CHF-indexed housing debts in Serbia: dependent financialization, housing precarity and housing struggles

The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extre...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:City (London, England) England), 2023-07, Vol.27 (3-4), p.636-653
Main Authors: Vilenica, Ana, Škobić, Milan, Pantović, Nemanja
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Clearing houses
Collective action
dependent financialization
Discourses
Everyday life
Evictions
Housing
Loans
Market economies
Narratives
Pensions
Political economy
Postcommunist societies
precarity
Public sphere
Resistance
Serbia
Social mobility
Social security
Socialism
Tactics
Transformation
Upward mobility
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Summary:The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one's own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics-from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors' personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.
ISSN:1360-4813
1470-3629
DOI:10.1080/13604813.2023.2229200