A WIN Zoom discussion, January 2024. See it HERE
Rents are skyrocketing, real salaries are falling. Workers spend a big chunk of their income to pay for housing, while social housing projects are becoming scarcer. Inflation has pushed building materials up, and making buying a house a distant dream for most young people. Over-indebtedness means that a lot of people are losing their houses by the banks, and marginalized groups are being affected the most. The tourism industry is gentrifying city centres, pushing workers out of their homes.
In the past five years, housing activists from Cluj critically focused on new real estate development and urban regeneration programs showing how they act as domains of capital accumulation. In light of this acknowledgment, their aim is to create cities for people and not for profit. Recognizing that the commodified and financialized housing regime exploits people’s housing needs, which adds to the systemic oppressions of capitalism, Căși social ACUM!/Social Housing NOW! sustains that housing struggles may and should become crucial part of socialist internationalism; in 2017 it carried on its activity by supporting ethnic Roma people belonging to the impoverished working class, in gaining a voice in the struggle for an anti-racist and just public housing policy.
The Social housing NOW! movement in Romania revealed the need to politicize the question of social housing in the context of a stark decrease of public housing stock and of commodification of housing throughout the past decades, and as well as the limitation of the access to social homes of the most deprived. I
Enikő Vincze, a professor at Babeș-Bolyai University of Cluj-Napoca, and a leading member of the Social housing NOW! movement will be speaking to present the housing situation in Romania and the attempts to mobilise tenants.