| Résumé : |
According to its presentation of itself, the European Union (EU) is based on principles and values such as freedom, democracy, equality, and the rule of law, promoting peace and stability.
Against this background, the huge inequalities, high poverty rates, and multiple cases of precarious living across and within the Member States (MS) are even more dramatic and suggest that the EU displays serious discrepancies between its declarations and the existing politics. These discrepancies are manifested in the domain of housing, too.
Even if the competence for social and housing policies rests primarily with MS, it has to be politically acknowledged that the EU economic governance, rooted within a neoliberal political economy, has negative social effects in each country. Such a governance model disempowers the EU and MS institutions to counterbalance the consequences of the unregulated movement of capital and the financialized market. This is even more so in the case of housing because housing is both an economic and social issue; it has an exchange value and a social/use value; for some, housing is real estate, for others, it is a home; and it is referred both as a socioeconomic right and a financial asset. Therefore, to ensure housing as a social right via social policies, there is a need for economic measures that eliminate housing inequalities and create the material conditions under which everybody, regardless of their social class, ethnicity, gender, or sexual orientation, is enabled to make use of their legally assured rights. This is what democratic socialist politics must follow while also involving in the decision-making process the labour classes whose housing needs it should aim to fulfill by transforming the social value of homes into a priority over their marketization, assetization, and financialization. |
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