Becoming propertied, becoming indebted : the making and unmaking of the Greek housing property regime and its subjects
Year: 2025
Type: dissertation
Abstract: In this thesis I investigate the paradox of housing in Greece: despite a severe housing crisis and complex property relations, housing remains largely depoliticised, policy frameworks are absent, and the issue is rarely present in party and movement agendas. To illuminate this paradox, I trace the evolution of the Greek housing property regime – a set of market mechanisms, legal frameworks and moral discourses that regulate access to housing. I argue that in post-war Greece low-cost access to homeownership became the cornerstone of an informal welfare system, which served to promote social integration and stability despite minimal state expenditure, enabling a high-growth, low-wage model of capitalist development. This system facilitated the rise of a propertied middle class and a familist wealth accumulation model, reinforcing individualistic values and dampening demands for state redistribution. The 2010 debt crisis, the ensuing austerity measures, and a comprehensive property reform designed to attract capital and financialise housing effectively dismantled the post-war social contract around homeownership. Overindebtedness and housing repossessions escalated, rents soared, households were priced out of homeownership and traditional sources of resilience were depleted; a crisis of social reproduction ensued. I approach property as a dimension of governmentality. In each historical period, a prevalent propertied subject position was put forth as the model citizen, in tune to the dominant mode of accumulation and its conception of value: the individualistic, resourceful, self-responsible, homeowning noikokyraios, to buttress a weak developmentalist state in the 1950s and 1960s; the industrious, social-justice-oriented mikromesaios in the 1980s, to fit a populist narrative of national economic reorientation through petty entrepreneurship; the risk-taking, consumerist, calculative petty investor in the 1990s, when neoliberalisation, capital concentration and financial deregulation took hold; in the 2010s, amid austerity, mass indebtedness and an accumulation by dispossession regime, the dutiful debtor emerged, who tightens the belt and services loans and taxes diligently. I go on to examine actual processes of political subjectivation, whereby contemporary subjects resist, defend or renegotiate the overhauled property relations. Tenants, landlords, overindebted homeowners and squatters, differentially positioned within intensifying processes of exploitation along labour, rent, debt and tax lines, pit social values against market value, and (re)trace lines of antagonism around property. My findings suggest that individualistic dispositions ingrained by the Greek property regime are not conducive to framing housing as a social right, but emerging conflicts point to the potential for a new politicisation of housing beyond the property imperative.
Author: Karyotis, Theodoros
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7045637226