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This chapter situates the housing affordability crisis spreading in different European countries within the political economy of neoliberal capitalism and as a core dimension of the European polycrisis. To this aim, a critical political economy framework is developed to analyse the structural, social, and political dimensions of the housing affordability crisis. The chapter thus reconstructs the conflicts and crisis-prone tendencies of residential capitalism, as the premise to investigate neoliberal housing policy and its tensions. According to this perspective, the current housing crisis must be analysed as the disruption of a homeownership-led hegemonic project which served as a pillar of the broader neoliberal hegemonic offensive. The limits in the housing reform agendas that emerged in the wake of the pandemic point to the structural difficulties in steering a viable political mediation between the dominant rent-extraction logic in residential capitalism and the need for housing as a primary condition for social reproduction.

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eng

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