Special issues

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.