RESIDUALIZED PUBLIC HOUSING IN ROMANIA: Peripheralization of ‘the Social’ and the Racialization of ‘Unhouseables’

Abstract

This study analyzes public housing residualization as a multiscalar phenomenon, providing specific details about how it happened in a Central and East European context via the marketization of the housing system, the peripheralization of ‘the social’ and the racialization of ‘unhouseables’. It employs secondary statistical data, interviews, and document analyses to examine the endemic features of global capitalism within Romania's housing regime. The study shows that the dismantlement of the state-socialist establishment has resulted in a lower social rental rate than in core capitalist countries. It observes that when the public housing stock has generally been depleted, newly established social housing is relocated to the peripheries of cities as a nonmarketable component of the dualist public housing sector. In Baia Mare, the municipality has created social housing enclaves for vulnerable groups associated with dangerous behavior by excluding them from other forms of public housing, whereas in Cluj-Napoca, it has attempted to exclude marginalized people from public housing by turning it into a site of class warfare. In both cases, the housing stock under scrutiny is associated with the racialized Roma ethnicity. The approach adopted in the study enables the residualization of public housing to be addressed across the peripheralization–racialization nexus.