Paper Short Abstract:

While hegemonic social norms individualize responsibility for mortgage debts, Eastern European mortgage subsidy schemes socialize them at the national community level. Lived experiences and social histories of housing debt in Slovakia are explored to understand the policies’ premises and promises.

Paper Abstract:

Since the Global Financial Crisis, governments across Eastern Europe introduced distinctive schemes of mortgage loan subsidies that tend to target younger families and include incentives for childbearing. Recently, soaring interest rates due to the global inflation surge gave additional impetus to such policies, which their opponents criticize as populist, unfair, wasteful and counterproductive. Building on fieldwork in Bratislava, Slovakia in 2011–2022 and archival data, this paper explores lived experiences and social histories of housing-related debt to understand the premises and promises of these schemes. Middle-class mortgage debt rarely develops into outright personal crises, but many debtors still experience it as a heavy material and existential burden, intensified by Slovakia’s housing regime and economic setting. While hegemonic social norms individualize and privatize the responsibility for mortgage debts, the policies push in the opposite direction and aim at its selective socialization at the level of the national community, in addition to its widespread embedding in familial relationships. This principle and specific elements of these schemes draw on local socialist and postsocialist legacies of integrating household lending with welfare and demographic policies, as embodied especially by the hugely popular “marriage loans” of late Czechoslovak socialism. However, compared to such socialist policies, the logic of the current schemes is fundamentally altered by the relations of private finance and housing that they depend on and reproduce, and their potential to achieve community building is also limited by the constellation of mortgage debt, party politics and class relations in contemporary Slovakia in which they emerge.