Housing (for) a post-growth world: A manifesto
Housing (for) a post-growth world: A manifesto
Providing housing for all is central to building any future. Yet, the system put in place to deliver housing globally has been relentlessly driven by growth imperatives. The consequences are far reaching: unhealthy, unsafe, overcrowded, over- or underheated, and inadequate housing, which is paralleled by the soaring greenhouse gas emissions and biodiversity loss tied to the construction and operation of buildings.
We are a group of practitioners, activists, and researchers who came together at the 2025 International Degrowth Conference to share and discuss efforts towards housing (for) a postgrowth world. We found common ground in four proposals, which challenge the current dominant housing paradigm.
In this manifesto, we reaffirm the well-documented crises that permeate the housing sector, and we set forth a collective vision for housing beyond growth. But we do not stop at critique. We highlight initiatives from across the globe that reveal how people are already building homes rooted in care, equity, and ecological responsibility. This manifesto aims to forge a shared language – one that unites diverse struggles and visions for the future, across geographies and political perspectives. It is a call to action, a framework for solidarity, and a commitment to providing homes that nurture both people and the planet.
1. An ideological shift
Around the world, housing is no longer treated as a basic human need but as a private asset. The ideology of the “property-owning democracy” has entrenched the idea that security, autonomy, and belonging come only through individual ownership — turning it into an alleged right. In the process, housing has been commodified and transformed into an investment vehicle rather than a shared foundation for health and community.
This shift has fuelled the financialisation of housing: credit markets, speculative products, and ever-expanding debt replace public and social housing. Secure, affordable, long-term rental options have been systematically dismantled in the name of ownership. Scarcity and crisis are invoked to justify endless supply-side “solutions,” yet these do little to address inequity in access, or wider issues of displacement and homelessness.
The result is a housing system that produces poor-quality homes, undermines health and well-being, and severs people from place and community. It does little to address the increasing inequalities we are faced with and at the same time ignores the ecological limits we face — the material and resource boundaries that make endless expansion impossible.
Alternative housing narratives need to be reaffirmed around collective well-being, reframing homes as shared resources grounded in care, affordability, and connection to place.
Part of the ideological battle over new narratives is one of language. For example, Spanish housing movements shifted the idea of squatting to “liberating”, from occupying another’s private property, to uncovering the processes through which profit-oriented investors create dispossession of citizens needing housing. Many of these movements are underpinned by a new notion of housing as a commons, challenging the myth of ownership and property as a secure investment and proposing alternative visions of housing as a good that is collective in nature.
Models of housing ownership which directly challenge this notion of individualised property rights have been effective at providing prefigurative models, such as housing co-operatives, and collaborative housing, Community Land Trusts (CLTs), and other forms. But these models have done more than provide homes. They have created new practices of living, new vocabularies of dwelling, new infrastructures of thinking and new narratives drawing on the wide range of experiences around the world.
All these experiences demonstrate the ongoing work of undoing and redoing; of dismantling infrastructures that lock us into destructive social and ecological pathways, while building alternatives rooted in care, equity, and sustainability. By imagining, inventing, or reviving alternative words, concepts, and traditions, these experiments reaffirm that housing is not a commodity. Housing is a commons.
2. Liberate housing from market pressures
Commodified housing distracts from the true purpose of a building: providing a home. Instead of a place to live and care for each other, homes are treated as investments or assets. This fuels financial speculation, driving up prices and rents, ultimately displacing or squeezing people out. This process is increasing at a terrifying pace. Housing affordability and access is undermined, social inequalities are exacerbated, and profit is prioritised over the needs of communities. Commodified housing also incentivises the demolition of existing stock, continuous (re)development and resource-intensive construction, resulting in excessive amounts of material use and waste, increasing impacts on nature, especially declining biodiversity. Commodified housing is catered towards investment rather than people and, thus, disconnects it from principles of collective well-being, embedding social exclusion and ecological degradation into its provision.
Housing needs to be liberated from market pressures and reclaimed as a collective right and ecological responsibility, ensuring homes that nurture communities and care and enable sustainable human-nature relations.
Alternatives to commodified housing that challenge dominant structures of housing provision and address wider social, ecological, and economic concerns need to be more supported. Strategies to liberate housing from market pressures have focused on providing community-oriented, commons-based forms of housing. Successful examples include projects like La Borda in Barcelona, or Kalkbreite in Zürich, as well as umbrella organisations enabling collective ownership like the German Mietshäusersyndikat the National Cooperative Housing Federationsin India, or the South African Abalhali baseMjondolo. Forms of collective land ownership like in community land trusts (CLTs) have demonstrated alternative ways to provide housing by limiting speculation on rising land prices and involving communities and neighbourhoods in decision-making, with examples including the London CLT in the UK, the Voi CLT in Kenya, or the Favela Community Land Trusts in Brazil. Policy frameworks and programmes have supported some of those initiatives in scaling out, by limiting possibilities for profit-oriented investment, providing decommodified housing, strengthening collective and mutual financing programs and balancing out ecological trade-offs of new developments. Examples include the Housing and Development Board in Singapore, the limited-profit housing system in Austria, the Philippines’ Community Mortgage Program or the Amui Dzor Housing Project in Ghana. Both self-organisation and active regulation have been and continue to transform contemporary housing systems, re-organising them around care and sustainable human-nature relations.
3. Redistribution
Access to housing is unequally distributed. Homelessness and temporary accommodation are the tip of the iceberg, creating high economic and social costs. In high and upper-middle income countries, underoccupied, vacant, and second homes fuel an artificial tension between housing demand and the need to limit the environmental impact of residential buildings by reducing, or even halting, construction. As a result, the narrative of an absolute lack of housing units is mobilised to support green growth arguments of having to build ever more — but in an environmentally efficient way. The demolition of existing homes and the introduction of denser, ‘net zero’ buildings into the market are the alleged silver-bullet solution to the housing crisis, disregarding the grey energy encapsulated in the existing stock. As the environment keeps paying the burden of social inequalities, power dynamics between tenures over the quality, distribution, sufficiency, and efficiency of homes are increasingly rendered invisible.
Housebuilding targets need to be based on a just, sufficient, and collectively agreed distribution of the housing stock, focused on enhancing the quality, accessibility, and environmental performance of existing homes.
Across the world, initiatives supporting construction halts are rapidly spreading. A moratorium on new construction has been called for in countries like Switzerland, the UK, and Denmark. Whilst counterintuitive at first glance, these propositions resonate with the lived experiences of communities — including displacement, broken promises, the deterioration of the natural landscape, and the extractivist and destructive practices linked to the construction process and its materials. In parallel, sufficiency strategies are gaining momentum around the world; innovative experiments in Switzerland such as Mehr als Wohnen show how smaller, private spaces can be integrated with collective rooms and shared amenities, lowering costs while offering flexibility throughout the life cycle of a household. Commoning practices have also been implemented in the mutual aid cooperatives of FUCVAM, Uruguay, which have transferred their model to countries across South America. In Germany, flats of empty nesters have been activated via an initiative to address the extremely limited housing options for young and older people. These strategies enable residents to enhance their living conditions whilst embracing post-growth principles.
4. Broaden the focus
Housing issues continue to be addressed in silos. The root causes and consequences span far beyond the housing realm – impacting on health, jobs, education, and community life. The political focus on individual units and their numbers discredits the conceptual, geographical, social, multi-scalar nature of housing. The larger physical and social networks that housing is embedded in is ignored, as well as the struggles that take place at their interface. This fake conceptual boundary weakens the function of housing as an infrastructure, hinders possible alliances between stakeholders, and overlooks the importance of the broader system for its viability.
Housing needs to be reconceptualised as a decentralised infrastructure that extends beyond the individual unit and household, and supporting multi-scalar amenities and alliances.
Housing initiatives worldwide are “rescaling” the housing debate: decentralising housing provision, working in symbiosis with broader systems and their transformation, and mobilising alliances within and beyond housing. Cooperatives like Lilac exemplify a decentralised, care-based living, while highlighting the wider system transformations (in labour, food, and community) integrated and enabled by such models – e.g., valuing time spent in care and mutual support, which are often excluded from dominant economic frameworks. Furthermore, material banks (e.g. the KULeuven Living Lab), self-build homes, and collective housing projects demonstrate ways to work in symbiosis with the social economy and the broader urban system, moving beyond isolated experiments. These processes of “infrastructuring” link housing struggles with wider agendas – such as labour, gender, energy, and food justice – building collective momentum for systemic change. Examples include concrete projects such as the cooperative De Nieuwe Meent in Amsterdam, the activities of Amics del Moviment Quart Món in Barcelona, and movements such as Right-to-the-city initiatives around the world.
This manifesto is only a beginning — it is a call to recognise and unite the struggles for housing in a post-growth world. We invite you to join us in imagining, building, and demanding it.
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Photo credit: Anna Pagani
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Thank you for this article. The tension between housing construction and post-growth narratives is especially compelling to me. In Chicago, large-scale upzoning on the North Side has generated significant division and protest this year. Anti-upzoning activists are frequently labeled NIMBYs and criticized for gatekeeping established neighborhoods. Pro-upzoning advocates, by contrast, champion development strategies which rely heavily on expanded gray infrastructure to meet housing demand, often framing this approach as environmentally progressive. Some “YIMBYs” have even accused “NIMBYs” of racism for resisting increased density and affordable housing initiatives.
On the other side, concerns about gentrification and the displacement of long-standing mom-and-pop businesses are common talking points. Environmental impacts of new construction have also been raised by this camp, but these arguments often seem to fall on deaf ears, as housing imperatives take priority over environmental considerations. I plan to review the initiatives referenced in this report more closely, though I suspect this will be a difficult perspective to advance here in Chicago—and one which will require leadership to meaningfully reckon with, and to adapt any successful European examples to the Chicago context.