Up to 30 percent of the country’s housing stock was nationalized during socialism, but less than 2 percent of housing is public today.130 This means that the very concept of social housing has been gentrified out of the public imaginary—but not for all. Upon restitution, many evictees advocate for social housing alternatives. This, they argue, would be better than winding up h ouseless or in a shelter. While shelters are better than nothing, they often segregate families by gender and sever communities. There are also far too few. Irina Zamfirescu and Liviu Chelcea observe that in Bucharest, there were 22,000 applications for social housing in 2017, but only twenty apartments available.131 Contexts such as this have animated the p olitical strategies of housing justice collectives such as the Frontul Comun pentru Dreptul la Locuire (fcdl/Common Front for the Right to Housing) in Bucharest and Căși Sociale acum! in Cluj,132 both advocating for dignified social housing production and against racist restitution evictions.
damn