The Housing Challenge to Neoliberal Homeownership: Profitability Relativism and Governance Asymmetry as Post-Neoliberalization

The widespread rise of renting unaffordability and gentrification across European cities has drawn attention to the social unsustainability of heavily financialized and privatized housing markets. Indeed, contemporary patterns of standardization and depoliticization of housing crises collide with the increasingly pronounced functional equivalence between tenancies and home-owning, as well as with future urbanization prospects. The Article departs from an understanding of housing crises as by-products of inter alia property relations to examine two distinct clusters of constitutional tension that define the European housing landscape. It then details the recalibration of renting profitability and the regulatory or "soft" asymmetrization of housing governance as defining features of a post- or counter-neoliberal movement within property's constitutional politics. While profitability relativism readily aligns with the basic tenets of European social constitutionalism, the plural resistances of constitutional governance structures to the localist repoliticization of housing crises urges fresh thinking around the shifting geographies of urban homeownership politics.