Paper short abstract:

In postsocialist Croatia, privileged access to mortgages has driven the emergence of a "new" property-owning middle class while consequences of predatory lending simultaneously marked it as "squeezed". Its relationship to the state is thus pervaded by a sense of discontent as well as entitlement.

Paper long abstract:

Recent anthropological work notes a complex relationship between mortgaged homeownership and the middle class understood as the asset-owning class. Financialization is seen as fueling the rise of “new”, upwardly mobile middle classes in the Global South while destabilizing their “squeezed” counterparts in the North. The unique articulation between mortgaged homeownership provision and the middle class in Croatia does not fit neatly either of the established accounts. In socialist Yugoslavia, a “middle stratum” defined in terms of education and profession was associated with the use of public housing rather than homeownership. The link between mortgaged homeownership and the middle class has emerged with the shift to a a “superhomeownership” housing regime in the postsocialist period. This initially took an implicit form of credit scoring models and state housing subsidy programmes that gave the middle class privileged access to mortgages, in particular during the 2000s mortgage and housing boom. The link started to be explicitly articulated after the boom when consequences of predatory lending became visible and a wider public narrative about the Croatian middle class as the victim of post-boom recession and austerity emerged. Croatia’s first boom-bust cycle of mortgage finance has thus made the middle class a property-owning class, but also, depending on context, a threatened, contestational or uncertain class. Its relationship to the state is pervaded by a sense of discontent as well as legitimate entitlement. Distressed mortgagors developed an institutional brand of activism and politics while the wider middle class is being recruited for various political projects.