Neoliberal Housing Research Articles

Exploring the conditions for the emergence and sustainability of housing cooperatives in Latin America

Housing cooperatives are being reconsidered in many countries worldwide as potentially relevant actors in the provision of affordable housing. This is also the case in Latin America, characterised by neo-liberal housing policies that have led to an increasing financialization of housing and marginalisation of the poor. Uruguay is an exception, with housing cooperatives playing a key role in the provision of affordable housing. For over two decades its Federation of Mutual Aid Housing Cooperatives (FUCVAM) has been advocating and actively supporting the establishment of cooperative housing in the region. In this paper, we examine the opportunities and challenges of housing cooperatives to penetrate in Colombia and El Salvador’s housing systems, two countries historically characterised by neo-liberal housing regimes. Based on empirical research in Uruguay, Colombia, and El Salvador, we will analyse the socioeconomic, political, and institutional factors that enable or constrain the emergence of housing cooperatives and their sustainability over time.

Can Tenants’ Unions Challenge Neoliberal Housing Governance? The Emergence of a New Movement in Spain and Its Impact on Post-neoliberal Housing Policy

ABSTRACT This paper analyses how tenants’ organizations approach the state for “post-neoliberal housing policy” that challenges decades of neoliberal housing governance. It introduces the concept of “counter-hegemonic legislative strategies” to illustrate how tenants’ movements in Spain have achieved this policy shift by influencing legislative changes. In contrast to traditional lobbying or representation-focused movements, unions aim to organize tenants offensively against the commodification of housing and capitalist relations, positioning themselves as counter-hegemonic forces. The paper outlines three mechanisms used to achieve this: turning tenant evictions and landlord threats into acts of civil disobedience; using the media strategically to shape narratives; and exploiting institutional windows of opportunity through alliances and political crises. While the legislative victories gained by these unions may fall short of their full demands, the paper emphasizes that their impact goes beyond political outcomes. Their activities contribute to contesting neoliberal housing trajectories, disrupting hegemonic governance, and reshaping the political landscape.

Towards Transversal Housing Solidarities Across Space, Time and Subjects

ABSTRACT The paper documents the emergence of precarious local and migrant tenants as political subjects that build transversal housing solidarities in Greek cities amidst multiple intersecting crises. In doing so, I introduce the feminist concept of transversal solidarities to housing studies and expand it by bringing it in dialogue with debates on housing precarity. Understanding transversal solidarity as an integral part of housing struggles and as an important theoretical concept in debates on housing precarity, I argue, is a crucial step forward to housing theory as it foregrounds transversal housing solidarities as translocal and intersectional processes through which collective political subjects emerge. Drawing from rent struggles in Greece, I demonstrate that transversal housing solidarities are being built across space, time and subjects: they are local and place-based initiatives, embedded in broader networks of trans-local solidarities that are generative of concrete social and political alternatives to the neoliberal housing model.

Access to homeownership in decline—rising housing inequalities for young people in the neoliberal housing market of Tallinn

The current housing affordability crisis, driven mainly by the financialization of housing and the government's retrenchment of social policies and provision of affordable housing, have affected growing inequalities in access to housing. The crises have hit young people especially hard. The recent trends call for systematic studies on the mechanisms generating such intergenerational inequality, considering the specifics of the prevailing housing regimes. Housing affordability in Tallinn has decreased due to fast-growing housing prices, as a result of an ultra-liberal housing regime, exemplified by housing financialization, capital accumulation, low level of governmental interventions and an overall increase in social inequalities. Based on EU-SILC data, it is shown how the recent trends during the decade between 2010 and 2020 have negatively impacted young people's access to homeownership—access has been greatly reduced for young cohorts, and it has become more differentiated, based on the socio-economic and labor market performance of households, as well as intergenerational transfers. Young households are increasingly residing in private rental dwellings, and many still rely on parental housing until their 30s. Rental housing, as compared to homeownership, has fewer advantages compared to homeownership—it brings no capital gains and is less secure, and rental stock tends to be located unevenly across urban space and to be in slightly worse condition compared to owner-occupied housing. This positions young people in an unfavorable position in the perspective of their housing career, and this can have severe consequences on their social inclusion.

Residing without settling: Housing market and tactics of Syrian forced migrants in Turkey

AbstractHow do forced migrants from Syria cope with structural barriers to housing in urban centres in Turkey? More than 3.6 million Syrian refugees have lived in different cities in Turkey since the closing of the temporary accommodation centres in 2018. This study examines the agency of Syrians and their housing pathways in securing accommodation in a neoliberal housing market amidst increasing unwelcoming attitudes by the local population, no social housing, high dependence on rental housing prone to price hikes, and “temporary protection” legal status. Based on analysis of data from 34 semi‐structured interviews with forced migrant Syrians and 20 expert interviews in Gaziantep, a city close to the Turkey‐Syria border with a substantial Syrian population, the research identifies four tactics that characterise housing pathways of Syrian forced migrants: (1) acting through local community members, (2) working with a Syrian mediator, (3) settling down in Syrian‐only buildings or informal settlements, and (4) purchasing a house through circumventing the legal ban on property ownership. The study concludes by highlighting that while these tactics are necessary for meeting forced migrants’ immediate housing needs, they are far from sufficient in preventing exclusion in the Turkish housing market.

“Jeg fatter ikke, hvad jeg laver i denne lorteby”

This article sets out to investigate how contemporary Danish fiction has responded to Copenhagen’s proliferating housing crises. Inspired by the notion within the burgeoning field of ‘literary urban studies’ that literature has a unique micro-sociological perspective to offer on the current urban condition, the article presents analyses of novels by Laura Ringo, Jonas Suchanek and Thomas Korsgaard. On that basis it argues that the novels through their depiction of urban precarisation spurred by the neoliberal housing market can be construed as counternarratives to the ruling discourses about the city’s recent regeneration.

Experiencing resonance: everyday life in modernist blocks of flats in Oslo, Norway

Based on an interdisciplinary approach to architectural history, drawing upon sound studies and anthropology, this article offers a case study of contemporary experiences of resonance by residents living in modernist blocks of flats in Oslo built in 1964. Drawing upon ethnography and archival research, I ask how these sonic experiences affect people's relationships, both with other neighbours and the building itself. Moving from the outside and into the building, following architectural historian Katie Lloyd Thomas' theoretical approach to materials and how these materials come into being, I discuss the way resonance creates a series of tensions, affecting the way individuals relate to their surroundings, both affecting the way we see our built environment and social relations. Asking what it means to live in a modernist block of flats, I frame the residents' own stories of resonance within a larger context of changing neoliberal housing reforms in Norway from the 1980s until today. I argue that the experience of resonance creates new spatial configurations and also can stand as a critique of neo-liberal housing politics, forming connections that are both social and material.

Australian rental housing standards: institutional shifts to reprioritize the housing–health nexus

ABSTRACT A large proportion of Australia’s housing stock offered for private rental or socially let is of poor quality, which has implications for residents’ health and well-being. This problem has arisen from historically weak regulation of housing standards and under-investment in public housing services, both features of Australia’s neoliberal housing regime. In this paper, we reviewed the institutional contexts of two policy settings used to address problems of housing quality: the Homes Act 2018 (UK) and the Healthy Homes Guarantee Act 2017 (Aotearoa–New Zealand). From these two case studies, five institutional shifts required to reprioritize the housing–health nexus in Australia were synthesized: (1) policy objectives should explicitly link housing conditions and health outcomes; (2) community awareness and sector advocacy should be harnessed to overcome complex structures of government; (3) policy approaches should foster collective social responsibility; (4) mandatory requirements should be made transparent and objective; and (5) robust protocols for tracking progress should be developed and applied.

Housing and Inequality in Australia

AbstractIn Australia and many other advanced economies, housing is playing a central role in accentuating and perpetuating inequality. This paper, drawing on primary and secondary data, discusses the various ways in which housing tenure in Australia contributes to wealth and income inequality. It argues that a neoliberal housing policy framework and accompanying financialisation of housing have facilitated a dramatic increase in house prices, the neglect of social housing, and a deepening wealth and income divide based on housing tenure. With respect to wealth, the key divide is between outright homeowners versus low-income private renters and low-income households in mortgage stress. The wealth of outright homeowners has grown substantially in recent decades and many have been able to acquire a holiday home and/or investment properties, thereby intensifying the wealth divide. Approximately a third of Australian households are now locked out of home ownership for an extended period or even lifelong. Housing tenure status also has an impact on the disposable income of households. For example, low-income outright homeowners are invariably in a far better position with respect to disposable income than their counterparts who have large mortgages or are private renters.

Diving in at the ‘Bottom End’: The Risk Awareness and Risk Management Practices of Sub £65K Landlords

Significant growth in Scotland’s private rented sector over the last 25 years has been led by a large number of individual lay investors/landlords who each own a smattering of properties. These characteristics, which are replicated in several countries where neoliberal housing policies prevail, have implications for the efficacy of PRS investments, but also for conditions and the stability of investment patterns within the sector. This study examines landlord investment risk awareness and behaviours via qualitative interviews with a small sample of Scottish landlords operating at the ‘bottom end’ of the market, which is disproportionately home to vulnerable groups and where some investment risks are believed to be more acute. The findings suggest that some landlords have relatively low levels of risk awareness, fail to adequately consider risk prior to investing in the PRS, have mixed success in selecting and implementing risk management and mitigation strategies, and incur significant risk-borne costs, which can limit returns.

The regionalisation of housing policies in Spain: an analysis of territorial differences

Housing policies have become increasingly regionalised but studies at sub-state levels are scarce and most research still focuses on the nation-state as the unit of analysis. This paper aims to address this gap by examining the development of regional housing policies in Spain. From an initial analysis of regional housing laws, three sub-state housing policy models were identified. Then, six case studies were examined to determine influencing factors and the relevance of regional political party positioning along centre-periphery and left-right cleavages. This research adds new information to the literature on the regionalisation of housing policies and provides insight about the role of subnational governments in generating alternatives to neoliberal housing policies.

Post-neoliberalization and the Irish private rental sector

Recent years have witnessed new policy interventions in many countries seeking to get to grips with challenges in the private rental sector (PRS), including rent regulation and enhanced security of tenure. This raises the possibility of a shift away from market-based approaches which have characterized neoliberal housing regimes over recent decades. This article adds to emerging work on post-neoliberalism by examining policy change in the Irish PRS. The Irish PRS is an illustrative example because it has experienced rapid increases in the proportion of households renting and in average rents, but also because of the large volume of reforms introduced since 2015. Examining these shifts through the lens of ‘market rule’, the article conceptualizes the Irish PRS as in a process of ‘post-neoliberalization’ in that it has moved away from the commodification of PRS housing, and yet continues to be shaped by the transnational political economy of institutional investment, itself largely a product of previous phases of neoliberalization.

From the streets to the statehouse: how tenant movements affect housing policy in Los Angeles and Berlin

How can tenants affect housing policy? This paper compares rental housing politics in Los Angeles (USA) and Berlin (Germany) between 2008-2020 by examining how political processes influenced policy. It serves as a case of the emergence, escalation, and impact of tenant power. Tenant movement organizations employed five mechanisms to affect policymaking: (1) making demands, (2) forming coalitions, (3) promoting referendums, (4) engaging government officials in dialogue, and (5) transferring agents to government. The paper draws on multiple data sources, including interviews and participant observation over ten years. The cities witnessed policy episodes with four parallel characteristics: (1) locally progressive and regionally moderate, (2) shifting from defensive to offensive, (3) shifting from particular to universal, and (4) signs of a breakthrough beyond neoliberal housing policymaking. The findings suggest that the rise of tenant movements and their allies help drive policy change via multiple channels, exhibiting both similarities and differences across cities, especially in terms of money power and people power.

From hippies to yuppies: marginal gentrification in Amsterdam’s Jordaan and De Pijp neighbourhoods 1960–1990*

Challenging the prevailing assumption that gentrification is a recent development, this contribution explores the (re)discovery of central urban living in Amsterdam by using the concept of marginal gentrification. Two inner-city neighbourhoods that have experienced the influx of marginal and middle-class gentrifiers, the Jordaan and de Pijp, will serve as case studies. In historiography, the transformation of both areas is portrayed as an unexpected and sudden development kickstarted by neoliberal housing policies in the early 1990s. However, historical research on Anglophone case studies has demonstrated that gentrification should be understood as a long-term process of social, cultural and economic change, already beginning in the 1960s. Through the use of newspaper articles and policy documents from the period under research, this contribution will reveal how the changing living preferences and consumer cultures of ‘urban pioneers’ can be understood as a case of marginal gentrification. Thus, this contribution will offer a deeper understanding of the ways in which structural changes in Amsterdam’s urban society shaped the everyday life of its citizens, and identify some of the inequalities in which these changes resulted for specific social strata.

Housing affordability: an econometric framing for policy discussions

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to analyze short- and long-run market-sensitive drivers of housing affordability. The study highlights an ongoing housing affordability crisis in an emerging market context by also providing an empirical tool to combat the crisis.Design/methodology/approachTo investigate determinants of uniquely constructed effective housing affordability index and house price to income ratio index, the author uses a bound testing approach to cointegration and error correction models, besides causality tests, variance decompositions and impulse response functions. This study uses Turkish data for the period of 2007 M06 and 2017 M12.FindingsThe evidence suggests that the housing affordability crisis is mainly driven by credit expansion, rent and construction costs. A sensible housing policy response would target these variables. This evidence suggests that housing affordability mostly depends on housing market dynamics rather than policies because of the exogeneous/cyclical natures of the drivers.Research limitations/implicationsData constraints shape the study. A regional or an aggregate-level panel study cannot be developed because of a lack of data. This limitation inevitably results in the exclusion of relevant socio-economic/political factors and is also the main reason for the lack of comparative analysis in a cross-country setting.Practical implicationsThis study argues that dependency on neoliberal housing market practices seems the underlying reason for the lack of efficient policy answers and the ongoing affordability crisis. From a policymaking perspective, the study suggests that necessary policy measures to resolve the housing affordability crisis may give a specific emphasis on housing rent, housing credit volume and construction costs as the major components of the crisis.Originality/valueThis study develops a novel measure and presents a new conceptual framework by combining quantitative research methods and policymaking in housing affordability. In this respect, to the best of the author’s knowledge, this is the first work to comparatively investigate the determinants of uniquely developed monthly housing affordability measurements.

No home for poor men: a comparative study of household debt and homeownership in Denmark and Turkey

Homeownership rates have declined in several countries including Denmark and Turkey since 2010. A majority of the decline in homeownership has been observed among low income holders. This variation finding comparative case study compares similar patterns of neoliberal housing policies to examine wealth inequalities based on homeownership despite fundamental differences in housing markets and welfare state provision. The comparison of Denmark and Turkey reveals similar adoption of policies that support financialization as a strategy to recover from financial crises. This paper examines how states have supported financialization with policies that allowed deregulations in the housing market to create an enabling environment for construction and real estate-specific growth, and how neoliberal housing policies positioned homeownership, a wealth symbol, as the core tenet of asset-based welfare that increased wealth inequalities. The outcome of this paper shows that neoliberal housing policies have generated new forms of inequality between low and high-income earners to access housing in both countries in different ways to produce a similar outcome.

Brutalism and Community in Middle Class Mass Housing: Be’eri Estate, Tel Aviv, 1965–Present

Fostering functioning, place-based communities has been a major concern in architecture and planning circles since the mid-1950s revolving the issue of habitat. Using the ethics of European New Brutalism, in Israel the architectural discourse locally developed a Team 10 critique of CIAM, addressing community as the main challenge of modern housing. The failure of modern mass housing to foster viable communities is associated with, and arguably triggered by, the global shift from state-sponsored to market housing that began in the 1970s. Increasing neoliberal policies, which address housing as economic investment, further strip housing off its social role as the site for collectivity and identity. These policies sideline community in housing design. Challenging these assumptions, this study focuses on the socio-spatial dynamics of Beit Be’eri, a single-shared New Brutalist housing estate built in 1965 in Tel Aviv. Marking the beginning of the end of the Israeli welfare state, this estate was produced in the open market explicitly for well-to-do bureaucrats, civil servants, and professionals. Nevertheless, it uses the architectural and urban manifestations of New Brutalism associated with the earlier period of Brutalist state housing. The estate is cooperatively managed since its opening. It consists of a local interpretation of Team 10’s call to plan the city as a big house, the house as a small city. Although its cooperative management provokes ongoing inter-resident struggles over its shared spaces, Be’eri represents a long-lasting community, fifty-years strong. Be’eri estate forms a perplexing community, where residents’ individual ownership and middle-class identities clash in intricate practices of shared estate management. Based on archival, ethnographic, and architectural field research, this article unravels values of identity and senses of belonging that the brutalist estate provides to its residents. Fostering a critical view of the notion of community, it also examines the residents’ persistence in the context of a neoliberal housing bubble. This article portrays how the building allows for shared management of the large estate, shaping and consolidating an active community built upon every-day struggles over shared spaces. Applying Anderson’s powerful idea of the imagined community as a cultural product, we ask: Is the strong sense of collectivity in Be’eri imagined? If so, how do these imagined communities form? Upon what are they grounded? How do the intricate practices managing the estate shape its persistent middle-class identity?

High Rise eState of Mind: Love and Honesty in the Midst of London's Neoliberal Housing Crisis

High Rise eState of Mind: Love and Honesty in the Midst of London's Neoliberal Housing Crisis

Space standards and housing design: typological experimentation in England and Chile

Space standards are a deliberately technocratic translation of housing experience, use, and demand into measurable minimum floor areas and dimensions by calculating standard furniture sizes, circulation, and activity zones in a dwelling. This paper discusses how space standards register regulatory cultures and affect housing design and perceptions of housing quality from a design research perspective. The definition and enforcement of standards depend on local design governance approaches. Housing standards are of particular importance to the protection of minimum subsidised housing supply in dualist rental systems with differentiated regulations, due to greater inequalities between private and subsidised housing sectors. This is characteristic of countries with neoliberalised housing access. Two archetypical cases are discussed here: England, whose privatisation of council housing is considered exemplary for Western neoliberal housing policy; and Chile, who is seen as the main Latin American neoliberal model. This comparison explores how neoliberal processes in housing relate to space standards, wider laissez-faire housing and social welfare histories, and design experimentation in subsidised housing. It further deals with the common issues of affordable housing in market-driven contexts, such as the peripheralisation of areas with less infrastructures and services, residualisation of social housing tenure, typological stigmatisation or preferences, homeownership prioritisation, and private-sector support through subsidies. The discussion of housing design and space standards connects problems of design governance to technical, legal, and socio-spatial discourses, through which responses to cultural, social, and economic contexts, as well as changing modes of living, can be analysed.

Housing in the face of crisis: The influence of Israel's 2011 protest on housing policy

Do social protests affect government housing-related decisions? If so, in what way? To answer this question this study examines the influence of Israel's 2011 social protest on the government's housing policy, using an empirical cumulative-aggregative analysis of housing-related decisions over the past two decades. The empirical analysis is based on two generic classifications of government interventions commonly used in housing literature: first, decisions aimed at increasing the housing stock (supply-side), as opposed to policies aimed at augmenting consumers' financial capacity to obtain adequate housing (demand-side); and second, decisions that encourage homeownership as opposed to those that promote rental housing. The research findings show that the 2011 social protest definitely affected Israel's housing policy, because it prompted the government to engage in housing. However, the interventions introduced focused largely on increasing the inventory of housing units (supply-side) for homeownership and benefited mainly members of the middle class who qualify for mortgages and investors. Thus, despite the increase in government involvement in the post-protest period, Israel's housing policy has remained neoliberal, though in an advanced form of neoliberalism that combines market-oriented policies with centralized tendencies, which we call “centralized neoliberalism.” The study discusses the findings and their implications for various population groups. Given the current global affordable-housing crisis, the findings are relevant to many countries whose existing neoliberal housing policy is failing to address housing-market problems and challenges.