Strategies forInSituHome Improvement in Romanian Large Housing Estates

Abstract

Socio-economic and physical change has visibly affected post-socialist cities, yet the state of decay of their inherited large housing estates has only deepened throughout the 1990s, despite of the change in tenure through IntroductionUnder the macro-economic constraints of post-communist restructuring since 1989, Eastern European governments have launched neo-liberal policies of large scale housing privatisation and overall state retreat from housing provision. Consequently, owner-occupation has reached over 93 percent of the housing stock in most Eastern European countries, and in Romanian large housing estates it has surpassed 99 percent (NIS, 2005). The state of decay of these estates has deepened throughout the 1990s. In order to take on their new responsibilities, flat-owners were challenged from two major directions. First, a comprehensive regulatory framework able to sustain a market-driven housing system, including condominium management, was until recently non-existent. documented (Hardin & Baden, 1977;Olson, 1971;Ostrom, 1990), this was likely to spur dilemmas of collective action and thus, asset degradation. Second, the macro-economic reforms of transition, global economic change and laissez-faire state policies throughout the 1990s have engendered an affordability crisis affecting both access to housing and the running costs of utilities and repairs. Whose housing problems?Besides the politico-economic rationale of early post-communist reforms, it was nonetheless hoped that decentralization and housing privatisation would stimulate local actors to improve housing quality and availability. In particular, households would begin to address the deferred maintenance problems of their newly privatized dwellings whereas local governments would engage in the delivery of housing services and assist social housing needs. This challenge of shaping new roles and attitudes among housing actors requires a discussion of the concept of ownership and its bundle of collective rights, which are prone to social dilemmas. The social contract of ownershipBroadly speaking, the paradigmatic change experienced by Eastern Europe has been twice engineered through the mechanism of property rights. Prior communist policies of nationalisation were reversed by post-communist policies of privatisation and restitution,

The meaning of home in Romania: views from urban owner–occupiers

“…It is important to acknowledge that very different forces at play have resulted in different outcomes across countries and social groups, nonetheless the contrast between the apparent compliance of most flat-owners in the communist estates and the proactive agency of selfbuilders raises important questions, not least regarding their meanings of home. Some questions regarding residents" challenges to home improvement in Romania were addressed elsewhere (Soaita 2012, 2013, Pascariu and Stanescu 2003, the latter will be explored in this paper.…”

A Critical-Realist View of Housing Quality within the Post-Communist EU States: Progressing towards a Middle-Range Explanation

“…For instance, Lux and Sunega (2014, 514) proposed -in a quite critical-realist vein -an explanation of path dependence framed under the "privatization trap" as "a trickle down mechanism" generating expectations of continued privatization in the newly built social housing and reinforcing already strong social norms of owner-occupation. Likewise, in-kind restitution of housing and land, and housing privatization have resulted in fragmented property rights with long-term consequences for how housing is developed and maintained (Górczyńska 2017;Lux, Cirman, and Sunega 2017;Soaita 2012;Vranic, Vasilevska, and Haas 2015). We anchor the idea of path-dependent change in the communist past by highlighting key differences across the political economies and forms of housing provisions across the communist states in the following section.…”

“…As the 1990s reforms of housing privatization and restitution are by now well-documented (Clapham et al 1996;Lowe and Tsenkova 2003), we will focus on the changes that have taken place since 2000. Economic growth and remittances have stimulated new housing construction throughout the region, stirring (self-built) suburbanization (Hirt 2008;Soaita 2013;Stanilov 2007), private regeneration of communist housing estates (Cirman, Mandič, and Zorić 2013;Soaita 2012;Vranic, Vasilevska, and Haas 2015) and gentrification in some cities (Górczyńska 2016;Kovács, Wiessner, and Zischner 2012).…”

Management of low-income condominiums in Bogotá and Quito: the balance between property law and self-organisation

“…Orban (2006) looked into the evident difficulties with condominium management within the privatised social housing sector in Budapest, Hungary, a phenomenon that has also been studied in many other eastern European cities (Grover, Munro-Faure, & Solviev, 2002;Rabenhorst & Ignatova, 2009;Soaita, 2012). Using Olson's theory of collective action (Olson, 1965), Orban found that condominium size (measured in number of dwellings) is negatively associated with the cooperative potential of a building's residents.…”