Towards Transversal Housing Solidarities Across Space, Time and Subjects

ABSTRACT

The paper documents the emergence of precarious local and migrant tenants as political subjects that build transversal housing solidarities in Greek cities amidst multiple intersecting crises. In doing so, I introduce the feminist concept of transversal solidarities to housing studies and expand it by bringing it in dialogue with debates on housing precarity. Understanding transversal solidarity as an integral part of housing struggles and as an important theoretical concept in debates on housing precarity, I argue, is a crucial step forward to housing theory as it foregrounds transversal housing solidarities as translocal and intersectional processes through which collective political subjects emerge. Drawing from rent struggles in Greece, I demonstrate that transversal housing solidarities are being built across space, time and subjects: they are local and place-based initiatives, embedded in broader networks of trans-local solidarities that are generative of concrete social and political alternatives to the neoliberal housing model.

KEYWORDS:

• Transversal solidarities
• housing precarity
• tenants’ struggles
• housing movements
• Greece

Introduction

Over the last decade, many European cities have been transformed in the context of multiple intersecting crises. The always deepening housing crisis created a large and highly heterogeneous part of the population that experience housing precarity. This precarity has also operated as “a site of alliance among groups of people who do not otherwise find much in common” (Butler 2015, 27) but sought to respond to it through the building of housing struggles and solidarities across borders. In this direction, two parallel types of responses can be identified. First, there is a re-emergence of occupation-based practices that seek to provide a dignified home to precarious populations, like refugees, through squatting. Indicative of this are the refugee solidarity squats that have been built in Greece and other European countries to support the everyday social reproduction of vulnerable populations. Recent literature has analysed these practices as generative of spaces of commoning and inhabitance that do not only challenge the exclusionary status quo but also create communities of care (Kapsali 2020; Kotronaki, Lafazani, and Maniatis 2018; Montagna and Grazioli 2019). Second, there are housing movements and grassroots struggles that seek to put pressure for institutional change and develop routes of communication with formal housing policies. For example, Card (2022) has started to interrogate the emergence of tenant politics, while Di Feliciantonio (2017) discusses Spanish housing movements as alternative practices that enact a politics of possibility. Moreover, over the last few years, a growing housing scholarship turned its attention to an issue that has been under-explored until recently: housing precarity and the emergence of rent-related housing struggles or as Wilde (2019, 64) puts it “the re-emergence of the renter as a political subject” (see also Byrne 2019; Fields 2017; Lancione 2019; Listerborn, Molina, and Richard 2020; Polanska, Rolf, and Springfeldt 2021).

Contributing to and expanding these debates on tenant organizing and collective action, I introduce the feminist concept of transversal solidarities to housing studies and in particular to debates on housing struggles and housing precarity. Feminist research on transversal politics and solidarities (Cockburn and Hunter 1999; Yuval-Davis 1999) is particularly important for understanding solidarity-making as a process of translation and openness. Understanding transversal solidarity as an integral part of housing struggles and as an important theoretical concept in debates on housing struggles, I argue, is a crucial step forward to housing theory and contributes in a twofold way. First, housing struggles are often studied with an emphasis on the particular historical, socio-political and cultural context in which they develop. While this is important, as they are undeniably context-specific (Madden and Marcuse 2016), recent housing struggles and solidarities have emerged as networks of solidarities built across spaces around the globe. Thus, transversality is a concept that can help us unravel the translocal and intersectional nature of housing struggles. Second, existing literature has started interrogating the relationship between housing struggles and housing precarity (e.g. Clair et al. 2019; Marques and Saraiva 2017; Waldron 2021). Contributing to this literature, I discuss housing precarity together with transversal solidarities so that I can build a radical feminist understanding of housing solidarities as world-making processes of political subjectification (Dikeç 2013).

The paper empirically focuses on housing precarity and associated tenants’ housing struggles in Greece. In contrast to countries with long traditions in rent strikes and housing movements, rent struggles is a new form of housing activism in Greece (Siatitsa 2014). Drawing from Greece, I argue that transversal housing solidarities are being developed across spaces, times and subjects: they are local and place-based initiatives, often embedded in broader networks of translocal solidarities that are generative of concrete social and political alternatives to the neoliberal housing model. Through the analysis of solidarity-building of activist groups in Greece, I argue that transversal housing solidarities are being built across three levels: (i) across space, emphasizing the spatialities of solidarities and their translocal character, (ii) across time, focusing on the temporalities of solidarities and (iii) across subjects, foregrounding transversal solidarities as bridges that bring together heterogeneous political subjects.

The paper proceeds as follows: After a methodological section, the first section introduces the feminist concept of transversal solidarities to housing studies by linking it with debates on housing precarity with a view to construct a novel conceptual framework around a feminist understanding of transversal housing solidarities. The second section discusses the emergence of the local and migrant precarious tenant as new political subjects in the midst of ongoing intersecting crises. Based on this, the third section analyses transversal housing solidarities in Greece across spaces, times and subjects, building on the activities of two activist groups, namely Unreal estate and Loupa, and on refugee solidarity initiatives organizing against the eviction of tenant refugees.

Methodology

The analysis draws on rent struggles in Greece’s two largest cities, Athens and Thessaloniki, focusing mainly on the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The starting point of the discussion on transversal solidarities in Greece is two activist groups, namely “Unreal estate assembly against rent blackmail” (Athens) and “Loupa” (Thessaloniki). They are selected as they are two of the most active groups in rent-related housing struggles in Greece during the last few years: they have a continuous and active engagement with rent-related issues, they organize grassroots networking and knowledge-sharing events and demonstrations and they are engaged in intersectional struggles bringing together housing issues with feminist, environmental and others. Refugee solidarity initiatives that struggle against the eviction of tenant refugees under the campaign “I am not leaving my home” have also been analysed.

The analysis is based on data from documents collected through internet research as well as media and social media entries. Media and social media are selected as key sources for data collection as they have played a crucial role in transversal housing struggles and solidarities of migrant and local tenants. For example, in the case of Unreal Estate, they were used to disseminate the work done (e.g. the results of the surveys or legal advice for tenants) and in the case of Stop War on Migrants to inform about activist events, like demonstrations and to share news. Besides, as Lochlainn (2023) argues contemporary housing struggles have shown that digital tools and technologies are an invaluable tool at their hands. Moreover, in analysing the emergence of local and migrant tenants as precariously housed subjects, I draw on analysis of policy and legal documents related to housing and migration (e.g. policy documents on the ESTIA accommodation program – analysed below – and laws related to the accommodation of newly arriving refugees).

The collected data were analysed based on two entry points. First, I examine housing precarity and the way it affects different population groups. Aiming to uncover and analyse precarity as a complex, dynamic and multi-faceted condition, I sought to analyse changes in the housing market since the beginning of the 2010 financial crisis and the consequent austerity. While most of the policy documents on the housing crisis focus on the Greek population, I also turned my attention to documents on the refugee crisis and the housing of refugees and migrants in order to create a more holistic picture of housing precarity in Greece. Second, I focus on solidarities, seeking to shed light on the spatialities and the socialities of solidarity-making. In doing so, I seek to untangle new spaces and spatialities of solidarities; practices and activities of solidarity-making; as well as new relationships of solidarities. To conclude, it is important to point out the methodological challenges of undertaking research related to ongoing, living grassroots struggles. I chose to focus on secondary material rather than conduct ethnographic research through interviewing for example, in order to respect the groups’ specific resources (e.g. time, energy, people) and their allocation on activist practices.

A Feminist Intervention in Housing Struggles Debates: Housing Precarity and Transversal Housing Solidarities Across Spaces, Times and Subjects

Transversal politics is a term that has reached us from Italian women peace activists who networked with women in other countries and talked about their practice of “politica trasversale”. In a 1999 paper in Soundings journal, Cockburn and Hunter (1999, 89) write, “[t]ransversal politics is the practice of creatively crossing (and re-drawing) the borders that mark significant politicised differences. It means empathy without sameness, shifting without tearing up your roots”. Transversal politics means a democratic practice that pays attention to commonalities while in parallel affirms difference (ibid). According to Yuval-Davis (1999, 95), “notions of difference should encompass, rather than replace, notions of equality. Such notions of difference are not hierarchical. They assume a priori respect for others’ positionings – which includes acknowledgement of their differential social, economic and political power”.

Coming from the work of feminist scholars and activists, transversal solidarity has attracted anew the interest of scholars, especially those working in critical migration and urban studies. Ataç et al. (2021, 927) argue that “[r]ather than romantici[z]ing the city, transversal solidarity often arises from the polari[z]ation, poverty and inequity of cities, with the right to affordable and adequate housing being a key issue”. Drawing on three empirical cases, the authors manifest that transversal solidarities are being built in several ways: by transgressing (i) ontological borders, based on bringing together people across positionalities and hierarchies; (ii) typologies of civic, institutional, and autonomous forms of solidarity; and (iii) territorial borders, political spaces and scales of governing. In a similar vein, Agustín and Jørgensen (2021) develop a typology of transversal solidarities which reflects different ways of practicing, organizing and articulating solidarity and distinguish between autonomous, civic and institutional solidarity. Transversal solidarities are being built as “multi-scalar connections between the local and the transnational” (Agustín and Jørgensen 2021, 860). Yet, at the same time, transversal solidarities are “connections across boundaries” that are not to be seen only through a spatial perspective but also through a historical and temporal view (Tazzioli 2020, 141). In her words, “thinking about transversal struggles is not only a question of connections – among sites, claims and actors – but also of multiple genealogies of solidarity to be retraced and foregrounded” (ibid:141).

Transversal solidarities are linked with two key concepts: translation and openness. Solidarity-making entails the encounter of heterogeneous subjects and refers to the practice of constructing an always unstable and in-the-making community. Feminist scholars emphasize that such communities are the product of interpretation; they are embodied practices that bring together heterogeneous subjects who acknowledge their interdependence (Federici 2012; Mohanty 2003).

Metaphorically and actually this means multi-lingualism. It is about foregoing the dream of finding a common tongue (because, given power relations, that is bound to be an imperialism) and instead taking up the challenge of learning each other’s languages. (Cockburn and Hunter 1999, 91)

Rather than seeking to construct a unitary language, solidarity-making denotes a practice of “translating difference and the common” (Curcio 2010, 464). In parallel, transversal solidarities imply openness. Thinking of solidarity as relational, transversalism shifts the focus to how heterogeneous subjects deny their pre-existing identities and forge solidarity struggles as equals (Agustín and Jørgensen 2021; Karaliotas and Kapsali 2021) in order to oppose exclusionary positions and build grassroots housing struggles. Drawing on Federici’s emphasis on the intersectionality of struggles (2012), transversal housing solidarities include struggles in the field of gender, race and class and highlight that the interconnectedness of struggles is essential for building effective and inclusive solidarity movements. Translating difference is, thus, the first step for the creation of strong communities of care and social reproduction that become a form of resistance against oppressive structures.

Transversal solidarity, I argue, is a concept that can bring new meanings and ideas in housing theories on housing struggles and especially when discussed together with housing precarity. Contemporary housing struggles are often constituted based on the precarity of the participating subjects. While labour market precarity has widely researched and analysed since the 1990s, housing precarity has only recently attained the interest and attention of scholars. Housing precarity is much more than lack of access to shelter (Greenop 2017). It is a complicated, multi-dimensional and thus a difficult to define concept. According to Clair et al. (2019, 16), housing precariousness can be defined as follows:

A state of uncertainty which increases a person’s real or perceived likelihood of experiencing an adverse event, caused (at least in part) by their relationship with their housing provider, the physical qualities, affordability, security of their home, and access to essential services.

In his turn, Vasudevan (2014, 13–14) defines precarity as both “an economic and political condition suffered by a population and the lived experience of that condition as a form of ‘ambient insecurity’” and Sakali and Karyotis (2022, 343) define housing precarity “as rooted in the tension that arises between housing as use-value and housing as exchange value”.

Rather than being understood as a linear condition, housing precarity should be conceptualized as a spectrum. According to Clair et al. (2019), housing precarity can be measured and understood based on four crucial factors: (i) housing affordability; (ii) security in housing, related to whether a person has control over if and when they leave their home; (iii) housing quality, linked to essential facilities necessary for people’s health and well-being; and (iv) access to essential services. Of course, one of the central and more obvious forms of precarious housing is homelessness. However, there are also other less apparent forms of precarious housing. Precarious housing includes, for example, “renting temporarily and not knowing whether your landlord will raise the rent and you have to move on-not because you want to but because you have to” (Listerborn 2021, 2).

Furthermore, housing precarity cannot be seen in isolation from other precarious conditions in areas, such as employment, legal status and access to basic amenities (e.g. healthcare, education, etc.). Highlighting this intersectional precarity one can experience, Bentley et al. (2019) coin the term “double precarity” to refer to both employment insecurity and unaffordable housing. In a similar vein, migration scholars point out that housing precarity should be conceptualized as a lived experience that intersects with types of migrant precarity linked to the precarious legal status of individuals and communities (Papadopoulos, Fratsea, and Mavrommatis 2018; Trimikliniotis, Parsanoglou, and Tsianos 2016). Overall, precarity can be understood as a condition “experienced as a series of absences, such as of medical assistance, warmth, a roof, and most importantly, of alternatives” (Lancione 2019; in Papatzani et al. 2022, 192).

Housing scholars have studied the relationship between housing precarity and housing struggles from different perspectives. In the context of racial capitalism, housing precarity is an everyday embodied condition for many individuals, households and communities. The recent COVID-19 pandemic has intensified conditions of housing precarity, especially for the most vulnerable. The RHJ Editorial Collective (Vilenica et al. 2020) emphasizes that precarity, amplified by the pandemic, has been challenged in practice through practices of radical collective care and mutual aid. Drawing from Buenos Aires, Muñoz (2018) examines housing precarity as a spatial, temporal, and gendered condition that is entrenched in the everyday life and the mundane practices of home-making. Muñoz (2017) argues that housing and urban precarity hinders the possibilities of collective organization, housing struggles and more generally political change. Challenging this perspective, Vasudevan (2022) studies housing struggles in Berlin and uncovers the different ways in which different groups make sense of their own precarity, pointing out that this helps them contest uneven urban conditions and build alternative social infrastructure. According to Vasudevan (2022, 1537), precarity is a “geographically grounded process rooted in long-standing patterns of exploitation, displacement, and vulnerability”.

Indeed, precarity operates as the glue that brings together tenants, as a social class that organizes common struggles in the midst of a generalized housing crisis. Their precarity is constituted on multiple factors: class is one of them – it is undoubtedly an important factor that brings people together to organize against structural inequalities and resist abusive practices (Tranjan 2023). Importantly, however, it is crucial to develop an intersectional and transversal perspective in understanding the ways in which tenants fabricate common struggles by crafting alliances and translating differences. As such, gender, race, migratory status and other factors play a key role in processes of political subjectification among tenants. For example, feminist geographers have long emphasized that in the context of globalized capitalism and patriarchy, social reproduction is “the ‘point zero’ of anti-capitalist, anti-patriarchal and anti-colonial struggle” (Dalla Costa and James 1972; Federici 2012; Jeffries 2018, 579). Struggles centred around social reproduction, such as those of housing and tenants movements, produce new human beings and relationships. Home-making is not anymore linked with classed, racialized and gendered oppression but it is the stage for the emergence of new collective subjectivities and new solidarities and relationships.

Understanding transversal solidarity as an integral part of housing struggles and as an important theoretical concept in debates on housing precarity, I argue, is a crucial step forward to housing theory as it foregrounds transversal housing solidarities as solidarities built across spaces, times and subjects. First, the spatiality of housing solidarities or what I here call the building of transversal housing solidarities across space foreground an understanding of housing solidarities and struggles across a variety of local, national and transnational settings. While housing injustices and housing struggles are always connected to the local geographical and socio-political context, at the same time they are translocal and global. Besides, solidarity has been conceptualized as a spatial practice that is constituted on different yet interconnected, scales (Featherstone 2012). On the one hand, physical proximity has been highlighted as a catalyst for solidarity to be generated; “‘being physically in common” generates new political possibilities’ (Caciagli 2021, 252). On the other hand, housing literature emphasizes the importance of translocal solidarity networks that include translocal learning and networking “beyond local place-related relations of cities” (Hölzl and Hölzl 2022, 2).

Second, transversal housing solidarity is not only linked to questions of spatiality and space-making at various scales. Rather such a spatial perspective should be complemented by a historical and temporal view. As Tazzioli (2020, 141) argues, “thinking about transversal struggles is not only a question of connections – among sites, claims and actors – but also of multiple genealogies of solidarity to be retraced and foregrounded”. The temporality of transversal housing solidarities is, thus, linked to the ways in which political experiences, struggles and solidarity practices travel across spaces and are reactivated in different historical and geographical contexts.

Third, the spatial and temporal perspectives of transversal housing solidarities are complemented by an understanding of such solidarity practices as bridges that bring together different political subjects and contribute to the emergence of new political subjectivities. Transversal housing solidarities are being built through the coming together of heterogeneous precarious subjects marking an act of disidentification from a given subject position (Rancière 1999) and the creation of the precarious tenants as new political subjects that organize and fight together. Through this act of disidentification, migrants, locals, students, queers, women, zero-hour workers and others begin to identify themselves as new political subjects – the precarious tenant – “open[ing] their identities to mutual exchange tracing solidarities across differences” (Karaliotas and Kapsali 2021, 412).

The Emergence of the Precarious Tenant as a Political Subject in Greece in the Midst of Multiple Intersecting Crises

Housing precarity in Greece is not a new phenomenon, but it has taken different characteristics over the last decades. In contrast to the industrial areas of Europe where the crisis of deindustrialization was severe, southern European countries adapted smoother to the changing conditions. Although the 1990s was characterized by a rise of homeownership (through mortgage lending), it was in parallel a period marked by the increase of the number of precarious tenants (Maloutas 2021), both locals and migrants arriving from Balkan countries (Hatziprokopiou 2003). However, the generalized economic growth of the period led to those housing inequalities and growing difficulties in securing acceptable and affordable housing to remain in the dark and not become particularly perceptible.

Since 2010, Greece like other countries worldwide is experiencing a deepening of housing and other inequalities due to multiple intersecting crises, such as the 2008 financial crisis, the “2015 refugee crisis”, the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic. More than their convergence on a time scale (Samaddar 2016), these crises have created a generalized socially induced housing precarity and have been all linked with the production of multiple sites of vulnerabilities and exclusions. Combined with the financial crisis which created severe housing burdens for locals, the aggressive, punitive and inhuman policies of Fortress Europe implemented by the Greek government left many migrants and refugees, who arrived from war-inflicted zones over the last 6 years, precariously housed (Papatzani et al. 2022). Also, the COVID-19 pandemic operated as the spark that lit the fire of increased housing precarity and transversal housing struggles.

Since the outbreak of the 2010 financial crisis, many traditional homeowner societies, like the United States, United Kingdom and Ireland experienced a transformation in housing tenure (Kemp 2015). Homeownership rates have declined while households renting from private landowners have been increased (Kemp 2015; Waldron 2021). This is what scholars define as the emergence of the Generation Rent (see among others Byrne 2020; Fuster, Arundel, and Susino 2019; Waldron 2021). Key questions that emerge are as follows: what are the characteristics of housing precarity experienced by such households? Are they organizing grassroots struggles and solidarities and in which form? Although traditionally Greece is characterized by high rates of homeownership (Roumpakis and Pleace 2021), over the more than 10 years of austerity has led to the increase of rented housing and the emergence of the Generation Rent. Two trends have led to the increase of precariously housed tenants.

The first trend is the impoverishment of the population during the financial crisis and the shrinking disposable income of households, which had a different impact on homeownership and rented housing (Maloutas 2021). On the one hand, the economic hardship affected the ability of a large part of the population to buy a house, leading several people to move to smaller houses, move back to their parents’ home or cohabitate with others (Maloutas 2021; Siatitsa 2021). On the other hand, renters negotiated lower rents individually, as they could not afford their rent. Indicative of this are the following quotes by young people who are renting through the private market: “Rent is 50% of your salary” (Eteron 2022a); “An average salary is 600 euros and you give 450 euros for rent” (Eteron 2022b). In parallel, pressure for rent reduction had an impact on smallholders who constitute the vast majority of homeowners and are deeply dependent on the extra income their rented properties offer. Although many smallholders are raising their rent following the general trend of rent increase, there are many homeowners who accept a rent reduction fearing that their properties would be left vacant (Kafetzis 2022).

The second trend is broader changes in the housing market linked with the expansion of Airbnb, investments under the Golden Visa program¹ or legislative initiatives to attract so-called “digital nomads”. Although it is beyond the scope of the paper to analyse these trends in detail, it is interesting to understand how Airbnb affects the increase of rents. In Greece, Airbnb spread at an impressive rate during the last few years: while in 2010 only 132 properties were available in Athens, in 2020, before the pandemic, Airbnb properties exceeded 125.000 (Balampanidis and Papatzani 2022). This spread of short-term renting leads to the withdrawal of a significant portion of available housing from the conventional housing market, while demand remains stable or even worse increases (ibid). As such, a large part of the urban population is unable to find affordable housing in the cities they live and work.

Since 2015, the arrival of hundreds of migrants and refugees became a catalyst for new transformations in housing policies and for the emergence of a new landscape of housing precarity. The increased housing needs of migrant populations operated as a catalyst for the setting up of new housing policies and practices, which, however, remained again rather fragmented and piecemeal. The settlement of migrants was coordinated through an accommodation system that consisted of two main pillars: (i) massive accommodation in camps and (ii) urban accommodation in rented apartments of the “Emergency Support to Integration and Accommodation” (ESTIA) programme (Papatzani et al. 2022).

Launching in November 2015, the ESTIA programme provided accommodation in apartments within the urban fabric of Greek cities to 22.400 people at the end of April 2020. Compared to accommodation in camps where people are living under miserable conditions (Kandylis 2019), the ESTIA program had significant advantages. Importantly, refugees were placed in apartments in the dense urban fabric of the Greek cities, something that is a catalyst for the development of interethnic relationships as well as common struggles and solidarities (Karaliotas and Kapsali 2021; Papatzani et al. 2022). However, at the same time, multiple categories of migrant precarity can be identified, linked mainly with three key mechanisms (Papatzani et al. 2022). The first is the filtering mechanisms around which the programme is structured that are based on vulnerability and other distinctions, such as legal status, family status or gender (ibid). These mechanisms reproduce the regime that differentiates people between those “deserving” protection and those “undeserving” and designs different types of accommodation for each of them.

The second is through spatial isolation and segregation. The differentiation of refugees in “deserving” and “undeserving” constitutes the basis upon which different geographies of accommodation types are created (Papatzani et al. 2022). While the former are eligible for residing in ESTIA apartments in polikatoikias² within the urban fabric of the cities, the latter are isolated in camps outside the city, surrounded by concrete walls. As such, the spatiality of the different types of accommodation defines the type and degree of precarity of refugees (re)producing geographies of segregation and inequality.

Finally, the precarity of ESTIA refugees can be identified at the level of everyday habitation (Papatzani et al. 2022). The set of rules that regulates people’s everyday life in ESTIA apartments are defined ad hoc by local and international actors, restricting the personal autonomy of inhabitants and producing feelings of everyday discomfort. Indicative of this is the forced cohabitation in which refugees are obliged to agree upon, as according to the regulations of the programme, refugees are obliged to share accommodation with others based on criteria of nationality, family status and common language.

Rent Struggles of Locals and Migrants: Transversal Housing Solidarities in Greece Across Spaces, Times and Subjects

Within the context described in the previous section, precariously housed local and migrant tenants emerged as new political subjects that sought to fight in common. Although Greece has a long history of urban political struggles, linked for example to the anarchist or student movement (Kitis 2015) or more recent grassroots struggles such as the anti-austerity (Arampatzi 2017) or the refugee solidarity movement (Karaliotas and Kapsali 2021), it has not experienced the development of a large scale housing movement until today. This does not mean that there are no housing inequalities and injustices. Collective demands around housing did not take the form of a movement. Rather access to housing for different groups happened through indirect ways with the involvement of collective actors such as pressure groups or larger organized groups that are linked to land and construction development (Siatitsa 2014). For example, in the beginning of the 20^th century, people claimed housing through building and land occupations. Land squatting constituted, according to Leontidou (2010, 1183), a “massive grassroots movement of civil disobedience” anchored on the ideas of illegality, informality and self-help.

Over the last decade or so, many existing grassroots groups and initiatives turned their interest in housing struggles and new ones have been formed. Two of the most active grassroots activist groups are “Unreal estate assembly against rent blackmail” in Athens and “Loupa” in Thessaloniki. Created in April 2019 in Athens, “Unreal estate” initially aimed at organizing a campaign and a demonstration against rent increase which took place in June 2019 in Kipseli, a low-income neighbourhood in Athens. In September 2019, the people gathered initially decided to organize a regular assembly as “they considered that the housing question will remain timely and crucial for ever-larger parts of the society” (Unreal Estate 2019a, 4). Created in 2014 in Thessaloniki, Loupa is an activist group engaged in intersectional struggles around issues of transportation, university canteens, and work rights and it, recently, turned its interest to issues of housing and rent. As they state in one of the brochures, “We believe it is necessary to meet, explore and create new modes of resistance and forms of struggle that will help us resist the expanded attack on the field of home” (Loupa 2019, 3).

In parallel, recognizing their housing precarity and benefited from the support and solidarity networks they have built within cities, refugees in solidarity with local initiatives like “Solidarity with Migrants” in Athens and “Stop War on Migrants” in Thessaloniki initiated an anti-eviction campaign called “I am not leaving my home”. In mid-2020, at the beginning of the pandemic and the first quarantine in Greece, the responsibility of the ESTIA programme was transferred from the UNHCR to the Greek government (UNHCR Greece 2020). This marked a significant change and downgrading of the programme. Moreover, after an amendment of the respective law, refugees and beneficiaries of subsidiary protection must leave their home within 30 days after their recognition, while under the previous framework, they were guaranteed support and housing for 6 months after receiving international protection status (Government Gazette 2020). This change threatened with eviction around 4.000 people who lived in ESTIA accommodations (Amnesty International 2020). Under the threat of being homeless, refugees self-organized and launched the campaign “I am not leaving my home”. In their first statement, they write:

The New Democracy government decided to evict migrants during Corona while its state slogan is “STAY HOME”. […] The war against migrants began on the seas and at the borders, it continued in the jails, detention centers, overcrowded camps and through ID checks on the streets. Now this war takes place inside our homes. WE ARE NOT LEAVING OUR HOMES! (Not Leaving my Home 2021)

The anti-eviction campaign used the official governmental logo “Stay at home” that was created as part of the COVID-19 campaign and turned its meaning as they added the phrase “No evictions”. In what follows, I analyse transversal solidarities across spaces, times and subjects building on the activities of these groups and initiatives.

First, transversal housing solidarities across space in Greece are being built through two main ways for and by local and migrant precarious tenants. To begin with, rather than being limited to the borders of a specific neighbourhood or a city, solidarity networks of precariously housed tenants are being built across the country. This is undoubtedly dictated by the restrictions of the COVID-19 pandemic, including social distancing, suspension of collective activities and restrictions on people’s mobility, but it is also the result of the specific tools and practices employed by activists in their effort to build housing solidarities. In the case of rent-related housing struggles in Greece, Unreal estate and Loupa sought to build solidarity networks with individuals and initiatives through information sharing and legal counselling campaigns. For example, Unreal Estate organized a grassroots research called “Can you afford your rent?” using online questionnaires. The research was structured in two stages; one between April 2020 and May 2020 and the second between December 2020 and January 2021. The aim of the research was “to get a clearer picture of how the coronavirus pandemic affected living and working conditions in Greece” (Unreal Estate 2022). The group aimed to use the results of the research “to formulate the requests for the next stage of a campaign for the protection of tenants and the reduction of rents” (ibid). Transversal solidarities were also crafted through legal counselling campaigns through which knowledge was transmitted and shared among precarious tenants. For example, Unreal Estate published a series of three booklets with legal advice for rent reduction during the pandemic and a newspaper called “Tenant’s news” where they discuss issues such as housing precarity, public space struggles, golden visa, refugees’ evictions, gentrification, touristification and student accommodation.

In addition, transversal solidarities across spaces are materialized through the process of learning together employed by activists, who seek to learn by rent struggles at other parts of the world. Engaging in “translocal social movement learning” (Langdon 2022), activists in Greece got inspired by more experienced housing activists in other parts of the world. During the COVID-19 pandemic, many people across the world, especially in the US, the UK, France and Canada, started organizing campaigns under the slogan “Can’t pay, won’t pay” or “#CancelRent” (Haag and Dougherty 2020; Lennard 2020). Slogans travelled from these countries to Greece and were adopted by local activists in posters suspended in streets as well as on banners during demonstrations. Notably, many of the demonstrations were organized in common with refugees who were fighting against evictions. So, multilingual posters (written in Greek, English, French, Farsi, Arabic) were suspended on walls in central streets of Athens and Thessaloniki (Unreal Estate 2020a). Transversal solidarities emerge, in this way, as practices that extend beyond national borders, opening up the possibilities for new relationships of care and mutuality. Transversality, thus, denotes a form of connectivity that transgresses the rigid spatial categories and ontological boundaries of the local and the transnational and is forged through dynamic encounters across and beyond borders.

Second, transversal housing solidarities across time is about the ways in which housing activists reactivate political experiences of solidarity produced in different historical and geographical contexts. Given that Greece does not have a tradition of rent strike movements and rent struggles, local activists in Athens and Thessaloniki sought to ground their struggles as a process of learning by past housing struggles in different socio-political contexts. In the case of Unreal Estate, this was materialized through the following processes of grassroots knowledge sharing: (i) film screenings, such as the screening of the 1974 film ‘Behind the Rent Strike” related to a rent strike in Kirkby, Liverpool (Unreal Estate 2019b)); (ii) translation of brochures and texts produced during rent trikes and housing struggles in other cities worldwide, such as the Translation of an interview with the residents of Station 40 in San Francisco (Unreal Estate 2020b); and (iii) open discussions. These practices of learning through past struggles and translating and reactivating practical knowledges in the present uncover the importance of the temporality of solidarity and the memory of (housing) struggles.

Third, the precarious tenant was formed as a collective subject through transversal housing solidarities and connections across boundaries by challenging the migrant/citizen divide. This was embodied in different ways by the different groups under study, whose members engaged in acts of disidentification and re-identification as precarious tenants struggling together against the continuous precarization of their living conditions. Struggling together was a process that was based on bridging differences rather than on finding similarities. Transversality opens a way of thinking about solidarity building as a process based on the translation of differences rather than on the identification of commonalities. Migrants and locals build bridges across their differences anchored on multiple aspects, such as different socio-economic background or different claims and demands. Crafting horizontal alliances involves the everyday laborious work of both migrants and locals and requires the translation of differences, a process wrought with power relations which always risks turning bridges into barriers.

Since its initial formation, Unreal estate identified themselves as tenants fighting for more just and affordable housing, while in parallel aligned their struggles to ongoing migrants’ struggles against evictions from rented properties. In their words (2019a, 2):

We take the streets to demonstrate as tenants and workers, regardless of ethnicity, race and gender. We take the streets because more and more people can’t pay their rent. We take the streets, because more and more people are threatened with eviction. We take the streets, as we can’t continue working all day long for shitty wages and spend most of our salary on rent. We take the streets, because the Greek state is eager to listen and legislate for the sake of bosses and landlords, while we, as tenants, remain invisible and vulnerable.

Unreal Estate often speaks about the evictions and brings together anti-eviction struggles of locals who have not paid their rent during the quarantine period or who use the self-reduction of rent and asylum seekers who live in subsidized housing under the threat of eviction. In parallel, its aim is not to claim housing provision from the state or other formal actors as it recognizes them as those contributing to housing precarity at first hand, through, for example, polices that favour Airbnb short-term renting, downgrading at the same time long-term renting. As the group claims, “there are million empty houses, old or new, refurbished or not but empty. It is absurd to have empty houses in a city and homeless people outside” (Unreal Estate 2021). In a similar spirit, Loupa (2019, 9) argues that “the struggles we fight around housing do not seek to defend property, but to deconstruct it. We fight in a way that is inclusive for all of us who rent, who are homeless or who are undocumented and not just for local smallholders”.

Practices of solidarity-building were not one-way, coming only from locals to refugees. Rather, refugees self-organized and in solidarity with local activists run the “I’m not leaving my home” campaign. The main practices of the campaign included information sharing and awareness raising campaigns as well as practical support of families and individuals facing eviction from ESTIA apartments. For example, the campaign operated as a means through which the voices of precarious refugees were being heard. Indicative is the following quote of a woman previously living in an ESTIA apartment with her children.

I am M., I am alone with two small children and they told me to leave my house. I am a recognized refugee and I am not treated as a human being. They stopped providing financial assistance in October and I have to make ends meet on my own. They ask me to leave the apartment in such cold weather. We are helpless. “The organization (NGO) has brought two more families home and still leaves us without hot water for the last 6 months.” (Not Leaving my Home 2021)

Being evicted from accommodation and being left homeless is the liminal moment of precarity. The same policies that considered some people as “deserving” a decent accommodation in the city at some point, decided that they are “undeserving” at some other point. Homelessness as the most acute type of housing precarity does not only means a serious risk of material deprivation but also implies the (re)production of racist and xenophobic practices on the bare bodies of the refugees who are deemed to live in the street.

Overall, contemporary rent struggles in Greece shed light on the transversal alliances between locals and migrants “without however disregarding the asymmetries at play between the two and the differential way of being raciali[z]ed” (Tazzioli 2020, 155). Although everyday negotiations and tensions are part of the process of collective political subjectification and solidarity-making, this section manifested that both migrant and local tenants become political subjects as, through their participation in activist groups, they engage into a process of disidentification (Rancière 1999). They deny the subject positions given to them by the police order (i.e. that of precarious tenants), and they participate in political activities and discussions, challenging existing power structures.

Conclusion

In this paper, I documented the emergence of the precarious local and migrant tenants as political subjects that build transversal housing solidarities in Athens and Thessaloniki in the context of the multiple recent intersecting crises. Aiming to construct a novel conceptual framework around a feminist understanding of transversal housing solidarities, the paper introduced the feminist concept of transversality to housing studies and in particular to debates on housing precarity. Introduced by feminist activists and scholars in the 1990s, this concept has been revived in recent years especially in critical migration scholarship.

I argue that it is helpful in housing studies as it promotes a more holistic understanding of contemporary solidarity housing struggles. I thus proposed three interrelated entry points for analysing transversal housing solidarities: across space, time and subjects and I mobilized this conceptual framework to understand and analyse contemporary rent-related housing struggles in Greece.

First, transversal housing solidarities across spaces foreground solidarity-making as a translocal practice through which precarious subjects build solidarity networks across a variety of local and translocal scales. Second, I have linked transversal housing solidarities to questions of temporality and highlighted the importance of understanding and analysing housing struggles as a continuum of different yet interconnected solidarity experiences. In this vein, I documented the creation of solidarities between movements in different historical and geographical contexts. Third, together with the spatial and temporal perspectives of transversal housing solidarities, I emphasized the importance of understanding housing solidarities as bridges that bring together heterogeneous subjects and contribute to the formation of collective political subjects, often based on the condition of precarity.

Brought together these three axes contributes to an understanding of transversal housing solidarities as translocal and intersectional practices that build bridges across spatial and temporal boundaries; as alliances and bridges between different geographies and spaces, between different historical periods and times; and between heterogeneous subjects that fight together on the basis of their precarity. Embarking on a process of disidentification, people with different subject positions and identities collectively organize and fight as a new political subject, i.e. the precarious tenant. Importantly, the interest on and importance of transversal housing solidarities is not only for emphasizing connections but also for understanding the ways in which different political subjects in different socio-political and geographical contexts are affected by and are organizing against housing injustices.

Acknowledgement

I wish to thank Jennie Gustafsson, Carina Listerborn and Irene Molina for organising the workshop ‘Retheorizing housing and activism’ and inviting me to contribute to the workshop and the Special Issue. I also wish to thank workshop participants for their comments and feedback on previous drafts of this paper. any thanks also to the editor and the three anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments that helped improve the quality of the paper.

Disclosure statement

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

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. The Golden Visa programme grants a residence permit in Greece for third party nationals if they purchase dwellings with a value of € 250 thousand or more (Elo 2021).

2. Polikatoikia is the multi-storey apartment building that appeared as a building type in Athens in the 1930s and spread throughout Greek cities since then.