Housing informality in Europe: understanding how Roma move away from precarious housing through informal practices

Housing scholarship pays specific attention to how current housing regimes enable certain households to accumulate wealth through homeownership while relegating others to residualised rental sectors. These asset and post-welfare-oriented perspectives obscure the realities of those who are formally or informally homeowners but whose dwellings are precarious, under-serviced, and (largely) disconnected from housing asset markets. This is particularly evident for Romanian Roma. This article reorients attention from the supply side of housing regimes towards the consumption side, examining the practices through which marginalised Roma pursue informal housing pathways, often in opposition to state strategies of substandard housing provision. Drawing on long-term engagement with ten case studies of informal settlements in Romania (2013–2025), we combine qualitative data (interviews and observations) with remote sensing to track changes in informality over the last decade. The cases span urban and rural ghettos, short-lived and long-term slums, and ascending and descending pathways, showing how Roma tactics of self-building, densification, and informal income strategies generate tangible improvements to housing – that nonetheless remains vulnerable to eviction. Scrutinising the dynamics involved in Roma housing informality allow us to deepen housing regime and pathways literatures. We use De Certeau’s distinction between strategies and tactics as our analytical lens and thereby cast informality as a site of tactical agency within a racialised housing regime oriented to financialisation and wealth accumulation.