Selling out the city: property rights as a locus of class struggle in post-austerity Lisbon

Shawn Nichols

Chapter 6 in Resisting the Financialization of Housing, 2026, pp 73-85 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Just over a decade ago, the city of Lisbon stood as a symbol of the economic devastation wrought by the Eurozone crisis. After accepting loans from the ‘Troika’, the Portuguese government adopted a series of reforms to attract foreign capital into the country's built environment. As capital flooded the market, residential buildings were increasingly converted into short-term rentals (STRs), followed by rising prices, evictions, and displacement. Under intense pressure to address the crisis, Portuguese policymakers adopted a series of policies prioritizing market-based incentives over regulations capable of meaningfully addressing the issues. This chapter asserts that such a strategy has relied on a particular conception of property rights and the selection of a particular set of legal principles to support it. Moreover, it contends that the boundaries of property rights are the site of intense class struggle and should be the focus of efforts to combat the financialization of housing and the proliferation of STRs it engenders.

Keywords: Critical political economy; Financialization; Housing; Short-term rentals; Property rights; Transnational capital (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026
ISBN: 9781035379637
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.elgaronline.com/doi/10.4337/9781035379644.00013 (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 403 Forbidden

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:elg:eechap:25122_6

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from
http://www.e-elgar.com

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Chapters from Edward Elgar Publishing
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Jack Sweeney ().