Consumption loans consuming homes: intersections of housing precarity and personal overindebtedness

Housing precarity as a condition referring to housing insecurity and unaffordability has been on the rise over the last decade across Europe and beyond. While various studies discuss the character of housing precarity and its links to (subprime) mortgage loans, the role of specific moral economies of debt in enacting housing policies which reinforce housing precarity is less developed in relation to other kinds of loans or the experience of debt enforcement. This article analyses fifty narrative interviews—thirty with debtors and twenty with institutional actors—and employs a processual methodology to highlight the performativity of personal debt and local housing policies. Performativity, enacted and modulated by moral economies of effort, (un)deservingness and (ir)responsibility, contributes to the remaking of housing precarity among indebted people, creating a vicious housing precarity-indebtedness loop. In the conclusion, we highlight the contingent and selective application of local housing policies which exclude the overindebted from municipal housing and discuss possible political and policy actions for overcoming the housing governance which generates this precarity.