Community-Led Alternatives to Housing Financialization: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Community-Led Alternatives to Housing Financialization: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Summary/Abstract: Over the past decades, housing financialization has deeply reshaped global housing systems,making housing increasingly less accessible, adequate and affordable while global financial markets actors,homeowners and private landlords have disproportionately benefited from surging property prices and rentalincome. An emerging body of scholarship examines how insurgent practices at the grassroot contest such actsof housing financialization from within civil society. However, emphasis on community-led housingalternatives, be them rooted in legislative activism or concrete land trust movements, remains somewhat under-scrutinized. Drawing on examples from Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe, we pay attention tosuch movements and how they can reshape the global housing system in more equitable and inclusive ways. Indoing so, we explore the potential of community-led housing alternatives and how they can evolve intomainstream housing repertoires that inform twenty-first century housing policy and market reform. Much likeduring the late nineteenth-century, when orchestrated housing initiatives laid the foundation of post-warsocial rented housing, we see the contours of a changing global landscape where community-led housingalternatives locally push for new housing institutions. Whether these alternatives can really be adapted at aglobal and national level depends on their overall effectiveness and the ongoing support for financializedhousing coalitions.

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