ABSTRACT
A prominent pan-European housing justice organization, Housing Europe, noted, ‘in 2017, 10.2 percent of households in the EU spent over 40 percent of their disposable income on housing costs, but this share increases to 37.8 percent when considering households at-risk of poverty’. The World Bank urged governments to abandon their previous role as producers of social housing and to adopt an enabling role of managing the housing sector. The World Bank (1993) insisted that social housing should no longer be coupled with traditional welfare provisioning. The growing state withdrawal of social surplus from social housing is reflected, albeit unevenly, across the EU, where the investment gap in affordable housing is €57 billion per year. Despite states’ ongoing insistence at various scales of intervention that affordable housing can be achieved through market-led approaches resting on privatization, marketization and individualization, there has been more, not less, rental housing displacement involving poor and marginalized households since the 1990s.
