Extended Summary

The right to housing is a multidimensional social right that extends beyond the individual’s physical safety or need for shelter. It encompasses the reproduction of labor, the spatial configuration of social inequalities, and the material foundation of citizenship. As one of the constitutive functions of the social state, housing is directly connected to relations of production, spatial organization, and capital accumulation. Yet throughout its historical development, this right has never been institutionalized as robustly as education, health, or social security; it has remained dependent on the spatial requirements of capital accumulation. Consequently, it represents one of the most precarious dimensions of the social state.

This study examines the right to housing in the context of the historical evolution and neoliberal transformation of the social state, analyzing the limits of its decommodification capacity. It argues that housing has historically been the least protected component of the welfare regime and thus the first to disintegrate under neoliberal regulation. The financialization of housing constitutes the main dynamic of this process: housing has shifted from being a public right to becoming a core mechanism of capital accumulation and household indebtedness.

The intellectual foundations of the right to housing trace back to Friedrich Engels’ mid-19th-century structural analysis of the housing question in industrial society. For Engels, housing is a necessary condition for the reproduction of labor power. Capital, while securing the minimal living conditions required for the worker to labor again the next day, simultaneously transforms housing into an instrument of class domination. This approach conceptualizes housing not as a mere physical need but as an extension of production relations.

In the 20th century, Lefebvre, Harvey, Castells, Fainstein, and Wacquant deepened this legacy on spatial and political grounds. Lefebvre situated housing within the social production of space, defining it as the locus of everyday life, identity, and belonging. The right to housing thus entails the right to access, participate in, and transform urban space. Harvey, in turn, viewed housing as a spatial fix for capital accumulation and as one of the most tangible expressions of social justice struggles. Castells’ notion of collective consumption positioned housing as part of the public services essential for the reproduction of labor. Fainstein reframed housing as a normative issue grounded in justice, equality, and participation, while Wacquant highlighted how neoliberal retrenchment transformed housing into an object of disciplinary and exclusionary governance.

This theoretical lineage allows the right to housing to be articulated through three analytical dimensions: (1) Social reproduction, referring to the material conditions sustaining labor’s continuity; (2) The contradiction between use value and exchange value, reflecting housing’s dual nature as both a living space and an asset of capital; and (3) The decommodification deficit, denoting the structural limits of the social state’s ability to detach housing from market dependence.

Housing constitutes an essential component of social reproduction. Under capitalism, labor power must procure its dwelling through the market; thus, housing becomes a direct part of production costs. The right to housing, therefore, concerns not only individual ownership but also how the costs of reproducing labor power are collectively borne. Harvey’s perspective on social justice situates the urban space as a site where income and rent are redistributed—albeit along class rather than egalitarian lines. From the standpoint of social reproduction theory, housing also forms part of the infrastructure of sustainable development: economic growth depends on the institutional and spatial conditions that sustain labor through housing, care, health, and education services.

During the neoliberal period, the protective role of the social state in these areas has weakened. The cost of housing has been transferred to households, and mortgage-based homeownership has tied labor incomes directly to financial capital. As a result, housing has become both a driver and a mirror of class and spatial exclusion.

Every commodity in the capitalist economy carries both a use value and an exchange value. The use value of housing lies in its ability to sustain life; its exchange value is defined by market price, rent income, or speculative gain. Since capitalist production aims at the accumulation of value rather than the satisfaction of needs, exchange value inevitably dominates use value. The financialization of housing in the late 20th century amplified this contradiction. Housing became not merely a dwelling but a key asset within global finance through mortgage lending and securitization chains. Households, by translating future income into present debt, have come to experience housing rights as a function of creditworthiness. This mechanism shifted the burden of social reproduction from public budgets to private indebtedness.

As Harvey notes, this process represents a regime of accumulation by dispossession. Rising property values, urban redevelopment projects, and real-estate speculation have displaced low-income groups from city centers, turning urban space itself into a vehicle of capital accumulation. The right to housing has thus been eroded by the supremacy of exchange value over use value.

Polanyi’s concept of the double movement interprets the emergence of the social state as society’s institutional counter-reaction to the market’s encroachment. Yet, as Offe and Esping-Andersen argue, this countermovement has never fully succeeded in constraining market logic. Decommodification—the capacity to maintain livelihoods independently of market income—remains limited, particularly in the housing sector. According to Esping-Andersen’s (1990) typology, decommodification is low in liberal regimes, moderate and family-based in conservative-corporatist ones, and relatively high in social-democratic regimes. However, in none of these models has housing been fully removed from market dependency. Kemeny’s (1995) notion of the unitary rental system shows that cost-based social rental schemes in Scandinavian countries enhanced decommodification, yet since the 1990s even these models have been weakened by financialization.

The failure to decommodify housing is not merely economic but also normative. As Fainstein argues, housing policies that are not grounded in justice, equality, and participation cannot deliver the just city. Hence, housing constitutes the weakest spatial dimension of citizenship.

In the liberal model, housing is defined as an individual aspiration for ownership. The state intervenes mainly through credit and tax incentives, while social housing remains marginal. The Right to Buy policy introduced in the United Kingdom during the 1980s epitomized this approach by shrinking public housing stock and consolidating a market-driven property regime. In conservative-corporatist regimes such as France and Germany, the state assumes a secondary, regulatory role, while the family remains the primary guarantor of housing security. Social housing is often linked to occupational status, reinforcing gendered and class hierarchies. In social-democratic regimes (e.g., Sweden, Denmark), housing is conceived as a universal right; cost-based rent systems and extensive social housing provision have long maintained relative equality. Yet since the 1990s, neoliberal pressures and fiscal constraints have reduced public construction and expanded market-oriented reforms.

Across all models, the financialization of housing has blurred historical differences. Since the 1980s, mortgage-driven homeownership, privatization of public housing, and deepening financial markets have re-commodified housing globally.

In the neoliberal era, housing became a core pillar of capital accumulation. Financial liberalization, the proliferation of mortgage credit, and securitization mechanisms integrated housing into global financial circuits. The state withdrew from direct housing provision and redefined its role as a guarantor of financial stability rather than social welfare. The 2008 financial crisis revealed the fragility of this arrangement: mass foreclosures and rising homelessness demonstrated how deeply housing had been embedded in financial logic. Policy responses prioritized market stabilization over social protection, confirming the subordination of welfare to finance.

Financialization also transformed the spatial fabric of cities. Gentrification and large-scale redevelopment projects reconfigured urban space to meet investment needs. Rising rents and property prices displaced lower-income groups to urban peripheries, entrenching spatial inequalities in social reproduction. As housing costs consumed a growing share of household income, a new regime of dependency and indebtedness emerged. Public housing production dwindled, and housing security became synonymous with market confidence and investor trust.

The right to housing thus stands as a critical measure of the social state’s legitimacy. Redefining the use value of housing and re-establishing it as a non-market right require not only new housing policies but also a broader reorganization of social reproduction. The future of the social state depends on its capacity to collectively sustain the costs of reproducing labor and to liberate housing from the circuits of financial valorization. Without a justice-oriented restructuring that restores the social use of housing, the social state’s decommodification capacity cannot be renewed. Consequently, in the neoliberal era, the right to housing is not merely a question of social policy but a normative and political foundation for reconstructing the very order of society.