Mortgage crisis: Social impacts and responses in Catalonia

Abstract

Since 2008, when the housing and financial bubble gave way to the current economic crisis, mortgage over-indebtedness has been a major concern for many Spanish and Catalan households. Arising in a context of «new poverty», with mass unemployment and austerity policies, this resulted in large-scale social exclusion. Loss of one’s home impacts people’s social relations and constrains their economic strategies. There is also the cultural interpretation of indebtedness, or the related stigma, and the denial of a second chance. The realities analyzed in this special issue, within the context of this housing emergency, include the threat of homelessness, but also offer debtors an opportunity for participation in a collective movement. With an ethnographic approach, the articles explore, on the one hand, the indebted condition and its impacts on people, and, on the other, the ideological, political and socio-affective functions of an emerging social movement.