ARTICLES The ‘Housing Question’ and the State-Socialist Answer: City, Class and State Remaking in 1950s Bucharest LIVIU CHELCEA Abstract Housing nationalization as a solution to urban inequalities has a long history in European social thought. This article describes housing nationalization in a state-socialist context. Using a political economy perspective and relying on recently released archival material about housing in 1950s Romania, I argue that nationalization may be regarded as a special type of urban process. Nationalization raised the occupancy rate and intensified the usage of existing housing, desegregated centrally located neighborhoods, turned some residential space into office space for state institutions, facilitated the degradation of the existing housing stock and gradually produced a socialist gentry. Aside from similarities with other state-socialist nationalizations from the same period, Romanian nationalization resembled the housing policies of other statist regimes. The data also suggest that, even in the context of revolutionary change, the state is a sum of multiple, often diverging projects, rather than a coherent actor. Introduction: housing nationalization and urban political economy theory Property relations were a key area of intervention for Soviet-type states. Although there were differences between these regimes, they all privileged state and collective ownership of various productive resources and forms of wealth (Verdery, 2003: chapter 1), including housing. This article provides an overview of the history of housing nationalization projects and an in-depth analysis of a city that underwent this process during the late 1940s and early 1950s. It aims to answer several questions: How did a pre-socialist city become socialist? What was the relation between state-socialist political economy (Szelenyi, 1983; Kornai, 1992; Verdery, 1996) and the social organization of cities during housing nationalization? What effects did the nationalization of capital goods (factories, retail, transportation, etc.) and urban housing have on the city, its classes and its buildings? How might nationalization inform urban theory? This work was supported by National Science Foundation, Award BCS-0108872 for 2001–03, an SSRC-IDFR fellowship, 2001–03 and by CNCSIS –UEFISCSU, project number PNII — IDEI code 1888/2008. Exploratory research was supported by the Department of Anthropology, University of Michigan. I thank Katherine Verdery for her many suggestions and comments on this research, as well as Gillian Feeley-Harnik, Thomas Trautmann, Andrew Shyrock, Patty Mullally, Jonathan Larson, Krisztina Fehervary, Bruce O’Neill, Norbert Petrovici and Vera Marin. Finally, I thank the IJURR reviewers for their insightful comments. Volume 36.2 March 2012 281–96 International Journal of Urban and Regional Research DOI:10.1111/j.1468-2427.2011.01049.x © 2011 Urban Research Publications Limited. Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main St, Malden, MA 02148, USA