Feminist housing policy, including the demand for socialization, should not be viewed as an additional adjustment to existing housing policy instruments. Rather, it strives for a structural transformation of social reproduction relations. This shift in perspective moves the focus from market power to social reproduction, from heteronormative household norms to collective care arrangements, and from protecting private property to exercising democratic control over housing, as Paulina Domke and Janne Martha Lentz argue in their contribution to the “Deep Democracy” series.
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Housing is a basic human need, but it is also much more than that. It provides the foundation for social reproduction – the essential care work that makes our everyday lives possible and keeps societies functioning. FLINTA* individuals continue to perform the majority of this unpaid care work – many hours more than men every day – from raising children to housework to caregiving.
This gender inequality has its roots in the bourgeois division of public and private spaces since the 19th century. While men worked and engaged in politics ‘outside’ in the public sphere, women were rendered invisible in the home, the domain of social reproduction. Care work and responsibility for it were portrayed as ‘naturally female.’
The intertwining of patriarchy and capitalism has enabled the social and monetary devaluation of care work. Most care work remains unpaid, and where it is paid, it is often poorly remunerated and linked to precarious working conditions. Accordingly, housing – both as an everyday practice and as an economic good – and the organization of care work are closely intertwined.
Gender-specific power over housing
In the current housing crisis, with skyrocketing rents, a nationwide shortage of 1.4 million affordable apartments, and the displacement of people with low and middle incomes, affordable housing has become a critical issue. FLINTA* individuals are particularly hard hit: due to unpaid care work and their tendency to be in lower-paying or part-time jobs, they have lower incomes and consequently lower pensions. They also comprise over 80% of single parents who must pay for housing for several household members on a single income. The scarcity of affordable housing is also a key security issue. Due to the shortage of adequate shelters, many FLINTA* individuals remain in violent dependency relationships. Additionally, there is a gender imbalance in the distribution of capital and real estate ownership. This manifests as gender-specific power and decision-making authority over housing.
Caregivers depend heavily on the accessibility of places important to their everyday lives and care work, such as daycare centers, schools, and doctors’ offices, as well as on proximity to care networks. Without good access to care infrastructure, caregiving becomes much more difficult. Intersectional disadvantages, such as having a foreign-sounding name, wearing a hijab, or having other markers of social exclusion, exacerbate these burdens in the housing market and during the housing search in a country like Germany. The result is often the displacement of FLINTA* individuals with low incomes to the outskirts of the city or surrounding areas, or the loss of housing through evictions, followed by emergency accommodations or homelessness.
Pressure on social reproduction
Therefore, we consider the housing issue to be fundamentally a feminist issue. It has been and continues to be addressed by feminist movements in their struggle against exploitation and oppression. However, this fundamental connection between housing and care work is often overlooked in political and academic discourse on affordable housing. In the neoliberal social order, housing is negotiated as a question of supply, demand, and price – a commodity on a market increasingly dominated by global financial investors who see housing primarily as a safe investment opportunity with high expected returns rather than as an essential base for coping with everyday care work. The social and gender inequalities exacerbated by the financialization of housing remain hidden. Thus, the housing market becomes a reflection of social power asymmetries, in which care work is individualized, privatized, and made invisible.
From a feminist perspective, the housing issue highlights structural inequality. This perspective reveals that housing is a political arena in which reproductive labor becomes visible and negotiable. Where and how people live largely determines their ability to care, as well as their social participation, autonomy, and quality of life. In the context of the current polycrisis, which puts enormous pressure on social reproduction, it becomes clear that housing is not only an individual need but also a collective challenge and a central arena for socio-political struggles. Without affordable and adequate housing, the ability to care, both individually and collectively, is compromised as time, energy, and resources are tied up in coping with a precarious housing situation. In the long term, this burden severely limits the ability of those affected to participate in democratization struggles. Housing thus becomes a question of social justice and democratic agency. A feminist perspective on housing calls for a radical rethink, shifting the focus from housing as a market commodity to housing as fundamental infrastructure for social reproduction.
Standards and contradictions in social housing construction
Against this backdrop, the construction of new social housing is often celebrated as the answer to the housing crisis. As a state instrument, social housing supposedly provides and distributes housing outside of market logic, cushions economic inequalities, and ensures a minimum level of housing quality for participation and care work. Social housing is intended to provide economically disadvantaged groups with access to adequate living spaces. However, upon closer inspection, it becomes apparent that social housing provides only limited adequate living space, both quantitatively and qualitatively.
Cities such as Hamburg exemplify how expired social commitments and unequal new construction have led to a severe shortage of social housing (approximately 80,000 apartments for around 643,000 eligible households). At the same time, social housing is planned and allocated according to criteria that are strongly influenced by traditional ideals of the heteronormative nuclear family. These institutional norms, far removed from the diverse realities of life, stabilize inequalities rather than reducing them. Such standardized housing policies determine not only who receives social housing but also how these apartments are designed.
This discrepancy means that many people with care responsibilities, especially single mothers, are confronted with a shortage of affordable social housing, forcing them to ‘take what they can get’ – if they can find an available unit at all – and live in substandard housing that makes their caregiving more difficult. Floor plans, apartment sizes, amenities, accessibility, and location determine which caregiving practices are possible and which are limited by spatial constraints. A lack of elevators, cramped living conditions, and peripheral locations do not have an additive effect; rather, they have a cumulative effect. They condense care work spatially and prolong travel times to daycare centers, schools, and social contacts. Forced relocation to other parts of the city (e.g., due to unavailable social housing in their own neighborhood) undermines informal support networks.
Unequal democratic subjectification
Thus, everyday care work becomes increasingly individualized and exhausting. Hamburg’s current social housing allocation guidelines, which stipulate “as many rooms as there are people,” force caregivers, e.g., single FLINTA* parents, to choose between living rooms, bedrooms, and shared children’s rooms, regardless of the children’s age differences. Their own needs are often put on hold in favor of the children. Therefore, care practices are not solely an individual decision but often the result of housing policy and architectural constraints that distribute care resources, such as living space, according to gender, class, and other axes of inequality.
This reduces quality of life and ties up time, attention, and energy in the daily struggle to cope with scarcity. Thus, the housing question is a question of unequal democratic subjectification. As a result, political articulation, collective organization, and democratization struggles are structurally impeded. After all, those who must constantly fight for living space can only exercise their democratic rights to a limited extent.
Socialization as a feminist vision
Inadequate housing policies are making it increasingly clear that we need solutions beyond the market. These solutions must remove housing from the logic of profit and enable needs-based organization to bring about long-term change. Socialization initiatives, such as Deutsche Wohnen & Co. enteignen in Berlin and its sister initiative, Hamburg Enteignet, are particularly significant in this regard. These initiatives address not only rent prices but also property ownership as a central control mechanism for social reproduction. They explicitly embrace a feminist approach to socialization.
These initiatives call for the expropriation and socialization of large, profit-oriented housing companies’ housing stock (in Berlin, companies with over 3,000 apartments and in Hamburg, companies with over 500 residential units). The apartments would then be transferred to a public-law institution that would manage them as a public utility and could not be privatized. The initiatives also call for social rents, democratic co-determination by tenants, employees, and urban society, and affordable rents and needs-based distribution. This will make a large stock of housing available for public, welfare-oriented administration, moving away from the scarcity that hits discriminated persons, such as FLINTA*, the hardest.
Beyond capitalist and heteronormative logic
Qualitatively, it enables the distribution and conversion of housing according to care needs rather than capitalist and heteronormative logic. Examples include organized apartment exchange programs that adapt to changing life situations; retreat spaces for care; age-appropriate floor plans; barrier-free locations; and good connections to daycare centers, schools, and medical practices. These features allow housing to adapt dynamically to care needs rather than trapping people in economically inefficient or stressful living situations. Social rents reduce economic dependencies, especially in violent or financially asymmetrical relationships. Secure tenancies, free from the threat of eviction, are a prerequisite for leaving patriarchal relationships of dependency. Public administration enables targeted and transparent occupancy management. Quotas can be provided for new rentals for structurally disadvantaged groups, such as people affected by violence, single parents, homeless individuals, and people with disabilities.
These initiatives challenge the market-based and patriarchal logic of treating housing as an investment product by recognizing it as a social right. Through democratic tenant management, housing is distributed according to individual and collective care needs rather than linked to individual income or family norms. The closer decisions are made to tenants’ concrete realities, the more their reproductive needs can be taken into account. At the same time, participation must be designed so that it does not create additional burdens, especially for FLINTA*. Socialization is more than a rental policy intervention; it establishes the foundation for reproductive justice in the housing sector and fosters emancipated care communities. Through tenant self-management, patriarchal structures can be broken down, and housing can become a solidarity-based public service. This conflictual nature is precisely what makes socialization a radically democratic practice.
Feminist housing policy for systemic change
Feminist housing policy, including the demand for socialization, should not be viewed as an additional adjustment to existing housing policy instruments. Rather, it strives for a structural transformation of social reproduction relations. This shift in perspective moves the focus from market power to social reproduction, from heteronormative household norms to collective care arrangements, and from protecting private property to exercising democratic control over housing.
Socialization involves decommodification and deconventionalization, opening up the possibility of organizing housing as a democratically configurable infrastructure of social reproduction. Rather than being the property of individuals, housing becomes a common good that replaces capitalist, patriarchal norms with democratic, needs-based planning. In this sense, feminist housing policy contributes to the radical democratization of social infrastructure by insisting that housing be distributed and politically shaped based on how societies want to care for one another.