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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 rental income. An emerging body of scholarship examines how insurgent practices at the grassroot contest such acts of housing financialization from within civil society. However, emphasis on community-led housing alternatives, 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 to such movements and how they can reshape the global housing system in more equitable and inclusive ways. In doing so, we explore the potential of community-led housing alternatives and how they can evolve into mainstream housing repertoires that inform twenty-first century housing policy and market reform. Much like during the late nineteenth-century, when orchestrated housing initiatives laid the foundation of post-war social rented housing, we see the contours of a changing global landscape where community-led housing alternatives locally push for new housing institutions. Whether these alternatives can really be adapted at a global and national level depends on their overall effectiveness and the ongoing support for financialized housing coalitions.

In recent years, the situation of renter households has emerged as a pressing social issue in Argentina, leading to the growth of tenant organisations around the country. This article examines the experience of grassroots tenant organisations in their attempts to influence local and national legislative agendas related to rental housing. It critically analyses these organisations’ concrete aims and achievements, as well as the other effects of this social movement. These include the emergence of novel forms of political mobilisation centred around the identity of ‘tenant’ in a country that still imagines itself as a homeownership society despite shifts in patterns of housing tenure and a budding ‘generation rent’.

The 2007/2008 global financial crisis severely affected EU semi-peripheral countries like Spain, where recovery policies facilitated the entry of international financial actors into the real estate market. In Spain, measures by the state and central bank supported the expansion of equity funds and REITs, accelerating the financialisation of housing and turning it into a speculative asset. This significantly contributed to widespread mortgage repossessions, evictions, and increasing housing precarity. In response, grassroots movements mobilised to defend housing rights and developed tactics that offered meaningful alternatives to eviction and displacement – conditions further exacerbated by the chronic lack of affordable housing, which remains among the lowest in Europe. This article examines the ‘tactics’ enacted by groups actively engaged in housing struggles in Barcelona, some of which were eventually incorporated into public administration strategies. Among these, the use of the right of ‘first refusal and pre-emption’ (tanteo y retracto) – pioneered by movements and some housing cooperatives – has proven effective in countering evictions and contributing to the expansion of affordable and social housing stock. By combining radical actions – such as actual or alleged occupations – with engagement in institutional channels, including demonstrations, policy negotiations, and legislative advocacy, these actors have (re)politicised urban planning and challenged dominant narratives of housing as a financial commodity. This study explores how such contentious urban practices resist financialisation and open space for alternative socio-economic governance in times of housing financialisation, austerity, and shrinking public resources, as well as their effectiveness in transforming grassroots tactics into decommodified and definancialised alternative housing strategies.

In Latin America and the Caribbean, residents of low-income, self-built neighbourhoods are increasingly turning to community land trusts (CLTs) to resist the financialisation of land and housing. In Latin America, financialisation occurs through large-scale land regularisation programmes that, while claiming to enhance tenure security, have imposed unfavourable mortgage finance on low-income communities, leading to land grabs. It is also manifested in the market-driven construction of social housing. In the Caribbean, financialisation is driven by real estate speculation, particularly in coastal areas, exacerbating displacement amid climate change. State-led programmes like Citizenship by Investment and tax incentives for wealthy foreigners, combined with the rise of short-term rentals, are pushing local populations off the islands.  Despite extensive research on land and housing financialisation, its impacts on urban residents – especially the poorest – remain understudied, as do the resistance movements fighting back. This article examines how CLTs in Latin America and the Caribbean are countering displacement by collectively securing land tenure through community-governed trusts, effectively de-financialising housing and land. We highlight two interlinked cases from Puerto Rico and Brazil where communities have mobilised against displacement caused by infrastructure projects, regularisation policies, disaster capitalism, and tourism development. Building on their success, CLTs are now being explored in other parts of the region, contributing to the momentum of the growing global CLT movement.

Financing remains the most significant challenge for grassroots housing movements in Europe. This is particularly true for housing pioneers in semi-peripheral European countries, where not only is access to adequate financing limited, but appropriate regulatory frameworks and organisational and institutional capacities are also lacking. In response, translocal networks such as MOBA have emerged in Central and South-Eastern Europe to promote non-speculative housing alternatives and, particularly, to establish transnational solidarity-based financing for community-led housing. Against this backdrop, this paper analyses the transscalar strategies of MOBA in their efforts to challenge financialised housing practices.

Introduction to the Special Issue: The View from Housing - The Contributions of Housing Research to Social and Behavioural Theory

Although academic definitions of ‘corporatism’ differ, the concept is generally about organisational influence on state politics. Around 1980, Sweden was regarded as the archetype of welfare-state corporatism, but around the turn of the millennium the broad representation of organised interests in state politics was largely abolished. However, in the housing sector, strong interest organisations have continued to play a dominant and institutionalised role. Rents are negotiated collectively between organisations of estate owners and tenants, and these organisations also have strong influence on rental legislation and on housing policy more generally. We argue that this system should be seen as corporatist and to that end suggest a somewhat modified version of Philippe Schmitter’s well-established definition of corporatism. We claim that our ‘view from housing’ may contribute to the increased relevance of corporatism theory also in studies of other welfare sectors where market distribution is increasingly important.

This article aims to theorise the housing governance of vulnerable debtor populations from a relational perspective, developing the affective attachment concept. While the emotionality of housing has been studied in housing research, the relational understanding of affects/emotions offers a fruitful perspective for understanding the interface of power (re)production between subjects and structures. The argument is supported by a literature review and excerpts from a qualitative analysis of 30 interviews with overindebted people and 20 institutional actors which demonstrate the relevance of emotions in attachment to the precarious housing market. Linking the relevance of affective attachment with moral discourses, the article shows the potential to better understand how the (self)control and (self)discipline–(self)governance–of vulnerable people could be performed by morally modulated affects and emotions.

One of the most researched and proven behavioural biases is the endowment effect, which manifests in people's higher valuation of goods they own relative to goods they do not. Loss aversion is considered the main cause of the endowment effect because of the assumption that losses loom larger than gains. Whether decisions are framed as either gains or losses depends on the adopted reference point, which is usually taken as current ownership. Mainstream behavioural economics also postulates that the decision-making process involves multiple reference points. This study aims to provide new arguments in favour of the existence of multiple reference points affecting the formation of the endowment effect based on theoretical reflections and empirical evidence from the housing market. A critical review of the literature, as well as an empirical study, revealed that there are multiple reference points in the housing market, the interaction between which leads to the endowment effect.

Introduction to the Special Issue: ‘Facing the Housing Affordability Crisis in Southern Europe: Housing Policies in the Spotlight’.

For decades, the analysis of housing policies in Portugal has focused on its distinct trajectory compared to those of other countries in western and northern Europe. However, the rise of the housing affordability crisis and the civic, media and political prominence that the housing issue has acquired in recent years have highlighted important similarities (despite some key specifics) with the dynamics that have been occurring internationally. This article discusses Portuguese political reactions to the affordability crisis. It presents a critical discussion of the ambitious multi-measure policy package ‘Mais Habitação’ (More Housing), including its content, the political conditions of its introduction, and its public reception - in the light of the recent international debates on the paths, possibilities, and obstacles to the post-neoliberalisation of housing policies.

Housing is increasingly playing a key role in the global economy, acting as a catalyst for capital expansion, international investment, and wealth accumulation. The transformation of the Portuguese housing system, which has been influenced by financial actors, illustrates the expansion of finance into housing systems. This paper unpacks recent housing policy and reports on the dimensions of the changes and alterations in financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives dominant in Portugal. We find that while the liberalisation of the rental market has sparked interest from private sector investors in recent years, the anticipated improvements in housing provision and affordability have not been realised thus far. These findings shed new light on the key features of the financialisation of the Portuguese housing sector and the extent of the political power of financial actors in promoting the financialisation of housing.

The sharp rise in rental prices in the absence of a decommodified housing sector has led to a growing mismatch between the Spanish housing system and households’ needs, especially in large cities. This article analyses the impact of recent housing market dynamics on housing access problems faced by young people in Madrid and Barcelona and the implications of Spain’s recently approved Right to Housing Law. Empirical evidence suggests that young people are increasingly facing exclusion from access to housing, as well as rising inequality in relation to the process of leaving the parental home, which varies depending on where they live. In this regard, the new Housing Law sets the course towards a more balanced and fair housing system. While it generates controversies and challenges, it also reflects the need for multifaceted and multi-scalar measures to address the current housing emergency, requiring greater cooperation between different levels of government.

The research aims to shed light on the case of a medium-sized town in the northeast part of Italy, where a semi-central neighbourhood, encompassing a triangle of streets and hundreds of apartments, has recently acquired the reputation of being an ‘urban social problem’, and is described by the local media as a ‘drug-dealing suburb’. Specifically, since 2021, most of the state- and company-owned buildings have been completely bricked up, families evicted, and apartments and gardens left in a state of complete abandonment, without giving residents any explanation, and without a plan for the future, except demolition. Using ethnographic and qualitative methodologies, this study seeks to investigate the reasons why such negative narratives have quickly become established in common discourse and are then immediately amplified by the media until they remain the only description of the neighbourhood, and to examine how residents have strived and worked to restore the centrality of their ‘sense of place’. In the conclusions, an attempt will be made to sketch out an answer to the classic question of whether a turnaround can be more easily brought about by large urban renewal plans, or whether community involvement in a network of ‘small plans’ might be more effective.