Precarious housing and the crisis of social reproduction: Towards a feminist political economy of rural working-class housing

Abstract This article explores the relationship between housing precarity and social reproduction in particularly peripheral rural regions in Germany, examining how ‘post-productive’ economic change, financialisation, touristification, and increased in-migration of urban middle-class households impact the living, working, and housing conditions of working-class households. Employing a feminist political economy of housing framework, it analyses how transformations in rural housing markets exacerbate class- and gender-based inequalities, deepening the crisis of social reproduction, particularly for the feminised rural working class. Key themes include the lack of affordable housing, internal peripherisation, increasing commuting distances between home, workplace, and infrastructure, weakened social networks, and the rising intensity of gendered reproductive labour. The qualitative study draws on 51 interviews with working-class individuals affected by poverty and 29 expert interviews conducted in two peripheral regions in Eastern and Western Germany. The findings highlight that housing precarity in rural areas is a structural feature of capitalist development more generally, with the housing crisis constituting a central dimension of the crisis of social reproduction for the rural working class, simultaneously facilitating and intensifying it.