Housing Transformations in Post-Socialist Industrial Cities. The Privatization and Decline of Company Housing in Ostrava and Zlín

This article analyses housing transformations in post-socialist industrial cities through a comparative study of Ostrava and Zlín — two contrasting cases shaped by distinct industrial, environmental, and urban legacies. It argues that the privatization of company and municipal housing in the 1990s represented not merely a transfer of assets but a structural transformation that linked housing commodification with ownership fragmentation and a weakening of public authority. In Ostrava, large-scale portfolio (“package”) sales created a hybrid tenure regime — a mosaic of small owners and surviving housing cooperatives alongside a dominant institutional landlord — reinforcing socio-spatial polarization and locking former workers’ colonies into cycles of decline. In Zlín, a more managed, tenant-oriented privatization consolidated a “city of owners,” stabilizing residential environments yet dispersing decision-making and eroding the architectural coherence of modernist (Baťa and socialist) housing estates through individualized alterations. Based on archival sources, census data, and long-term field research, the study shows how divergent industrial and environmental legacies produced distinct, path-dependent trajectories that continue to shape both the limits of coordinated housing governance and the current challenges of urban renewal and affordability. This manuscript is a preprint and has not yet undergone peer review. It is intended for submission to an internationalpeer-reviewed journal. Version 1.0