After a boom in foreign-currency denominated (forex) mortgage loans in the 2000s and the resulting debt crisis in 2008-2009, Hungary’s debt management came to be defined by a highly politicised combination of several phenomena: the existence of a large social base at risk of defaulting on their mortgages; the integration of debtors’ struggles into a shift from the post-socialist dominance of neoliberalism to a national conservative political hegemony during the crisis years; and the political foregrounding of forex debt management in the post-2010 Orbán governments’ construction of a new financial model as part of a post-neoliberal authoritarian capitalist regime. The article traces how two main aspects of the forex mortgage crisis, housing debt under dependent financialisation and the problem of limited housing access, became integrated into Hungary’s electoral politics and macroeconomic transformation in the last decade.
In Britain, the shift from the ideology of homeownership into one of homeownership-based welfare has been sustained by homebuyers being regarded as investors. Homeowners are expected to create a synergy between the owned house seen as a space of shelter, place of home and increasingly, an investment vehicle and an object of debt. Drawing on 80 interviews with owner-occupiers and national data on house prices and mortgages, we examine the way in which the meanings of home meanings are negotiated through the subjective calculation of the financial costs and gains of homebuying. We explore homebuyers’ debt amnesia, their miscalculation of gains and their disregard of inflation. However homebuyers’ financially unsophisticated understanding of the asset-home arises less from book-keeping complexities or difficulties in pricing the emotional domain of the home, but rather by them instinctively considering the alternative cost of a rented space of shelter. From this financial perspective and given affordability, homebuying illustrates a misleading ideological notion of choice.
This special issue expands on the existing research on foreign-currency lending and the forex loan crisis in Eastern Europe by investigating other forms of housing-related finance and post-crisis developments. Bringing together hitherto disparate strands of research, our issue traces the linkages between macroeconomic developments, state measures, class dynamics, and social movements in the aftermath of the forex loan crises in Latvia, Romania, Croatia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, and Hungary as part of their long-term trajectories of housing finance. We find that despite different political-institutional articulations, these trajectories all feature a new expansion of lending based on a bifurcation of the credit market into more secure, often subsidised mortgage lending aimed at better-off debtors and more risky non-mortgage loans used for housing purposes by more precarious households.
The adoption of innovative building technologies (IBTs) and social welfare policies in South Africa has facilitated an increase in decent homeownership among low-income groups, thus improving their quality of life. However, due to the escalating costs of building materials, the capital and lifecycle costs of implementing these technologies may no longer be affordable. This research aims to provide a comparative evaluation of the affordability of some readily available IBTs in the South African construction industry, relative to existing homeownership subsidy grants. The method used involved the use of secondary data for these IBTs and the income constraint methods. The results showed that, apart from the technologies suitable for the provision of temporary structures, most of the other technologies were not affordable for the complete subsidisation of the top structure when both capital and lifecycle costs were used, except the Moladi and Robust structure IBTs under some low-income homeownership programmes. Further analysis using credit-linked subsidies revealed that the minimum household income required to achieve affordable homeownership (and their rankings) depends both on the evaluation technique (lifecycle or capital costs) and technology used. To improve affordability, any implementing government can either raise the amount of the top structure subsidy grant, promote the use of cheaper but durable IBTs, or promote the use in incremental building methods, such as the Enhanced People’s Housing Process (EPHP) for the case of South Africa.
Although financialization of housing is well known global concept, in our paper we attempt to present how financialization produces new spaces and household practises in a Central Eastern European semipheripheral context. We approach this framework through an anthropological investigation, the transformation of allotment gardens what we consider as a combination of social and spatial transformations after the 1990s. In our case study we are curious how different waves of financialization influence the formation of the transformation of an informal housing space and how informal practices of the households could be an agency against financialization.
This paper looks at the rationale for social housing; examines the models that have been used in Europe over the last century and how social housing might be maintained into the future.
The article presents a review of the research activities of the Socio-Economics of Housing research team. The Socio-economics of Housing team is one of the research teams at the Institute of Sociology of the Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic. The main research activities of the team include sociological research concerning attitudes towards housing in the Czech Republic, international comparisons of housing policies and social housing systems, and econometric simulations of policy reforms, like rent deregulation, the introduction of housing allowance and social housing, housing finance, housing market efficiency, and house price indices.
France has a high rate of production of new housing and the Global Financial Crisis has had little impact on a country of fixed-rate housing loans and strong guarantees for home-buyers. At the same time, the social rental sector, managed by a powerful network of public and private (not-for-profit) companies, has greatly increased its housing production thanks to the use of a financial mechanism that is independent of mainstream finance. Housing should be easily available throughout France. But this is not the case in the capital region and for some disadvantaged households. Critics regularly speak out against the deficiencies of French housing policies. Opponents of increased public spending consider that too much public money is being spent on this, while supporters of the free market say that the legal and institutional framework hinders private initiatives. Advocates of homeless people and low-income groups complain about the high cost of housing and segregation processes. This paper presents the debates and discussions regarding the pros and cons of housing policies in France at a time of severe budgetary constraints.
This article analyses recent developments in Croatian housing finance to update the established account of housing finance and peripheral financialisation in Eastern Europe that is based on the boom-bust cycle of the 2000s and early-to-mid 2010s. During the bust stage of that cycle, changes in regulation and in the behaviour of debtors and creditors resulted in deleveraging and a shift away from the risky and exploitative lending practices characteristic of peripheral housing finance. However, new increases in household debt and housing prices since 2016–17, coupled with the COVID-19 pandemic, seem to have reversed these trends. While a boom-bust cycle of similar scope and modality to the first one is unlikely to be repeated, peripheral forms of housing finance have persisted to some degree.