefs in “individualism, private property, personal responsibility, and family values.”6

The flagship example of neo-liberal housing policy – the “Right to buy” program launched by Margaret Thatcher in the early 1980s that allowed council tenants to buy the flats in which they lived – opened up space for financial institutions offering mortgage loans, for private property administrators and commercial construction companies, but most of all it made tenants aware that the relationship between them and the state had changed significantly and that from then on, ensuring proper living conditions for themselves would be primarily on them.

Neoliberal ideologists and economists perceived the countries of Central and Central Eastern Europe, which entered the transformation period at the end of the

1980s, as an area of great potential. With huge resources in the form of public housing, ranging from 20 per cent (in Hungary) to as much as 70 per cent (in Latvia) of all available apartments, they constituted the perfect ground to test new market solutions in practice. The events in the region after 1989 are often interpreted as an obvious continuation of the neoliberal policies developing in the West and the inevitable result of geopolitical changes. We should remember, however, that these policies had only been implemented in the West for a decade and were still emerging in the process of “chaotic experimentation” at that time.7 Thus, the post-communist and post-socialist states were not only a place for the implementation of ready-made solutions, but also “an important laboratory for creating a new paradigm of housing policies, clearly expressed in the documents The above quote comes from the Manifest petru drep- of the World Bank”.8 If we take into account the tate locativă (Housing Justice Manifesto), published costs of these experiments borne by the inhabitants of last April by the Romanian network of associations and the region, we should speak not so much of a laboratory groups Blocul pentru Locuire (Housing Bloc), fighting as a military training ground. for a fair and equitable housing policy in response to Let us begin with the assessment that had been at the the coronavirus pandemic. The latter revealed and root of all these experiments. In 1993, the World Bank deepened the scale of the housing crisis in Romania. published the Housing report. Enabling markets to work. Data published by the Eurostat show that the country Raquel Rolnik compares its effects to releasing the genie is facing serious problems: in 2018, Romania had the from the bottle. This document, aptly referred to by the highest share of overcrowded housing among European Union countries (46 per cent) and severe housing deprivation (16 per cent of the population live in overcrowded apartments with at least one major disadvantage, e.g. a leaking roof, no bathroom or toilet, too dark).2 Romania also had the highest percentage of people at risk of poverty and living in overcrowded homes. Having said that, after studying the Eurostat data, we will notice that many countries experience these problems on a similar scale. In terms of overcrowded housing, Latvia, Bulgaria, Croatia and Poland are close behind. The highest rates of severe housing deprivation are recorded in Latvia, Bulgaria, Poland, Hungary and Lithuania. As in Romania, alarmingly high numbers of people at risk of poverty live in overcrowded flats in Poland, Slovakia and Bulgaria.3

It is tempting to interpret these comparisons as another symptom of the “poverty of small Central and Eastern European countries”, a typically Central European ailment, resulting from the repeatedly described structural backwardness of the entire region. However, when we also take into account other indicators related to the quality of housing, the picture becomes somewhat more complicated: among the countries with the highest financial burden related to the cost of housing (expressed in the number of households that spend more than 40 per cent of their income on housing), Greece is clearly the leader; excessive costs of housing also plague many residents of Great Britain, Belgium, and Germany.4 If we went beyond

← Ruczaj Estate in Kraków, from the series Self-affirmation 1 Blocul pentru Locuire, Manifest pentru dreptate locativă. Împotriva pandemiei capitalismului și rasismului, 02.04.2020, https://bloculpentrulocuire.ro/2020/04/02/ manifest-pentru-dreptate-locativa-impotriva-pandemiei-capitalismului-si-rasismului/. English version: Manifesto for Housing Justice: Fighting the Pandemic of Capitalism and Racism, 02.04.2020, https://bloculpentrulocuire. ro/2020/04/02/manifesto-for-housing-justice-fighting-the-pandemic-of-capitalism-and-racism/ (accessed: 15.03.2021). 2 Severe housing deprivation rate, 2017 and 2018 (%), Eurostat, https://ec.europa.eu/ eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php?title=File:Severe_housing_deprivation_rate,_2017_ and_2018_(%25)_SILC20.png (accessed: 15.03.2021). 3 Housing statistics, Eurostat, https://ec.europa. eu/eurostat/statistics-explained/index.php/ Housing_statistics#Tenure_status (accessed: 15.03.2021). 4 Ibid. 5 R. Rolnik, Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance, London–New York: Verso, 2019 (ebook). 6 D. Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005, p. 23. 7 Ibid. 3 HOW CENTRAL EUROPE LOST ITS RIGHT TO HOUSING, AND HOW TO GET IT BACK 8 R. Rolnik, op. cit.