Like the previous chapter, this one follows the main areas of housing tensions—housing poverty and access for low- to middle-classes—and the mobilizations linked to them. It follows these tensions across Romania’s first two decades of post-1989 privatizations, the period of post-2008 crisis management, and the start of a new growth cycle in 2015.

As the following sections show, the forms of politicization and expression of these tensions by different groups in Bucharest transformed across time, reflecting tumultuous political changes at the national level that were much more unstable than in the Hungarian case. Beyond the two main areas of housing tensions, the chapter emphasizes the changing dynamics of political alliances across hierarchies of housing conditions from severe forms of housing poverty at the bottom to shifting positions for fragmented low- to middle-income groups and for middle- to high-income groups interested in residential investments.

Responses to Privatization and Lack of Housing Access Prior to the 2008 Crisis

Homelessness as a Silent Aspect of the Field

With the regime change in 1989 came the privatization of state housing, the liberalization of utility costs, privatization of state companies, and successive waves of layoffs. In this context, many low-income households became unable to cover rising utility costs and private market rents, which also led to loss of homes and evictions. As Chap. 3 showed, this process was coupled with the difficulty of accessing social housing. Thus, tens of thousands of households were evicted (Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019), pushed into severe poverty at the edges of large cities such as Bucharest or in rural areas (Stănculescu & Berevoescu, 2004; Fleck & Rughiniș, 2008), or forced to build informal housing as the only affordable housing option (Berescu et al., 2006). These structural tensions between housing needs and privatization leading to severe poverty were primarily addressed through the charity work of humanitarian and religious NGOs that emerged in the early 1990s. These tensions were framed as a humanitarian crisis in the early 1990s, when homelessness became visible in large cities. Foreign-sponsored charities—for example, the French- and Italian-sponsored SamuSocial and Parada in Bucharest as well as Save the Children—dominated the field. Unlike the situation in Hungary, homelessness support was thus almost entirely subsumed to charity work, offering mobile medical assistance, daycare centers, and a few night shelters. Meanwhile, the decentralized state authorities retreated, offering very few night shelters around the entire country (Florea et al., 2015c).

Since then, homelessness has remained a silent aspect of the field of housing contention, with no political mobilization of the homeless and no organizations with homeless people as representatives alongside social work professionals. But the issue is voiced publicly during conflicts surrounding evictions when evictees oppose being expulsed from their homes and made homeless. Much more often, homelessness is addressed by individual households through occupations of empty houses or informal buildings on empty plots on the outskirts of cities (Florea et al., 2015a; Blocul pentru Locuire, 2019). In and around Bucharest, many plots left empty by those who benefited from property restitution awaiting more profitable periods to build or sell have been occupied by people in need. Opposition to evictions, occupation of empty houses, and building informally on empty plots are all aspects of explicit or silent struggles against (temporary) homelessness. They were all voiced later in the housing rights struggle.

Informal housing remained a silent aspect of the field of housing contention for a long time. According to estimates based on 2001 census data, about 900,000 people at the national level lived in informal arrangements in rural areas, urban peripheries, and inner cities (Berescu et al., 2006). This meant hundreds of thousands of people living in self-built shacks, small houses, and self-refurbished empty buildings on properties they did not own and had no authorization to inhabit or build. Diverse areas of informal housing, ranging from a few shacks to groups of over 100 people in small homes, existed and remain today near the outskirts of Bucharest.

Household Debt as a Silent Challenge

As discussed in Chap. 3, household bank lending penetrated Romania later than in Hungary, due to the later and slower privatization of banks. It reached a smaller proportion of the population before the 2008 crisis and was accessible mostly (although not exclusively) to middle- to higher-income households. In 2005, out of a total population of about 20 million, fewer than 100,000 were bank borrowers, and only about 6000 were in arrears. However, the number of borrowers doubled annually until 2009.

Moreover, forex lending (mostly euro-, followed by dollar-denominated loans), represented most of the precrisis lending to households and reached predominantly middle- to high-income debtors. Unlike Hungary, borrowers of Swiss franc (CHF) bank loans represented a small proportion. For example, according to the National Bank, in 2015, from a total of about 500,000 people with housing credits, more than 300,000 had foreign currency loans, but only about 31,000 had housing credits in CHF (Banca Națională a României, 2020). Debtors on lower incomes typically had consumer or hire-purchase loans for buying household goods. These were smaller, less regulated, riskier, and more expensive loans, poorly monitored by the authorities, despite being widespread in the years before the 2008 crisis.

As early as 2007, bank debtors were affected by hikes in their monthly installments on variable interest rate loans and in their exchange rates on forex loans. Individual debtors started questioning their banks about these changes and about the clauses allowing them in the contracts they signed. In this initial phase, debtors negotiated individually with the banks and sought individual resolutions (Florea et al., 2015b).

Mobilization Around Evictions and Urban Regeneration

The leftist alliance around housing issues in Bucharest emerged in the early to mid-2000s, during the precrisis real estate boom and during a time of speculative transformation of the city. The national political sphere was dominated by center-right neoliberal coalitions in continuous conflict with the social-democratic coalitions that nonetheless also passed neoliberal measures. Traian Băsescu, the former mayor and pioneer of gentrification in Bucharest became president in 2004. The national discourse was dominated by promises of better lives associated with privatization, the arrival of foreign capital, and the EU accession planned for 2007 (Gabor, 2012). However, local realities were often criticized for failing to meet such expectations. Roma rights and advocacy NGOs condemned abuses by local authorities, including brutal evictions, utility cuts, and refusal to develop public infrastructure in poorer neighborhoods with a higher percentage of Roma inhabitants (European Roma Rights Center, 2002).

Multiclass youth groups such as street artists, cyclists, and subcultural and neighborhood groups were forming at that time, some under the influence of the wave of alter-globalization movements in the late 1990s to early 2000s. At that time, the size of these groups ranged from a few individuals to around 100 participants. Many but not all members were educated, many were from low but stable and low- to middle-income families, but some were from precarized working-class backgrounds. The multiclass aspect of these youth groups thus did not manifest as a wide gap in class differences but in subtle ways. The strong precarization effects of the post-1989 privatization waves (overlapping with a reduced pre-1989 level of inequality compared to Hungary) brought together young people from different backgrounds. These groups attempted to improve their conditions and influence the urban transformations taking place around them. Some criticized the rise of the car culture, the gated communities, and other manifestations of the speculative urban development of Bucharest (Asociația Komunitas, 2006, 2007; Evacuați din oraș, 2009; Ia o cameră și filmează ceva!, 2011). Several civic and professional groups, urban ecologists, and academics, including the Association of Urban Transition, religious groups, and architectural heritage lovers, also claimed access to the benefits of urban growth and the decision-making processes (Florea, 2016). At the same time, after the implementation of the law for restitutions in 2001, the media was reporting violent and often racialized evictions from restituted buildings in Bucharest and the main cities. These events highlighted the social cost of the urban development processes at the time (Florea et al., 2015a; Lancione, 2018; Popovici, 2020).

In 2005, against the background of this multilayered political constellation, thousands of people were evicted from the historical center of Bucharest while the area was being regenerated as a tourist district. Many evictees were in precarious situations and displaced without adequate relocation. The new private owners of restituted buildings raised rents, evicted former (mostly precarious and many Roma) state tenants, and embarked on real estate redevelopments. This mass eviction process continued for about a year. At that time, Mayor Adrian Videanu, a member of the center-right coalition in power at the national level, publicly announced that those lacking the economic means to live in Bucharest should not expect any support from public authorities and should leave the city. Thus, expectations of the better life promised by the EU and global economic integration contrasted with the everyday realities of lack of access to decision-making and the (re)distribution of resources.

Moreover, as Chap. 3 has shown, evictions from homes have continuously accompanied urban transformations in Bucharest and the largest Romanian cities since 1989. Owing to their disproportionate effect on Roma households, the evictions were first politicized and condemned by the Roma rights movement. Since their establishment in the 1990s, Roma rights NGOs have written reports, media material, and petitions on the topic aimed at public authorities from the local to the international levels. Some of these outputs became well known in academic and left-leaning circles. Consequently, antiracism and attention to the Roma struggle against disproportionate housing precarity continued to be an important layer of the field of housing contention in Bucharest and Romania.

In the mid-2000s, evictions provoked by property restitution and gentrification became more visible in the central areas of Bucharest as well as in areas of new real estate developments (Evacuați din oraș, 2009). In this context, evictions became politicized by diverse actors. Some of these actors, for example the Association for Urban Transition, were formed in the academic context of urban studies. Anarchist and feminist groups were formed through intersections with global waves of organization stemming from the alter-globalist movement. Others, for example Ofensiva Generozităţii (the Generosity Offensive collective), were formed in the context of the arts universities, with surging interest in social issues. Still others, for example the NGO Komunitas, were formed at the intersection of all of these. Most of these groups initially had around 20–30 members and close supporters. They were all from younger generations, at university or completing their studies in the early 2000s, but most remained materially precarious. All shared an interest in urban transformations and their social impact.

The context that brought these actors together in 2006 was the ongoing eviction process provoked by property restitutions, affecting numerous families from the Rahova-Uranus semi-central neighborhood. The Generosity Offensive collective gained a small grant for an artistic project in the area from an alliance of companies with interests in gentrification there. The collective made a public call about the project, and other groups and organizations interested in urban issues joined. Through their intra- and intergroup negotiations and through their continuous interactions with neighborhood families, the initial scope of the project was transformed. The 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. The reliance on donors with interests in gentrification 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).

The 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 Offensive 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. These made possible a form of cooperation among groups active in diverse causes linked to what they identified 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 fight 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. The 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).

The general and local elections in 2008 preceded the onset of the global crisis effects. The 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 first time since 1992. However, once the newly elected candidates took office, they abandoned the Pact for Bucharest. While all parties in power seemed to support the same for-profit 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 intensified their open contention (sometimes together and sometimes separately from the other groups), some intensified their community organizing efforts, while others organized street performances, or occupied municipal council meetings. The 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 first 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 flats built before 1990 in Romania. These programs revealed a differentiated class orientation. Those who could access and afford them required approximately a medium income, provided by jobs mostly concentrated in urban centers (Guga, 2019). The three programs stabilized the real estate market, the market for housing credit, and the construction market, limiting the drop in prices. The 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 insignificant compared with those for the three programs, which remained the main housing programs until 2020.

Housing, Urban Regeneration, and Heritage Protection

The crisis and the subsequent austerity programs came with an intensification of racist and anti-poor discourses of the political leaders, which channeled anxieties about redistributive scarcity against the most vulnerable. This wider context, enhancing fractures and narrowing the space for negotiation, was reflected in the positioning of the Platform for Bucharest alliance. Its housing rights groups intensified community organization efforts in neighborhoods with high eviction risks. Its heritage protection groups intensified their attack on local authorities, framing “protection” and “heritage value” in nationalistic and, at the same time, pro-European terms (Florea, 2016). The latter groups, consisting of about 100 active participants and several thousand supporters, became the most visible members of the Platform. Their 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.

The heritage protection groups dominated the alliance’s internal and external communications, with messages differentiating between the “deserving” and “undeserving” poor. It blamed inhabitants of heritage buildings who were in precarious situations for their insufficient appreciation of heritage value. These 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 fighting 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 different levels of precarity, from poor to low but stable income, to middle class). This allowed them to come together in the years before the 2008 crisis. However, after the onset of the 2008 crisis, their different 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. The 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 gentrification, 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. The 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. The 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. This solidarity response was an indicator of the widening support network in the growing housing rights mobilization.

This 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 affected by evictions and those giving direct support to the evictees became politicized. The 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 field, embedded in the dynamics of the national political landscape, which affected their emerging opportunities differently since they had started from rather nonconflicting class positions.

Debtors Caught Between Political Silence and Contention

The difficulty of building and maintaining alliances across different positions, or overcoming even subtle class differences, 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 first 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. This 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. Thus, 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 different 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). Their grievances were expressed in a range of ways from silent negotiation to open contention. The 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, Raiffeisen, 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. The 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 differences 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. This occurred when other precrisis debtors had already settled their refinancing schemes and postcrisis debtors had already borrowed on better conditions. Thus, being relatively isolated at that time, they were less powerful in negotiations. After their initial silence in the field 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 first set of strong austerity measures was adopted in Romania in 2010. The 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. The most devastating austerity measures were passed in 2011, based on legislative proposals lobbied for by representatives of employers’ organizations. These 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 flexibilization. These measures continued and accelerated long-term processes of post-1989 economic restructuring and EU accession. The changes affected many workers, including urban professionals and those in middle-income categories, and had lasting effects 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). This turmoil was also reflected in several waves of protests around the country.

In the aftermath of the 2008 crisis, the massive national-level anti-austerity (2012) and environmental protests (2013) represented 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. The latter was already becoming visible beyond the Rahova-Uranus area and beyond single protests against evictions. This happened in a structural context in which soaring real estate prices, overcrowding, utility arrears, and high rents relative to incomes also became relevant to significant 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 difficult 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. They were immediately reflected in the mass media, on the cultural scene, and in the human rights advocacy coalitions. These networks of support maintained and enhanced the mobilization’s cross-class dimension: it involved a range of members from the activists in the most precarious situations, artists facing precarity, journalists, to better-off academics, NGO workers, and supporters living abroad. Soon after the eviction, the women affected by it and the supporting artists who witnessed it documented the experience of the community in the form of a political theater play.

The play premiered in early 2012 and it was subsequently performed for free in different 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. The 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). This 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. The 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. The protests were joined by people of different ages, professional backgrounds, and even those approaching medium-level incomes that were still insufficient to guarantee material security.

Part of the middle class was also hit by the austerity measures. This 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.Footnote 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 office. 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. The heritage protection movement’s visibility, alliances, and resources were activated for this endeavor. The declared aim of the campaign was to advance architectural heritage protection as a major principle in Bucharest’s development.

The 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, 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: “The 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). This path represented a further move away from the anti-austerity and housing for all stances, opening the door to antagonistic interactions in the field 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. The new coalition government and the president agreed to support a large gold mining operation, using a controversial extraction method involving cyanide. This extraction project in the mountain village of Roşia Montană, in central Romania, was pushed by the Roşia Montană Gold Corporation (a heavily financialized 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”). The 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 affected villages, with tens of thousands of participants in Bucharest every night until the end of 2013. They represented another wave of politicization of various categories of protesters and witnesses: the locals directly affected 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-identified 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. The most visible environmental groups and right-liberal NGOs, often spokespersons for the protests, scarcely condemned the aggressions. This 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. The 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 influence at the end of the protests were several right-liberal groups and NGOs linked to the heritage protection movement. They presented themselves as, and they were generally portrayed as saviors of the historical heritage of Roşia Montană (Florea & Rhodes, 2018). They were linked to the social media page Uniţi Salvăm (United we save) which became very popular, reaching more than 50,000 followers. Their ascension also reflected 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.

The exclusion and silencing of the leftist groups in the environmental wave of contention destroyed the prospect of alliances between structural positions that had seemed possible only two years earlier, during the anti-austerity contention wave. However, the housing mobilization was able to use the politicization process of these tumultuous years to grow in terms of visibility, supporters, and outreach. It subsequently established a clearer political entity under the Common Front for Housing Rights, collaborating with housing activists from other cities and several 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

The 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). These 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. This time, the media reports sided with the evicted family, which was hardly the case before the 2008 crisis. From this intensified 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 Offensive collective, and some politicized during the anti-austerity wave). The 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. The FCDL was thus based on a cross-class alliance between affected members, long-term activists, and more recently politicized activists (from the new leftist groups formed in the anti-austerity contention wave), mostly from educated low- to middle-income backgrounds. In addition, the FCDL continuously reached out in other locations in attempts to prevent evictions and to raise awareness 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. The two groups were very similar in their principles, claims, constituency, size, and visibility. They were initially connected through common friends in the wider leftist networks and through reciprocal support. The connection between the two groups became a pillar of housing contention in the years to come.

The FCDL claimed housing as a fundamental right for all and a concern for many affected by uncertainty, overcrowding, and excessive housing costs. Thus, 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 reflected 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. This 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. They decided to resist inside these huts until the local authorities assumed their responsibility to allocate adequate social housing to evictees. This would mark the largest and most enduring protest camp in the recent history of the housing rights movement, and it lasted for two years. This 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. The 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. This was happening against a structural background where competition over advantageous positions intensified 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. Their 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. This generated a political constellation that again exacerbated antagonisms between structural positions and especially class positions. The strengthening of the right also involved choosing Klaus Iohannis as a presidential candidate: he was another ex-mayor and promoter of gentrification, a beneficiary 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.

Thus, in the Romanian postcrisis context of deepening inequalities, the solidarity around Vulturilor Street resistance was exceptional. This 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. The 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). This 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 affinities joined, reflecting the widening of the field 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. This fact signaled a favorable field 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 field of housing contention was to be challenged again, in November 2015, when massive protests were sparked by a deadly accidental fire 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 fire, it was closed. The FCDL and its supporting groups joined the wide protests taking place in the aftermath of the deadly fire 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 fire. The 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 fire, a new government was formed, represented as technocratic and apolitical, and thus uncorrupted.

The 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 fire broke out. This was an old, partially reconverted factory, used not only for clubs and rehearsal spaces, but also for improvised housing.Footnote 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 fire. These 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 “Thousands of empty houses, thousands of people living on the street. Where is justice?” The 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 intensified a process of party formation that later established the Demos party, which remained a supporter of housing rights claims.

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

The year 2016 marked several new directions for the FCDL. On the one hand, the Claca collective, which lost its space after the Colectiv club fire, 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 effervescent 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 finally allocated social housing, together with other eligible households on the waiting lists (which are strictly prioritized according to points and verification). This 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 finally able to access social housing, while many had to move out in the face of restitution evictions (Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire, 2018). Thus, the intensity of organization around the two resistance communities lowered.

These 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. Throughout 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 affected 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 affected groups. In addition to affected families, both groups included experts on urban social issues who were invited to participate in the consultation process. Thus, through the National Strategy on Housing consultations, the housing rights movement conducted its first 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).

The 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). Affected members of both groups participated in negotiations with members of parliament, engaged with the press, and recorded their stories on film (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; affected members were always present at the European Action Coalition meetings. This 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. The member groups and NGOs had a left-leaning political position. They 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. Their complementary expertise ranged from litigation to community organizing, from campaigning to social research. Together they were in direct contact with several hundred affected people and had several thousand followers and supporters. The groups were initially connected by personal contacts and affinities. The 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 affordable rent became voiced by the Block member groups more clearly than before. This 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. Thus, this new party, which became successful based on the post-2008 protest wave, absorbed the heritage protection movement. As discussed above, that movement had first 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). The 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. Through 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). This 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 financial investors (Economica.net, 2016). These 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 field of housing, as described below. Neither of the contributors had their proposals passed into legislation. The National Strategy on Housing had still not been adopted in 2021, after several changes of government. Thus, 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. The 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. The right-liberal president also joined the protests and was welcomed. CEOs of two foreign banks that were involved in public contracts for the state-backed housing credit programs joined the protests and they were well received. Other multinational CEOs also joined or expressed their support (e.g., McDonalds). These 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). The alignment between the protestors and these political and economic powers reflects 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 afford to access bank credit (Petrovici & Poenaru, 2017). Their alignment was also the reflection of a longer process of winning them over and building alliances from above by the major right-liberal parties, intensified in the aftermath of the 2008 crisis. The 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. They called upon the protestors to offer solidarity in an eviction situation taking place at the same time and in the vicinity of the protests; the call remained unanswered. The two mobilizations continued separately by advancing conflicting structural/class interests and by occupying opposing sides of the political spectrum (Voicu, 2017).

Housing, Debt, and Wage Struggles Since 2015

The beneficiaries 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 field of housing contention. They first organized as a social media group with more than 20,000 users, and then as the Grupul Clienților cu Credite în CHF association. This 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 specific 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 refinancing 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. The legislation thus granted them privileged access to the very limited public housing stock over households in more precarious situations awaiting social housing. This development led to competition between categories of applicants for public housing that translated into a silent and involuntary antagonism in the field of housing contention between the debtors’ interests and the housing rights struggles.

Thus, the FCDL and the leftist groups supporting it did not manage to significantly influence 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. The 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 financialization and household lending in 2017, under the influence 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 different 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. This 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. The 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. Thus, 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

The 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 field 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. The 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. These NGOs were previously involved in charity, micro-credit, or educational projects in areas of informal housing—all legitimized as humanitarian intervention. They 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-profile conferences with invited speakers from the World Bank, the government, academia, commercial banks, and construction companies. The audience was diverse, including people from the NGO sector, academics, and representatives of local and regional institutions. The goal of the events, as observed from consistent fieldwork, was to lobby for fast-tracked legislative changes that would accelerate the formalization of informal housing sites.

This 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 significance 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 financialization (ibid.).

The 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. The 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 financialization 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. The 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. This criticism was based on years of experience with evictions leading to homelessness, with only informal solutions accessible to the evictees. The Block’s actions on the issue included media releases, publication of its own analyses, participation in high-profile 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.

Thus, informal housing became a visible part of the field 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 affected groups. The 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 field possible. Moreover, opposing the indebtedness of lower-income households in informal housing conditions intensified the Block for Housing activists’ engagement with the issue of debt and financialization. This also created the possibility of a wider understanding of the structural factors affecting housing conditions for various social categories with which the Block could ally.

Housing Struggles Since the Pandemic Years

The Covid-19 pandemic and the government’s policies addressing it intensified previous dynamics in the field 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 intensified their direct support for families affected 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. This 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 intensified their alliance formations since 2020. They 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. They held online events with members affected by housing precarity and members of labor unions. They wrote articles for and stayed in contact with leftist media platforms in East and Central Europe united in the Eastern European Left Media Outlet. They have often participated in the internal and public meetings of several transnational networks dealing with essential work, migrant labor, and care work: The Transnational Social Strike, Migrant Coordination, and Essential Autonomous Struggles Transnational. Members of the FCDL and the Block for Housing also intensified their publication of academic papers, explaining the social and economic implications of different housing policies and conditions (Zamfir et al., 2020; Vilenica et al., 2021; Vincze & Florea, 2020; Vincze, 2020, 2021a, 2021b) to address those in more affluent and educated classes and potentially leaning to the left. These actions also involved seeking professional campaigning knowledge from PR specialists and campaigning platforms for wider reach to local authorities and major national parties. The aim was to push for faster access to social housing for applicants on social housing waiting lists. This campaigning knowledge was used to support one of the FCDL’s most active affected 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.

The increased challenges of this context are also reflected in the transformation of the First Home subsidized credit program. The year 2020 brought new general elections and the installation of a new government, which leaned even further toward the neoliberal right. This 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. Thus, 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. They 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 Conflicts, Silences, and Political Expressions

This chapter has followed the main areas of housing tensions and their expression across the sociopolitical changes of three postsocialist periods. The 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 field, addressed mostly by charities. However, at times, with field transformations, charity organizations became involved in contentious actions. Similarly, informal housing remained a silent aspect of the field 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 field 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). The chapter also illustrates areas of commonality between low- to middle and middle to high-income conditions, owing to field 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 field transformations.

The chapter showed that this dynamic and entangled field of making and unmaking alliances, of silences and politicized expressions, also reflects a dynamic political context at the national level, with changing party constellations, despite following the same global market integration path for Romania. This is different 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 benefits of examining them through a structural field of contention approach.