CHF-indexed housing debts in Serbia: dependent financialization, housing precarity and housing struggles

Abstract

The paper outlines the causes, unfolding and outcomes of the boom and bust of Swiss franc (CHF) loans in Serbia with a focus on their relation to class mobility in the setting of a transition to the market economy that transformed the methods of housing acquisition. This process resulted in an extreme housing precarity and declassing for segments of the post-Yugoslav middle and working classes, which has manifested in their dispossession of secure housing, savings, pensions, and the sense of having social security, working towards one’s own house and building a family. We demonstrate how besides contributing to declassing, housing precarity played a significant role in rendering CHF-indexed housing debt an opening that activated individual and collective strategies of resistance. Resistance by debtors, and its articulation in the public sphere, relied on multiple logics and tactics—from appeals for existing laws to be respected, to demands for a legal codification of the right to home, to the physical prevention of evictions. These sometimes contradictory and competing logics reflected varied social and economic positions of debtors with their related moralities as well as corresponding different reasonings on acquiring housing, social mobility, and approaches to the financialization of everyday life. By combining the analysis of debtors’ personal narratives, public discourses, and the political economy of dependent financialization in Serbia, we flesh out the connection between financialization, housing, ideas about social mobility, post-socialist transformation and declassing. The article reveals how and why predatory loans in post-socialist conditions lead to declassing through precarity and new forms of collective action.

Keywords:

• dependent financialization
• housing
• precarity
• resistance
• Serbia

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Predatory lending is “a syndrome of abusive loan terms or practices that involve one or more” these five general categories of problems “(1) loans structured to result in seriously disproportionate net harm to borrowers, (2) harmful rent seeking, (3) loans involving fraud or deceptive practices, (4) other forms of lack of transparency in loans that are not actionable as fraud, and (5) loans that require borrowers to waive meaningful legal redress” (Engel and McCoy 2002, 1260).

2 The 2011 Law on Enforcement privatized debt enforcement procedures by instituting the profession of private bailiffs (a 2015 amendment of the law renamed them as public bailiffs in order to obscure their nature). The introduction of a private profit incentive into enforcement procedures, by linking the compensation of bailiffs to the number (and value) of their completed enforcement cases, has led to skyrocketing numbers of foreclosures and evictions.

3 We consider as juridical activists in this particular context those actors who rely primarily on litigation and legal reasoning in establishing, defending and furthering their position on the issue of CHF-indexed loans.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Ana Vilenica

Ana Vilenica (DIST, Polytechnic and University of Turin) is a post-doctoral researcher, a core member of the Beyond Inhabitation Lab and a member of the Radical Housing Journal editorial collective. Email: 
[email protected]

Milan Škobić

Milan Škobić (Northeastern University in Boston) is a PhD candidate, researching industrial policy and class formation in Serbia. Email: [email protected]

Nemanja Pantović

Nemanja Pantović is a teacher, communist and editor of the publishing house Prelom. Email: [email protected]