Moral economies of housing in post-boom Croatia: Swiss franc loans crisis and politics of housing financialization

Abstract

This paper traces the Croatian Swiss franc loans crisis and debtors’ movement in the context of the wider politics of housing finance after the 2000s credit and housing boom. The movement mainly contested Swiss franc loans through litigation and demands for regulation of predatory lending practices. This selective and institutional articulation of the issue reflected the urban middle-class background of the movement’s constituency and its ambivalent position of having stakes in the financialized housing regime while resisting some of its consequences. Political and financial elites supported a relaunch of a more regulated version of finance-led, state-subsidized housing provision. The structural conditions resulting from the postsocialist housing privatization and the hegemonic ideology of homeownership have been instrumental in preserving the established model. Even then, the CHF loans experience contributed to a slow and gentle shift in the politics of housing towards a possibility of, and calls for, a less ownership-dominated and financialized model.