The ‘launching grounds’ of housing financialisation: public housing programmes with social legitimisation in Romania

This paper examines the role of the state in gradually establishing the ‘launching grounds’ of housing financialisation through public housing programmes legitimised as solving social needs in the context of post-1990 capitalist transformations in CEE. Over the past three decades, while dismantling the socialist housing regime, the Romanian state has developed specific housing programmes promising to fulfil social purposes by addressing the needs of low-income persons, young couples, and Roma families, first-time buyers lacking resources, and families at risk of having their only home repossessed. These programmes facilitated the advancement of housing markets, financial instruments (especially mortgages), logics (assetisation, de-risking, and the seising of collateral), and actors (especially Western banks) into the broader housing sector. While contextualising and following them chronologically, we argue that the ‘launching grounds’ of housing financialisation created by the analysed programmes were embedded in transformations of the housing regime. Moreover, we reveal how these transformations are tied to economic cycles over time, offering different possibilities for financialisation to advance in a country that has recently been elevated by the OECD from a ‘frontier’ to an ‘emergent’ capital market status. This analytical arc is our contribution to current debates on the variegated financialisation of (social) housing.