Te context that brought these actors together in 2006 was the ongoing eviction process provoked by property restitutions, afecting numerous families from the Rahova-Uranus semi-central neighborhood. Te Generosity Ofensive collective gained a small grant for an artistic project in the area from an alliance of companies with interests in gentrifcation there. Te collective made a public call about the project, and other groups and organizations interested in urban issues joined. Trough their intra- and intergroup negotiations and through their continuous interactions with neighborhood families, the initial scope of the project was transformed. Te 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. Te reliance on donors with interests in gentrifcation was overcome in a couple of years, but art projects and collectives remain an important part of housing mobilizations today (Lancione, 2017a; Florea & Popovici, 2021).

Te 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 Ofensive 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. Tese made possible a form of cooperation among groups active in diverse causes linked to what they identifed 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 fght 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 development of Bucharest. It included green public infrastructure, public transportation, conservation of built heritage, and universal access to housing among its main points. Te 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 promised to support the Pact and work for a better development path if they were elected (Salvați Bucureștiul nostru, 2008).

Te general and local elections in 2008 preceded the onset of the global crisis efects. Te same coalition of right-liberal parties retained power at the national level, while in Bucharest a candidate supported by the Social Democratic Party won the city hall for the frst time since 1992. However, once the newly elected candidates took ofce, they abandoned the Pact for Bucharest. While all parties in power seemed to support the same forproft 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 intensifed their open contention (sometimes together and sometimes separately from the other groups), some intensifed their community organizing eforts, while others organized street performances, or occupied municipal council meetings. Te 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, conditioned by a commitment to stability goals, including that of austerity. At the same time, the government launched three national housing programs, all based on credit, with a generous budget allocation: the *Prima Casă* (First Home) program of state-guaranteed mortgages for frst time homebuyers; the *Banca pentru locuinţe* (Housing Bank or Bauspar) program 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 fats built before 1990 in Romania. Tese programs revealed a diferentiated class orientation. Tose who could access and aford them required approximately a medium income, provided by jobs mostly concentrated in urban centers (Guga, 2019). Te three programs stabilized the real estate market, the market for housing credit, and the construction market, limiting the drop in prices. Te facilitation of further household lending was embedded in the architecture of the programs. At the same time as new lending was being facilitated, no legislative changes were passed to protect debtors who took out loans before the crisis and were struggling in arrears. Budget allocations for public social housing were insignifcant compared with those for the three programs, which remained the main housing programs until 2020.

#### **Housing, Urban Regeneration, and Heritage Protection**

Te crisis and the subsequent austerity programs came with an intensifcation of racist and anti-poor discourses of the political leaders, which channeled anxieties about redistributive scarcity against the most vulnerable. Tis wider context, enhancing fractures and narrowing the space for negotiation, was refected in the positioning of the Platform for Bucharest alliance. Its housing rights groups intensifed community organization eforts in neighborhoods with high eviction risks. Its heritage protection groups intensifed their attack on local authorities, framing "protection" and "heritage value" in nationalistic and, at the same time, pro-European terms (Florea, 2016). Te latter groups, consisting of about 100 active participants and several thousand supporters, became the most visible members of the Platform. Teir rising visibility was also due to their compatibility with some of the mainstream discourses on urban development, as well as to the increasing political involvement of the urban professional class that represented most of their constituency.

Te heritage protection groups dominated the alliance's internal and external communications, with messages diferentiating between the "deserving" and "undeserving" poor. It blamed inhabitants of heritage buildings who were in precarious situations for their insufcient appreciation of heritage value. Tese were mostly racialized accounts of the inhabitants, which legitimized their eviction from buildings with heritage 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 development of the city (see Chap. 3). Such views were directly opposed to those of the housing rights groups and to the organizations fghting racism and social inequality. Toward the end of 2010, this led to the breakup of the Platform for Bucharest alliance.

Activists in most groups of the alliance—the discontented—had temporarily similar structural positions: most were younger than 30, many (although not all) were students in higher education or had recently graduated, and most were in precarious situations (although at diferent levels of precarity, from poor to low but stable income, to middle class). Tis allowed them to come together in the years before the 2008 crisis. However, after the onset of the 2008 crisis, their diferent class opportunities (and therefore class aspirations) linked to the level of remuneration within their professions coalesced into divergent political logics. After the separation, each side continued to build alliances based on class opportunities. Te 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 contrast, the core groups of the housing rights contention went on to work with communities of the frontline of urban gentrifcation, 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. Te establishment 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 contested private owner. Te 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 material about it. Tis solidarity response was an indicator of the widening support network in the growing housing rights mobilization.

Tis process continued throughout the post-2008 austerity years, when certain cross-class alliances seemed more possible owing to generalized economic insecurities and national political dissatisfaction. During this time, many of those afected by evictions and those giving direct support to the evictees became politicized. Te 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 (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 followed opposing political logics in the same feld, embedded in the dynamics of the national political landscape, which afected their emerging opportunities diferently since they had started from rather nonconficting class positions.

#### **Debtors Caught Between Political Silence and Contention**

Te difculty of building and maintaining alliances across diferent positions, or overcoming even subtle class diferences, 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 frst 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. Tis 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 category, with the means to access lawyers and knowledge or to lobby for their interests. Tus, 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 occasionally voiced in public debates by diferent types of debtors (mortgage holders and debtors with consumer loans with houses as collateral, consumer loans with variable interest rates, various loans in foreign currencies, and debtors in arrears). Teir grievances were expressed in a range of ways from silent negotiation to open contention. Te 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 unlawful 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, Raifeisen, 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 legislate (or grant obligatory consequence on all similar trials to) court decisions favoring debtors against banks. Te 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 diferences 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. Tis occurred when other precrisis debtors had already settled their refnancing schemes and postcrisis debtors had already borrowed on better conditions. Tus, being relatively isolated at that time, they were less powerful in negotiations. After their initial silence in the feld of housing 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 frst set of strong austerity measures was adopted in Romania in 2010. Te 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. Te most devastating austerity measures were passed in 2011, based on legislative proposals lobbied for by representatives of employers' organizations. Tese meant changes in the Labor Code and Social Dialogue legislation, practically dismantling labor unions, destroying sector-wide collective contracts, and generally reducing the bargaining power of workers while advancing work fexibilization. Tese measures continued and accelerated long-term processes of post-1989 economic restructuring and EU accession. Te changes afected many workers, including urban professionals and those in middle-income categories, and had lasting efects 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). Tis turmoil was also refected in several waves of protests around the country.

In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the massive national-level antiausterity (2012) and environmental protests (2013) represented important 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 mobilization. With their active participants and supporters, this added a couple of hundred supporters to a growing housing rights movement. Te latter was already becoming visible beyond the Rahova-Uranus area and beyond single protests against evictions. Tis happened in a structural context in which soaring real estate prices, overcrowding, utility arrears, and high rents relative to incomes also became relevant to signifcant segments of the middle class.

In the environment of political turmoil during those years, the housing 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 difcult for forming and maintaining alliances. Nevertheless, the housing rights mobilization passed through several phases of politicization and managed to grow in visibility and numbers in just a few years.

As mentioned in the previous section, the LaBomba community center was evicted in mid-2011 following the contested restitution of the building. Manifestations of solidarity with the Rahova-Uranus community were strong. Tey were immediately refected in the mass media, on the cultural scene, and in the human rights advocacy coalitions. Tese networks of support maintained and enhanced the mobilization's crossclass dimension: it involved a range of members from the activists in the most precarious situations, artists facing precarity, journalists, to betterof academics, NGO workers, and supporters living abroad. Soon after the eviction, the women afected by it and the supporting artists who witnessed it documented the experience of the community in the form of a political theater play.

Te play premiered in early 2012 and it was subsequently performed for free in diferent 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. Te play was also staged by the housing rights groups to mobilize other communities at risk of eviction and to publicize such experiences, which are usually kept silent and marginalized (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019). Tis 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. Te 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. Te protests were joined by people of diferent ages, professional backgrounds, and even those approaching medium-level incomes that were still insufcient to guarantee material security.

Part of the middle class was also hit by the austerity measures. Tis 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 instability under austerity, and whose politics mostly—although not only—followed 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 dissatisfaction with the austerity measures, the strong neoliberal government fell, and a coalition including the Social Democrats took ofce. 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. Te heritage protection movement's visibility, alliances, and resources were activated for this endeavor. Te declared aim of the campaign was to advance architectural heritage protection as a major principle in Bucharest's development.

Te campaign was one of the most important moments for the development 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,

<sup>1</sup>Tat is more than 6,000,000 people, without counting all those who disconnected or were forcibly disconnected because they could no longer aford the costs. Utility arrears have been the most widespread form of household debt in Romania in recent decades.

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: "Te 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 predominantly urban professional middle-income constituency. In the following years, this coalescence found a favorable political constellation and structural situation at the national level, growing into the third most powerful party in Romania, the Save Romania Union (Uniunea Salvați România: USR). Tis path represented a further move away from the anti-austerity and housing for all stances, opening the door to antagonistic interactions in the feld 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 isolated members.

Another wave of contention was manifested at the national level in 2013 around environmental issues. Te new coalition government and the president agreed to support a large gold mining operation, using a controversial extraction method involving cyanide. Tis extraction project in the mountain village of Roşia Montană, in central Romania, was pushed by the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (a heavily fnancialized Canadian company) and had been blocked by villagers and environmental activists since the late 1990s. Moreover, in 2013–2014, the government 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"). Te 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 spread in several cities and in the afected villages, with tens of thousands of participants in Bucharest every night until the end of 2013. Tey represented another wave of politicization of various categories of protesters and witnesses: the locals directly afected 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 opponents of capitalist exploitation) or right liberals (self-identifed as antipolitical 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 several localities. Te most visible environmental groups and right-liberal NGOs, often spokespersons for the protests, scarcely condemned the aggressions. Tis 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. Te 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 infuence at the end of the protests were several right-liberal groups and NGOs linked to the heritage protection movement. Tey presented themselves as, and they were generally portrayed as saviors of the historical heritage of Roşia Montană (Florea & Rhodes, 2018). Tey were linked to the social media page *Uniţi Salvăm* (United we save) which became very popular, reaching more than 50,000 followers. Teir ascension also refected the strengthening 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.

Te 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 antiausterity 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 autonomous 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**

Te years 2013–2014 were foundational for the housing rights movement. 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). Tese 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. Tis time, the media reports sided with the evicted family, which was hardly the case before the 2008 crisis. From this intensifed mobilization, the Common Front for Housing Rights (FCDL) was established. It involved 20–30 active members, most with previous experience in housing rights activism (some since the early years of the Generosity Ofensive collective, and some politicized during the anti-austerity wave). Te 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. Te FCDL was thus based on a crossclass alliance between afected 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 middleincome backgrounds. In addition, the FCDL continuously reached out in other locations in attempts to prevent evictions and to raise awareness of housing injustice. Its social media page soon reached more than 2000 supporters from diverse backgrounds who were quite active in dissemination, material support, and occasional involvement. It had strong connections to a group of housing rights activists and evicted families from the city of Cluj-Napoca, who had formed in 2010. Te two groups were very similar in their principles, claims, constituency, size, and visibility. Tey were initially connected through common friends in the wider leftist networks and through reciprocal support. Te connection between the two groups became a pillar of housing contention in the years to come.

Te FCDL claimed housing as a fundamental right for all and a concern for many afected by uncertainty, overcrowding, and excessive housing costs. Tus, the FCDL placed cross-class solidarity, collective organizing, experiences of those evicted or at risk of eviction, and attention to intersectional struggles at the center of its organization. In the FCDL's internal and public communication, it refected on the conditions 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. Tis 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 families decided to set up tents (and later wooden huts) in front of their former homes and mark them with protest banners. Tey decided to resist inside these huts until the local authorities assumed their responsibility to allocate adequate social housing to evictees. Tis would mark the largest and most enduring protest camp in the recent history of the housing rights movement, and it lasted for two years. Tis entailed ensuring the everyday logistics of the camp, preparing media communications, organizing protests, and actions to put pressure on local authorities. It also entailed the forming of emotional connections between the evicted families, 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, visibility, 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 alliances. 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. Te resistance 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. Tis was happening against a structural background where competition over advantageous positions intensifed on all scales from the strengthening of the (both liberal and extreme) right at the national level to growing rural–urban fractures, and to everyday 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. Teir 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. Tis generated a political constellation that again exacerbated antagonisms between structural positions and especially class positions. Te strengthening of the right also involved choosing Klaus Iohannis as a presidential candidate: he was another ex-mayor and promoter of gentrifcation, a benefciary of property restitutions, and landlord to a foreign bank's local branch. Having hitherto proven himself to be an ally of German, Austrian, and Luxembourgian foreign direct investment (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 environment for FDI and to reduce social services and redistribution further.

Tus, in the Romanian postcrisis context of deepening inequalities, the solidarity around Vulturilor Street resistance was exceptional. Tis 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. Te community of resistance became part of the FCDL, just as the Rahova-Uranus community of resistance did previously. It thus became part of the permanent cross-class, multiethnic process of development of the housing movement. It mobilized an unprecedented level of solidarity and support (Lancione, 2017a; Popovici, 2020). Tis 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, institutions on several scales, and a diversity of supporting groups and organizations. Indeed, recently formed or strengthened groups with similar political afnities joined, refecting the widening of the feld of new leftist politics. Moreover, even some groups from the heritage protection movement and some of the hitherto uninvolved homeless assistance charities supported the resistance. Tis fact signaled a favorable feld for (at least partially) redistributive ideas—similar to the precrisis context of expectations of general improvement of living conditions for all.

However, this process of solidarity-building in the feld of housing contention was to be challenged again, in November 2015, when massive protests were sparked by a deadly accidental fre 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 complex of old buildings with the music club. After the fre, it was closed. Te FCDL and its supporting groups joined the wide protests taking place in the aftermath of the deadly fre 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 professionals and artists who lost their lives or were injured in the fre. Te main claims were for the resignation of several authorities accused of corruption and incompetence. Resignations were actually received from the prime minister and the district mayor. Two weeks after the fre, a new government was formed, represented as technocratic and apolitical, and thus uncorrupted.

Te 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 fre broke out. Tis 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 fre. Tese 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 follow-up, the FCDL and its support network organized the occupation of an empty public building, under the slogan "Tousands of empty houses, thousands of people living on the street. Where is justice?" Te 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 supported the FCDL view intensifed a process of party formation that later established the Demos party, which remained a supporter of housing rights claims.

<sup>2</sup>A few years after the fre, the area became dominated by luxury apartments traded through global real estate intermediaries.

Te occupation of the public building marked yet another important moment for the housing mobilization in terms of radicalizing its participants and supporters. Tis strategy was continued in the following year with a hunger strike of the evicted women. Tese radical actions complemented the everyday work of creating and disseminating informative materials to reach frontline communities and possible allies. Tis work included producing a documentary flm about restitutions, another theatrical play about diferent 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**

Te year 2016 marked several new directions for the FCDL. On the one hand, the Claca collective, which lost its space after the Colectiv club fre, managed to open a new and larger cooperative space with a bar and theater (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 communities. For the next three years, the new space became an efervescent 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 confrontational 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 fnally allocated social housing, together with other eligible households on the waiting lists (which are strictly prioritized according to points and verifcation). Tis 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 members were fnally able to access social housing, while many had to move out in the face of restitution evictions (Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, 2018). Tus, the intensity of organization around the two resistance communities lowered.

Tese 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. Troughout 2016, the technocratic government showcased its transparency and anticorruption allegiance by undertaking consultations with civil society organizations on several policies, including the National Strategy on Housing. Large charities involved in social assistance, and representatives of advocacy 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 afected families 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 afected groups. In addition to afected families, both groups included experts on urban social issues who were invited to participate in the consultation process. Tus, through the National Strategy on Housing consultations, the housing rights movement conducted its frst consistent negotiation scaled up from the local to the national authorities over policies, and legislation. It then constructed a base of expertise and legitimacy on which it continues to build (in 2021).

Te 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). Afected members of both groups participated in negotiations with members of parliament, engaged with the press, and recorded their stories on flm (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, which they had previously joined; afected members were always present at the European Action Coalition meetings. Tis 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. Te member groups and NGOs had a left-leaning political position. Tey 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. Teir complementary expertise ranged from litigation to community organizing, from campaigning to social research. Together they were in direct contact with several hundred afected people and had several thousand followers and supporters. Te groups were initially connected by personal contacts and afnities. Te Block for Housing platform aimed at extending the grassroots work of the groups to a national scale. New topics such as tenants' rights and the lack of afordable rent became voiced by the Block member groups more clearly than before. Tis 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 movement 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 regeneration, 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 party in parliament. Tus, this new party, which became successful based on the post-2008 protest wave, absorbed the heritage protection movement. As discussed above, that movement had frst 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 category, but some were more favorable than others (Petrovici & Poenaru, 2017). Te 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 structure. Trough 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 proposed by the World Bank, presented as apolitical and thus incorruptible and infallible (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2018; Florea & Dumitriu, 2018). Tis alignment between technocratic logics on the local and global scales smoothed the path for national policies on housing—and associated policies on real estate, land use, urban and rural development—favorable to real estate and fnancial investors (Economica.net, 2016). Tese charities and NGOs, including the two linked to the heritage protection movement, 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 feld of housing, as described below. Neither of the contributors had their proposals passed into legislation. Te National Strategy on Housing had still not been adopted in 2021, after several changes of government. Tus, 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.

In late 2016, the general elections were won by the PSD, thus ending the technocratic government. Te 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 immediately joined the protests and adopted many of their slogans. Te rightliberal 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). Tese 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 (promoting neoliberal policies favoring global capital). Te alignment between the protestors and these political and economic powers refects the structural positions of their constituency (Poenaru, 2017): they represented mostly urban middle-class professionals, usually employed in multinationals based in urban centers and among the very few workers who could aford to access bank credit (Petrovici & Poenaru, 2017). Teir alignment was also the refection of a longer process of winning them over and building alliances from above by the major right-liberal parties, intensifed in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. Te heritage protection 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. Tey called upon the protestors to ofer solidarity in an eviction situation taking place at the same time and in the vicinity of the protests; the call remained unanswered. Te two mobilizations continued separately by advancing conficting structural/class interests and by occupying opposing sides of the political spectrum (Voicu, 2017).

## **Housing, Debt, and Wage Struggles Since 2015**

Te benefciaries 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 government. 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 feld of housing contention. Tey frst organized as a social media group with more than 20,000 users, and then as the *Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF* association. Tis 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 association). Moreover, at the end of the austerity period, the government implemented specifc policies to support better earners and, in this context, debtors with mortgages, including most CHF debtors, became more protected. Since 2016, an in-kind repayment law has allowed mortgage holders to negotiate better refnancing conditions with the banks, while a few households have actually used the law to exit debt through repossessions. Since 2017, amendments to the housing legislation have allowed repossessed mortgage holders to access a special category of public housing. Te legislation thus granted them privileged access to the very limited public housing stock over households in more precarious situations awaiting social housing. Tis development led to competition between categories of applicants for public housing that translated into a silent and involuntary antagonism in the feld of housing contention between the debtors' interests and the housing rights struggles.

Tus, the FCDL and the leftist groups supporting it did not manage to signifcantly infuence the most visible mobilizations of the post-2015 growth cycle on the one hand, and did not try to engage with debtors' mobilizations on the other. Te parallelism with the debtors' mobilizations 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 fnancialization and household lending in 2017, under the infuence 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 diferent structural positions in relation to class, gender, ethnicity, and housing conditions, forming 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 interconnectedness between housing, income, and labor conditions. Tis process was made possible by the growing concern of the labor unions regarding the calculation formula for the minimum wage. It occurred under structural 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. Te 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 budget of the average Romanian household. Tus, as the labor unions struggled for a wage calculation based on actual needs, they had to turn their attention to housing costs. Simultaneously, the Block for Housing considered 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**

Te 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 feld of housing contention. Informal housing was such an aspect. In 2017, larger charities and advocacy NGOs previously involved in the consultation process for the National Strategy on Housing started holding public debates on the topic. Te 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. Tese NGOs were previously involved in charity, micro-credit, or educational projects in areas of informal housing—all legitimized as humanitarian intervention. Tey 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-profle conferences with invited speakers from the World Bank, the government, academia, commercial banks, and construction companies. Te audience was diverse, including people from the NGO sector, academics, and representatives of local and regional institutions. Te goal of the events, as observed from consistent feldwork, was to lobby for fast-tracked legislative changes that would accelerate the formalization of informal housing sites.

Tis process was permitted by a national context of economic growth where in certain informal housing areas, inhabitants managed to overcome 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 settlements and most importantly in clarifying and formally registering property rights. In a new postcrisis boom context, the political and economic signifcance of peri-urban land and property has changed: as the Ministry of Economy stated in its public communication, formalizing and registering 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 endeavors, to facilitate future land marketization and fnancialization (ibid.).

Te 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. Te 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 lobbying 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 fnancialization 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. Te Block's main criticism was that the majority of households in severe poverty lacked the resources for formalization and they were being continuously pushed to margins through evictions. Tis criticism was based on years of experience with evictions leading to homelessness, with only informal solutions accessible to the evictees. Te Block's actions on the issue included media releases, publication of its own analyses, participation in high-profle 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.

Tus, informal housing became a visible part of the feld of housing contention at the intersection of an accelerated legislative process, an institutional 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 afected groups. Te 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 feld possible. Moreover, opposing the indebtedness of lower-income households in informal housing conditions intensifed the Block for Housing activists' engagement with the issue of debt and fnancialization. Tis also created the possibility of a wider understanding of the structural factors afecting housing conditions for various social categories with which the Block could ally.

## **Housing Struggles Since the Pandemic Years**

Te Covid-19 pandemic and the government's policies addressing it intensifed previous dynamics in the feld of housing contention. With the government freezing the minimum wage, pension, and social aid levels, as well as shrinking social services, the groups collaborating as the Block for Housing intensifed their direct support for families afected by evictions and loss of livelihoods. Facing this challenge, current housing movement activities are marked by severe limitations to resources, protests, face-to-face meetings, and dissemination of information. Tis 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 intensifed their alliance formations since 2020. Tey have sought national, regional, and international involvement 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 audience. Tey held online events with members afected by housing precarity and members of labor unions. Tey wrote articles for and stayed in contact with leftist media platforms in East and Central Europe united in the Eastern European Left Media Outlet. Tey have often participated in the internal and public meetings of several transnational networks dealing with essential work, migrant labor, and care work: Te Transnational Social Strike, Migrant Coordination, and Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. Members of the FCDL and the Block for Housing also intensifed their publication of academic papers, explaining the social and economic implications of diferent housing policies and conditions (Zamfr et al., 2020; Vilenica et al., 2021; Vincze & Florea, 2020; Vincze, 2020, 2021a, 2021b) to address those in more afuent and educated classes and potentially leaning to the left. Tese actions also involved seeking professional campaigning knowledge from PR specialists and campaigning platforms for wider reach to local authorities and major national parties. Te aim was to push for faster access to social housing for applicants on social housing waiting lists. Tis campaigning knowledge was used to support one of the FCDL's most active afected 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.

Te increased challenges of this context are also refected in the transformation of the First Home subsidized credit program. Te year 2020 brought new general elections and the installation of a new government, which leaned even further toward the neoliberal right. Tis 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. Tus, 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 mobilizations, due to increased policing and stronger anticommunist voices reaching government positions through the USR party. To respond to this context, a new path of action was opened: one member and one supporter of the FCDL—both Roma women who experienced evictions ran as candidates for the local council elections in Bucharest in 2020. Tey had campaign support from other left-leaning groups as well. Although they did not win seats on the targeted councils, their campaigns served as a training ground for public campaigning and future engagement with electoral politics.

## **Conclusion: A Dynamic Field of Alliances and Conficts, Silences, and Political Expressions**

Tis chapter has followed the main areas of housing tensions and their expression across the sociopolitical changes of three postsocialist periods. Te 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 feld, addressed mostly by charities. However, at times, with feld transformations, charity organizations became involved in contentious actions. Similarly, informal housing remained a silent aspect of the feld 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 illustrated that, with feld 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). Te chapter also illustrates areas of commonality between low- to middle and middle to high-income conditions, owing to feld transformations. First, some mortgage holders and forex credit holders, who were privileged groups of debtors, lost their livelihoods 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 overlap 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 feld transformations.

Te chapter showed that this dynamic and entangled feld of making and unmaking alliances, of silences and politicized expressions, also refects a dynamic political context at the national level, with changing party constellations, despite following the same global market integration path for Romania. Tis is diferent 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 benefts of examining them through a structural feld of contention approach.

### **References**

(pp. 133–151). Te Institute of Network Cultures, Amsterdam University of Applied Sciences.

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# **6**

# **Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles: Comparative Lessons**

In Chaps. 1 and 2, we laid out a proposal for a structural feld of contention approach to housing movements. Tis approach examines contention 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 housing 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 diferent 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 feld of contention approach.

Our arguments in this chapter are organized around specifc insights into two cases where the structural feld 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 clarifes the specifc benefts of this approach. We do not ofer these conclusions as generalizable theoretical statements, nor do we claim that our conclusions from the perspective of a structural feld of contention cover all possible aspects of the empirical state of housing contention in the two cases. Instead, we conceive them as specifc heuristics following from a feld 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 frst 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 specifc areas of tension that were relatively constant throughout the decades following 1989, and were at the center of contention after 2008. Tese were housing poverty, accumulating at the bottom of the housing hierarchy, and the problem of housing access for low- to middle-income groups. Tese areas of tension are similar in the two cases, owing to the similarities 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 commodifcation across diferent postsocialist regimes. Tese tensions are addressed by diferent forms of housing contention at various points, and are relegated 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 commodifcation and fnancialization. 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. Te 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 commodifcation concerned 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 heritage buildings to the marginalization or outright eviction of poorer dwellers.

#### **Tensions around Severe Forms of Housing Poverty**

Te most visible tension that followed from this structural environment was the production of severe housing poverty at the bottom of the system. Te privatization of housing transferred growing utility and maintenance costs to residents who often lost their jobs owing to the transition crisis. Tis 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 postsocialist housing. Another, less visible form of severe housing poverty, which also existed under socialism but was reinforced and expanded after 1990, was informal housing. Tis involved self-built, low-quality dwellings in peri-urban areas as well as squatting or semi-legal occupations of empty apartments. Struggles around the dwindling supply of social housing were another characteristic form of the politicization of housing poverty. Evictions became a specifc point where these tensions transformed into open confict—from the privatization of social housing to evictions related to utility or mortgage debt or the forced destruction 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, poverty levels are especially high among the Roma, and ethnic discrimination contributes to their material and social marginalization. Consequently, the Roma have been among those most severely afected by postsocialist housing poverty. Te efects of housing peripheralization—the concentration of poor households in low-quality housing areas, peri-urban informal housing, or poor areas of the countryside—hit Roma communities particularly hard in both countries. Contention around these situations often arose when ethnic and social characteristics intersected, as they did in anti-eviction struggles or in urban regeneration programs where the social efects of commodifcation created lines of ethnic division.

## **The Problem of Housing Access for Lowto Middle-Income Groups**

Another main area of housing tension was the situation of those in lowto middle-income groups who had relatively stable incomes but could not aford to buy a home. Tis tension was manifested in two main domains. Te frst 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. Te 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 following the regime change, in the 2000s, the accumulation of risky household loans grew into a major problem that burst into the open after the 2008 crash. Te 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.

Te main forms of politicization of this housing tension in the two countries difered signifcantly. In Romania, the forex mortgage boom of the 2000s generally remained limited to relatively well-situated middleclass 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 families and was widely politicized at a national level—frst by vocal support in conservative politics, and then by debtors voicing their discontent with debt-management measures. Te 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 demonstrations over wages, and collaborations between unions and leftist housing 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 pressure 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 infuenced the conditions of housing contention. Yet, while the macrostructural background of housing-related tensions was relatively similar in the two countries, the characteristics of the political changes induced by the crisis difered signifcantly. Tese diferences were linked to the specifc political evolution of local regimes across late socialist and postsocialist structural transformations and they produced diferent conditions for the political orientation and alliance options of housing movements in the two capitals.

## **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, exsocialist managers and technocrats interested in privatization, and the strong reformist section of the Socialist party that governed socialist marketization reforms. Tis alliance established an FDI (foreign direct investment)-led model of external integration that shifted toward debtled development in the 2000s. Te contender power bloc, which preferred 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. Tis discourse became a vocabulary for the expression of social discontent in popular right-wing anti-neoliberal protests by the late 2000s.

Te efects 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 simultaneously served to manage the crisis of capital from core countries, created room of maneuver for state-backed domestic capital, and diversifed fnancial dependence away from Western sources. In this context, while pre-2010 anti-austerity protests were channeled into a conservative political victory, post-2010 demonstrations targeting crisis efects 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) liberal bloc.

#### **The Alliance between Post-2008 Movements and Liberal Politics in Romania**

In Romania, in contrast to Hungarian socialist marketization, the socialist regime reacted to the problem of indebtedness with a policy of extreme austerity serving debt repayment to retain independence and resist international lenders' pressure for marketization. Instead of opening up, the Romanian regime maintained intensive industrialization and centralized power. Tis 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 privatization and protectionism. Tis 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, neoliberal reforms were accelerated. In this process, neoliberal politics formed an alliance with liberal intellectuals and employed a strong anticommunist discourse in their struggle against the Social Democratic Party. Tis alliance presided over the debt-ridden growth of the 2000s, and the austerity-led crisis management of the years following 2008.

Te aftermath of 2008 brought intensifed confict 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 disillusionment with postsocialist politics were channeled into support for liberal parties in their struggle against socialists.  Unlike the situation in Hungary, this framework was explicitly dissociated from the social perspectives of post-2008 middle-class protestors and it combined pro-liberal statements with antagonism toward the poor.

## **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 afliations who built alliances with disenfranchised groups and thematized housing-related grievances in political terms. For these actors, the varied contexts of post-2008 politics ofered diferent possibilities for alliance formation. In Romania, leftist housing activists came into confict with demonstrators' shift toward right-liberal positions. Tis was manifested in both general protest politics, as well as in specifc instances of confict 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 amplifed in the general wave of post-2010 middleclass 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 oppositional politics met social demands. Tis was due to the advanced frameworks of leftist housing activism prepared by a group named Te 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 afected 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 profle, separate from the political institutionalization of post-2008 middle-class politics, in Hungary, it was integrated into the dynamics of wider opposition politics. Tis included founders of Te City is for All entering political positions after opposition victories in the 2019 local elections, as well as various collaborations with new opposition local governments. In this context, the relationship of Hungarian groups to market-oriented oppositional politics took the form of tactical collaboration or parallel action rather than open confict.

#### **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 sufered spikes in debt repayments owing to post-2008 changes in currency rates mobilized to claim state relief for their situation. In both countries, debtors' groups focused on retaining homeownership and optimizing their situation under the conditions provided by the system. However, diferences in the distribution of forex mortgages and in alliance options ofered by diferent post-2008 political contexts produced very diferent forms of debtor politics in the two countries.

In Romania, debtors' struggles were mainly limited to individual bargains and litigation, with the notable exception of households with CHFdenominated 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. Tese, in turn, allowed them access to the very limited public housing stock, thus placing them in direct competition with precarious social housing applicants. Among more afuent and nondefaulting mortgage holders who bought to rent and hoped to improve their situation as landlords, this efect was even more prominent. Living in urban centers with better paid jobs, often in multinational frms, they were integrated into the right-liberal framework, supporting the anticorruption protest wave against socialists and the poor. Tus, they came into opposition with leftist housing activism. While they organized to secure their positions, their struggles 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 afected a large number of lowermiddle and working-class households. Tis 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 fght" it promised against the dominance of Western capital. However, after 2010, Fidesz's management of the debt crisis pursued fnancial stabilization supported by domestic actors in fnancial markets instead of social goals. While the more afuent debtors were saved, debtors whose problems were not alleviated turned against Fidesz. Tis phase of the struggle, however, was efectively 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 prodemocracy movements, in Hungary and Romania, debtors' mobilizations did not develop a signifcant connection with leftist housing movements. While debtors' groups in both countries maintained a right-wing tendency bound to the idea of homeownership, they connected to diferent 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 refected the class-based character of housing movement alliances. While leftist housing groups prioritized alliances with those struck by the most severe forms of housing poverty, debtors' activism represented middle- and lower middle-class segments. Tese segments occupied intermediate positions in housing hierarchies, which could sometimes be considered to compete with the needs of the poor as much as to support their demands for housing rights. Tis ambiguity of potential political positions came to be decided by political support for right-wing versions of post-2008 politics, facilitated by debtor groups' preferences for homeownership and participation in former right-wing movements.

Te fracturing of housing movement alliances across diferent patterns of post-2008 politics in the two countries contradicts the dominant narratives on post-2008 housing activism. Referring to examples of progressive movements such as PAH in Spain, these narratives consider post-2008 reactions to housing-related tensions an organic part of progressive antiausterity 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 movements. Tese appear either in the form of explicit conficts 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 mobilization, was not integrated with leftist frameworks in these cases, and debtor movements remained caught between right-wing political alliances and marginalization.

## **Translating Tensions into Politicized Demands: The Role of Middle-Class Expertise and Institutional Interfaces**

Our case studies confrmed the long-term insight of social movement studies that structural tensions do not generate movements by themselves. Although the areas of tensions described above characterized both postsocialist housing systems, neither the long-term presence of these tensions nor their intensifcation in certain periods led to mobilizations in themselves. Instead, we found that tensions were politicized in specifc moments when they intersected with the formation of activist and political alliances between diferent types of actors.

In some cases—such as the birth of a new participative model of homeless 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 activist 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, politicization occurred at points where tensions were intensifed, 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 afected 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 confict 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 afected groups themselves. Yet, here too, the help of professional allies was key to interpreting debtors' situations and translating their problems into institutionalized 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 countries, 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) middleclass political activism and expertise, and institutional interfaces where structural tensions could be projected in terms of demands tailored to defnitions 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 ft existing institutional frameworks.

#### **6 Structural Fields of Contention in Housing Struggles…**

Te existence of institutional interfaces with which housing activists could directly engage in relation to their problem—such as social housing for housing poverty, litigation for forex debtors, or municipal regulation 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 ft their institutional logic—a fact often criticized within housing activist groups. Such criticisms were made by Te 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 noncommodifed forms of housing to provide alternatives to the redistributive or market-based solutions ofered 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 solidifed, could become actors in their own right, able to defne 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 processes of politicization across changes of structural contexts and transformations of the contention feld. 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 activists and people afected by evictions in Romania, which later could engage with new types of challenges such as the World Bank program for housing formalization. Te enduring capacity of the Hungarian National Alliance of Housing Cooperatives to act as an interest representation body in the feld of housing policy, decades after the collapse of the socialist system that set it up, is another example of advocacy-based institutional capacity. New initiatives for building institutional frameworks for cooperative or social rental housing explicitly aim to create such movement institutions.

## **Dynamics of Alliances in Politicizing Issues of Housing Poverty**

In homelessness-related organizing, which became the main form of contesting severe forms of housing poverty in Hungary, the frst wave of politicization in the 1990s happened through collaboration between homeless people's own mobilizations, low-income volunteers, and (liberal 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 institutionalized 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 afected actors' own criticisms, this wave of activism created a model, embodied by Te City is for All, that attempted to combine the mediating capacity of middle-class activists with majority control by afected members. In the 2010s, the importance of middle-class alliances was reinforced by Te City is for All being open to middle-class housing problems and its collaboration with broader opposition networks. 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 evictions, became a central topic of housing contention. During the 2000s, educated low- to middle-income activists sympathetic to left-wing critiques of postsocialist development formed alliances with Roma activists and with people afected by evictions. Tese alliances provided a standpoint that strongly linked leftist housing activism to people discriminated against in housing hierarchies. Similar to Te City is for All, these movement alliances sought to balance middle-class capacities for political representation with the infuence of directly afected members. Unlike in Hungary, the political line established by this alliance collided with the politics of post-2008 demonstrations, including direct conficts 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. Te "trickling down" of housing poverty to the countryside after 1989 produced pockets of poverty in rural areas, many of which also became ethnically segregated. With the reduction of state funding for housing, social housing benefts paid to such population segments constituted a remaining stream of subsidies that continued to be paid to the poorest. In the escalation of ethnic conficts in rural areas during the 2000s, this type of state assistance was described as unfair, with claims that working Hungarians received no benefts during this period. Te 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 politics. Other cases involved intra-city developments within Budapest. Te peripheralization of poor residents by market-based regeneration programs had a strong ethnic character in the inner districts. Te 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 signifcant 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 policy of development, its more general anti-Roma, anti-poor, and propolicing 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 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 afected communities and institutionalized negotiations over formalization, in which they could participate based on their credentials earned during earlier advocacy work. Tey advocated against pushing costs of formalization on residents and instead emphasized the need to address the problem of housing poverty causing informalization. Tis 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 afected communities and previously gained access to the lower ranks of institutional negotiators.

## **Dynamics of Alliances in the Politicization of Social Housing**

Te issue of social housing has been repeatedly addressed by housing contention in both countries by diferent constellations of alliances. In Hungary, liberal and leftist housing activism has provided relatively continuous support for social housing since the 1990s, including instances of collaborations with afected groups. From the 2000s on, resistance to evictions from social housing formed a regular element of the new participative wave of leftist housing activism, and demanding better social housing remained a major way to translate the general idea of housing rights into specifc demands in public campaigns. Despite these connections, social housing and evictions did not become a major convergence point of movement agency and politics, as they did in Bucharest. Tere, anti-eviction actions were key to forming lasting political and emotional links between the afected people and middle-class expert activists. Te struggle by afected movement members to access social housing directly connected aspects of direct action, institutional advocacy, and political demands. Te 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 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 feld for wider class alliances around social housing.

#### **Politicization around Urban Regeneration Projects**

In the case of urban regeneration, we saw the following patterns of making and unmaking alliances in the politicization of regeneration-related tensions. In Hungary in the 1990s, the harmful social impact of marketbased regeneration programs was not expressed politically, but was noted by experts. By the 2000s, this expert capacity combined with the possibility 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 afected 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 development occurred in an environment of opposition campaigning, where a politically heterogeneous opposition was forced to collaborate to confront a supermajority government. In this context, contradictions between market-based and socially oriented development could be temporarily subdued in the convergence of symbolic messaging, while in the programs of diferent 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, families at risk of eviction, those fghting to keep their homes, Roma and anti-racism activists, artists, and social researchers. Tis initial cross-class coalition was also the grounds for collaboration with the heritage protection movement interested in conserving areas near the city center. Te alliance broke up because of the latter prioritizing market-oriented urban development over social rights. Te breakup clarifed 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 Lowto 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 intensifed 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. Te Alliance of Housing Cooperatives used its institutional capacity developed during the socialist era to represent the interests of this segment, even if this was mainly in closed-door negotiations and with decreasing power over the years. Troughout 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 afected 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 cooperative 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 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. Tose in the latter movements eventually joined the broader liberal trend of large political demonstrations, embarking on technocratic or party-oriented careers. Meanwhile, new leftist activism, with a highly educated but rather materially precarious background, mostly relied on voluntary work and solidifed its anti-systemic stance. Tis stands in contrast to the Hungarian case, where leftist housing politics became more integrated into formal politics after 2019. Similar to the situation in Budapest, leftist housing activism also produced projects for cooperative dwelling as well as new coalitions with unions.

In terms of social housing policies, the contexts of leftist housing activism difered 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 channeled 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 public housing stock. Tis 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 housing, was seen by leftist housing activists as conficting with the needs of the poorest.

## **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 politically has been a specifc 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 specifc 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 institutional 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 formalization project and leftist activists' knowledge of local afected groups, local administrations, and international criticisms of World Bank developmental projects.

Debtors' activism exemplifes the limitations of translating capacities across scales. While the problem of mortgage debt was deeply connected to the international dynamics of fnancialization in both countries, debtors' 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 specifc collision between foreign fnancial 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 confict, repeating a narrative that in earlier forms had been applied to Socialist-Liberal governments serving Western interests. Tis framework could not provide a functional diferentiation between Western and Hungarian capital or engage efectively with the government's maneuvers to reorganize relations between the two. Hungarian debtors' activism in relation to the EU provides a similar example. Owing to hopes placed in EU-level litigation after domestic possibilities were removed and to impressions of better consumer protection in Western countries, debtors saw the EU as a potential guarantor and good example of debtors' rights. Despite recurrent references to Western fnance as the cause of debtors' sufering, 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 Te City is for All, the New Yorkbased homeless advocacy group Picture the Homeless played an important role in the conceptualization of its organizational model. Other international connections of Te City is for All constituted an important tool for applying pressure in its campaign against anti-homelessness legislation. Lessons from the Spanish housing and municipalist movement were later used by Te City is for All members in Eighth district community electoral campaigns. For Romanian leftist housing groups, similar connections developed with the European Action Coalition for Te 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 frst common movement institution through which local groups directly engaged with multiscalar and multisited aspects of housing tensions. Tis largely contributed 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 urbanism that followed the 2008 crisis, and particularly the foundation of the East European cooperative housing network MOBA, played an important role as a forum for international collaboration, a source of inspiration, and an institutional reference frame for both Hungarian and Romanian local projects.

## **Field Dynamics**

In both countries, we have seen that relatively constant and similar structural tensions were politicized over time by a multiplicity of actors with diferent political frameworks and alliances. In descriptions of other local felds, this characteristic was identifed as the long-term fragmentation of housing struggles (Sebály 2021). Tis section describes some heuristic tools from the structural feld of contention approach that we found useful 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 conficts to parallel action), whereas others are used to examine relationships between structural tensions and their politicization 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 contradictions in the tensions that become politicized. A third heuristic that we found useful concerned transformations in the feld as a whole, whereby certain contextual changes impact all actors and their relations, thereby changing the forms of housing contention without necessarily being refected in groups' intentional strategies. Finally, the end of this section describes a feld-level division in the politics of housing contention that we found characterized both cases.

### **Explicit Alliances, Explicit Conficts, 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 coalition between leftist housing activism, new middle-class movements, and oppositional politics after 2019. Explicit conficts involved cases such as tenant conficts 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 policies, and conservative urban development. Tey also involved debtors' struggles against banks' demands for higher installments or expropriation.

Te most striking example of parallelism between movements was that between leftist housing activism and debtors' movements in both countries. In Romania, this remained an issue that we characterized in terms of leftist activism not engaging with the debtors' relatively narrow, technical, and politically conservative eforts to maintain homeownership. In Hungary, this parallelism was recognized by both sides as a problem, but remained in place despite recurrent eforts to build bridges. Here, topdown penetration by right-wing politics and other political cultures produced diferent political perspectives on this problem in debtor and leftist activist circles.

Te other main form of parallelism we saw was the relative distance of leftist (and in Hungary, liberal) housing activism from low- to middleincome groups' housing access problems. In some instances, this distance was even manifested as a confict, 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 confict between left- and right-wing political frameworks and their respective alliances, a deeper layer of political parallelism was based on these groups' diferent 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. Tis ultimately went against the dominant system of homeownership. Meanwhile, debtors' groups maintained the goal of housing access through homeownership, as prescribed by the super-homeownership system, in an attempt to resist its efects on indebtedness rather than its property aspects. Te diferent political frames and respective sensitivities regarding the idea of homeownership kept these two streams of activism in parallel. Tese 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 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**

Te 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 poverty was sometimes addressed in Hungary by leftist or liberal housing groups and by Roma advocacy, it remained beyond the focus of the dominant 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 tensions, 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).

Te relatively small scope of politicized activists compared with the number of people directly afected by the issues that activist groups addressed was characteristic of leftist housing movements as well as debtors' groups. Te signifcance of such groups regarding the larger, politically silent base of tensions they addressed was typically enhanced by their access to policy negotiations. Te role of Hungarian dissident activists 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 politicization 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 signifcant proportion of condominiums in subsequent decades. Te Alliance also 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 afected by the situation it addressed.

#### **Contradictions Not Refected in the Politicization of Housing Tensions**

We observed that the structural contradictions that defned the conditions of contestation addressing a certain area of tension were not necessarily refected in the frameworks of politicization that respective actors built around them. We consider such relationships to be highly illustrative of the way the dynamics of politicization relate to underlying structural and political conditions.

An illustrative example of structural contradictions that defned housing groups' politics, but is not refected in their political frameworks, is provided by the tenants' movement during the late socialist era and during the regime change in Hungary. Tis 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 defciencies of maintenance by state housing companies, owing to a lack of funds following from the burden of public debt repayment—the same situation that made later socialist political liberalization possible. Although tenants mobilized to pressure state maintenance companies to do long-delayed repairs, such pressure could not change the macrostructural conditions that caused the gaps in maintenance. With the progress of economic liberalization, tenants' diferent positions within the privatization process manifested as a political contradiction 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 refection outside the leftist scene but played an important role in the divergent strategies and frameworks of diferent middle-class substrata and activist groups. Tis arose from 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. Tese 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 messages, those on either side of this contradiction could appear to be organically harmonious, with middle-class activist expertise representing broader interests, including those of the deprived. However, the potential confict between these two aspects was also manifested in various forms in our cases.

In the Romanian leftist housing groups' confict with heritage protection activism, we saw two trajectories of diferent segments of politicized middle-class expertise conficting through diferent 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 housing activists. Tey 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 housing groups allied with deprived groups refected 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 middleclass politics played out diferently, as the activists integrated into opposition 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 efect of expert careers tied to dominant institutions by building horizontal relations with afected groups.

#### **Transformations of the Field**

In addition to the dynamics between actors, we also found feld-level transformations that afect the positions of each actor to be important in terms of feld dynamics. One such transformation includes the 2008 crisis, which accelerated social polarization and sharpened housing tensions, especially in the areas of severe housing poverty, housing debt, and fuctuating mid-level incomes. Te post-2008 feld-level transformation also involves the political aftermath of the crisis, which solidifed diferent (neoliberal and nationalist authoritarian) regimes in the two countries, leading to diferent dynamics in the political alliances of post-2008 movements.

Further examples of feld-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 example 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 politics. 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. Te USR raised its anticorruption agenda above any other social and economic demands and further advanced an approach to social benefts and services, such as housing, dedicated to the deserving poor. Tese transformations of the feld increased competition among low- and low- to middle-income groups for public visibility and access to social and public housing, imposing new limitations on crossclass 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. Tus, Romanian leftist activists began to address housing accessibility and costs in connection with labor/wage struggles, and vice versa.

## **Resistance to Deprivation Versus Housing Access Activism for Low- to Middle-Income Groups: A Field-Level Division**

Contemplating the relations between structurally induced housing tensions 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. Tis was the division between a strain of politicization whereby coalitions between afected 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. Tis division was most often expressed by silence or parallel action, and sometimes through more or less explicit confict.