Over the last two decades in Romania, the housing question has received more attention than before, from left-wing as well as, at certain times, liberal or even right-wing organizations, alliances, and/or political actors. The country has the highest rate of overcrowding in homes in the EU (which it joined 2007) and a large population turning to informal housing in the absence of formal housing solutions for the most precarious groups. Although in 2018, the Ministry of Development estimated a need for about 63,000 more public social housing units nationwide, the stock of social housing has not increased since then. In Bucharest, despite circa 20,000 applicant households, years go by when public authorities do not allocate any social housing to those on the priority lists. In this context, where the need for housing support is high but remains unanswered by mainstream policy-makers, right-wing parties have increasingly emphasized this issue in their campaigns and popular promises. Their success in the November-December 2024 elections is largely due to them addressing socio-economic grievances such as the housing needs of low-to-middle income groups.
As members of the Common Front for Housing Rights, in contact with persons both in this low-to-middle income category as well as others affected by housing precarity, we find it important to pay attention to the attitudes and values of the population beyond the rare moments of elections (every 4-5 years). These beliefs and options remain rather stable across time and across diverse socio-economic categories. This is why we examined the results of the most recent national survey entitled Progressive Attitudes and Values in Romania (Bădescu et al. 2022). The survey finds that there is significant popular support for a wide range of progressive public policies. Whether with regard to access to public social housing, rent control, or support for low-income groups who can’t cover the costs of renting on the market (retirees, people working on minimum wage, people on guaranteed minimum income or disability support, etc.), more than 80% of the Romanian population considers state intervention necessary.
Wide access to public social housing, rent control, and prioritizing low-income groups in urgently accessing public social housing are also the demands of the leftist anti-capitalist housing movement in which we take part, seemingly aligning us with much of the population. Yet, Progressive Attitudes and Values in Romania also revealed an increased support for meritocracy and the neoliberal path, especially among the middle-income and highly educated categories. As we illustrate in the following, the findings of the survey indicate both the possibilities for and limitations to broad, trans-class solidarities around progressive demands – particularly with regard to building coalitions in favor of housing rights for all.
Social housing and immediate support for housing access
The main demand of the housing rights movement in Romania is the expansion of the publicly owned social housing stock and a subsequent allocation to all households that cannot afford to rent or to buy on the market. The 1996 Housing Act establishes the right to access public social housing for all households that do not own property and whose members have incomes below the average wage. The nationally representative survey Progressive Attitudes and Values in Romania shows that 87% of the population agree very strongly or strongly that the state should help those who cannot afford to buy or rent a house (CC SAS 2021, 34). This shows an overwhelming support not simply for targeted public policies that ensure housing access for low-income people, but also for the main demand of the housing rights movement.
However, the 11% of the population that contests state involvement in housing is significant; only state involvement in ensuring a decent standard of living for the unemployed is contested more – by 23% of the population (CC SAS 2021, 16). This raises the question as to what percentage of the population would oppose social housing for the unemployed. The low popular support for unemployed people is the result of decades of stigmatization in the media and public discourse, as well as of Romania’s integration into global economic circuits as a country of cheap labor, where the majority is under pressure to either labor in precarious work or remain without a job.
This discrimination also affects people who apply for social housing, and/or are involved in the housing movement, who, in every confrontation with public authorities (and often, unfortunately, also in meetings with the media), are pressured to prove that they work or have worked. They are compelled to explain that, although they work or have worked and are retired, their income is not enough to afford adequate housing. This need to explain is despite the fact that Romania has consistently had the highest rate of in-work poverty in the EU (around 15% in recent years), meaning that low-income earners, the precariously employed, and the unemployed represent a large part of the population.
The survey shows that high-income and very high-income groups (which overlap with highly educated groups) are relatively more opposed to state involvement in social programs and prefer a meritocratic approach to it. The housing rights movement challenges this approach, and especially the introduction by public authorities of meritocratic criteria as tiebreakers in the approval of social housing applications. This practice discriminates against low-income people, people with lower levels of education, and people who have lived in informal settlements. It creates situations in which victims of domestic violence, people with disabilities, people with chronic illnesses, and people coming out of the child protection system find themselves competing with each other for very limited social housing stock. The use of these prioritization criteria masks both a much greater need for access to public services, as well as the authorities’ attempt to limit this access.
Even among middle-class strata, however, there is still strong support for some social policies: 71.1% of people with university and postgraduate degrees agree that the state should provide a job for anyone who wants to work, and 79.4% agree that the state should provide decent housing for those who cannot afford market housing – a large majority.
Solidarity on the issue of rent
The housing rights movement has addressed the issue of rents especially in relation to the support and guidance offered by local authorities to people entitled to rent subsidies. It is in this context that the contradictions of this public policy of rent support – through which public money goes to private landlords who rent on the market – has been addressed. The housing rights movement has been demanding a robust stock of public housing as a powerful instrument in the quest to control and rein in the rental market.
The Progressive Attitudes and Values in Romania study sheds some light on dominant perceptions and experiences in relation to the rent question: “Even though only 8.7% of the surveyed respondents state that they are tenants, there is significant support for state involvement in rent regulation. 66% of the Romanian population believes that the state should impose a rent cap, while 26% disagree with such a measure” (Bădescu et al. 2022, 16). Given that housing overcrowding is very high in Romania, it is possible that a significant percentage of people wish they could move into a rented, more private, and less crowded space, but cannot afford it. The study concludes that “even among the middle and upper middle classes there is a significant majority who would support rent ceiling policies” (Bădescu et al. 2022, 17).
Globally, because house prices rise more than incomes, two interrelated processes are taking place. On the one hand, fewer households can afford to buy a home, ending up renting or remaining in rented accommodation, thus subject to rising rents. On the other hand, institutional investors (mainly investment funds, pension funds, insurance companies), accumulating more and more capital in search of new profitable assets, have increasingly invested in the residential segment of the real estate market. They do not yet dominate this market in Romania, but in some territories such as the US and Germany they have a large enough market share to be able to manipulate rental prices. Aware that this trend is expected to accelerate in the future, groups in the national coalition The Block for Housing are seeking to gradually mobilize a hitherto absent tenants’ movement in Romania.
Costs of living: income, inequality, redistribution
Housing-related costs (rents and/or loans, utilities, repairs, furniture, to which we can also add cleaning supplies, as well as transportation from home to work or study) represent the largest and most burdensome category of living costs for households in Romania (Guga 2019). The disparity between these costs and income is an important issue for both the housing rights movement and the trade unions, presenting a common issue that can bring the two movements together.
To elaborate, 91% of respondents of the Progressive Attitudes and Values in Romania (2022) study believe that both the minimum pension and the minimum wage are too low (CC SAS 2021, 31); 86% consider the guaranteed minimum income too low, and 63% think the same of unemployment benefits. Given the anti-welfare attitude of the media and the small number of people on the guaranteed minimum income (159,123 in December 2021, spread across the country, outside the big cities), the widespread public awareness of this specific issue is remarkable. Indeed, the average amount of GMI was 260 lei (approximately 45 euro) per month at the end of 2021, and for single persons the amount was 142 lei (approximately 30 euro) per month (according to the Ministry of Labor and Social Solidarity, cited on page 34), an extremely small social benefit based on workfare. Even so, it is not easy to access. Among the families supported by the Common Front for Housing Rights, some are struggling to apply for GMI and meet the work requirements needed in order to get access to the health insurance associated with it. Besides the need for access to medical services, there is another reason why families apply for this benefit: going against the spirit of the Housing Act, local authorities have made access to social services, including social housing, conditional on a declared income.
The above illustrates the dire situation of measures which have around 90% support in the population (Bădescu et al. 2022, 14). An increased budget is essential to restore the welfare system, programs preventing social marginalization, and interconnected systems of public services as central and functional elements of the public good. Nevertheless, the data continue to reflect contradictions that are difficult to resolve in the current capitalist context: although 91% of respondents believe that the minimum pension is too low, “more than two-thirds are in favor of setting the value of the pension solely on the basis of contributions over years of employment” (Bădescu et al. 2022, 35). The housing rights movement has always included people of retirement age, people retired on medical grounds, and people retired on low pensions, and people who took early retirement as factories where they had worked were dismantled before the mid-200s. These social groups do not have an income that ensures a decent standard of living. These people often spend years on waiting lists for social housing without ever being granted it, and we have had cases where people have died because of the health-damaging stress of successive evictions, displacements, and confrontations with local authorities.
Similarly, while there is strong support – 77.6% of the population – for increasing the budget allocation for “poverty reduction” (CC SAS 2021 SAS, 16), some 30.2% still believe that poverty is caused by poor people not working enough (CC SAS 2021 SAS, 47). While especially those with higher incomes and higher education are more likely to explain poverty by a lack of work ethic, there is also some understanding of the deeper structural causes of poverty and socio-economic inequalities: 39.3% of the population believe that if you are born into a poor family, you will remain poor (Bădescu et al. 2022, 23-24).
Possibilities for building wider solidarities around housing justice
Considering the important alignment between the demands of the housing movement and the attitudes and values of a large part of the population – as revealed by this 2022 nationally representative survey – what are some of the openings for wider solidarity building that could be addressed by our movements?
An important path forward for solidarity movements could be to increase mass information about the structural causes of social inequality and poverty. As shown above, the premises of this direction are already widespread among people. While some redistributive demands or public policies may not have overwhelming support, they do have support of the majority. This includes some as radical as those of the housing rights movement. Almost three quarters of the population believes that in a just society there should be support for those in need, and more than half agree with redistributive policies, including more radical ones like progressive income taxation – a topic that has been largely ignored in the public space (Bădescu et al. 2022). Thus, increasing mass information about the wide support for such policies might catalyze collective organizing around reclaiming them. The main challenges progressive solidarity movements face are combatting the predominance of the meritocratic narrative in the public sphere and revealing the contradictory position of the middle classes who benefit from, yet are also threatened by the structural causes of inequalities. It also remains an open question whether and how people from these higher income and status groups can be mobilized around progressive issues, even when the data suggest many among them might support them.
Public debate on these issues and on public policies in general is vital for the emergence of emancipatory and more just social-political visions. The housing movement tries and will continue to try to keep the issue of housing as a fundamental social-economic right that must be guaranteed by the state on the public agenda. It would take a sustained effort from various more or less interconnected activist groups and networks – anti-racist, feminist, queer, trade union, housing, youth, reproductive labor, etc. – as well as media, and academic and artistic support, to overcome this public silence and catalyze broader solidarities. But the main limitation to such an endeavor is the lack of sufficient resources in the left-wing coalitions. Even trade unions – the largest and most important forms of collective organizing in Romania, and the main vehicle for reclaiming economic justice in this context – have been squeezed by decades of austerity and union-busting policies. Our housing movement has allied with unions, but we have all lacked the resources to engage in more than just developing and sustaining common demands.
For an anti-capitalist movement, it is also important to be aware of the support that the current economic system has among the population: 39.4% prefer capitalism, 37.1% opt for socialism and 20.5% are undecided. It is even more promising that younger generations are more inclined towards socialism. Also, “the option for socialism is much stronger among disadvantaged social classes and is strongly rooted in the way people experience the hardships of everyday life” (Bădescu et al. 2022, 21). The disadvantaged also have the highest percentage of indecision on this specific issue, over 37%, much higher than other categories (with indecision levels below 20%). The most active people in the housing rights movement are women, low-income persons, and various groups of young people with progressive views – socio-economic categories that overlap with those opting for socialism. It is therefore important that any progressive movement must include these categories in order to raise awareness and organize. However, we are still uncertain how progressive social movements, often concentrated in big cities but lacking consistent resources, can reach out to persons in these categories that are not (only) living in the few big cities, but rather dispersed across the country.
The strategy of the Common Front for Housing Rights until now has been to organize a March for Housing each year in Bucharest and in Cluj-Napoca, together with our comrades from E-Romnja Association, and Social Housing NOW!, as a discursive space where the potential for broader solidarities can be expressed, manifested at least temporarily, and practiced. Through this yearly event, we aim to contribute at least a bit to creating and sustaining the conditions for the future realization of the solidarity potential that is now still locked.
A longer earlier version of the text was published in Romanian in April 2024 in the collective volume “Ce urmează după neoliberalism? Pentru un imaginar politic alternativ” [What comes after neoliberalism? For an alternative political imaginary], Sorin Gog and Victoria Stoiciu (eds.). It was translated by Marius-Alexandru Dan.
The writing of this text was supported by grant no. 22-GP-0001, The Foundation for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University, “Sustaining Civil Society in the Context of Multiple Crises” project.
References
BĂDESCU, Gabriel, GOG, Sorin, TUFIȘ, Claudiu, 2022. Atitudini și valori de tip progresist în România. București: Fundația Friedrich Ebert.
CC SAS. 2021. Raport de cercetare – Realizarea unui sondaj pe teme socio‐politice, conform metodologiei elaborate de FES.
GUGA, Ștefan. 2019. Situația salariaților din România 2018‐2019. București: Syndex România.
Ioana Florea and Mihail Sandu-Dumitriu are involved in the Common Front for Housing Rights (FCDL), a platform for housing activism created in Bucharest by a group of evicted persons, persons living under the constant threat of forced eviction, together with relatives, friends, activists and artists. FCDL is part of the Block for Housing, a national action network bringing together militant groups for the right to housing, housing justice and the right to the city. Mihail and Ioana were also part of the team of housing activists and supporters involved in the research project “Class formation and re-urbanization through real estate development at an Eastern periphery of global capitalism.” Ioana is an associate researcher with Södertörn University. Mihail is a PhD candidate with Babeș-Bolyai University.
