Liquid homeownership: Navigating future horizons to turn homeownership into assets in Bucharest, Romania

Abstract

This article examines the financialization and assetization of housing in an Eastern European context by focusing on the specific temporally bounded financial strategies to maintain housing as an asset and vehicle for social reproduction. It proposes the concept of liquid homeownership to account for the varied associations of housing with liquidity and the expectations of future increased exchange value that play an essential role in shaping financial decisions in the present. Drawing on ethnographic research in Bucharest, the article argues that upper‐middle‐class mortgage borrowers strategize their leveraged housing investment by navigating between two future horizons. To ensure that housing is an asset in the long term, mortgage borrowers prefer to evacuate the long‐term of the mortgage contract through medium‐term financial strategies of early repayment. Given the importance attributed to future liquidity from homeownership for providing for old age or securing children's future, the article argues that liquid homeownership, at least for ordinary homebuyers, is a reflection less of short‐term financial interest and more of a long‐term social reproduction need, pointing to the complex intermix of financial calculations and domestic concerns in the context of financialization of housing.