Cluj-Napoca

Romanian law already has room for housing cooperatives. The Law on Cooperation of 2005 lists the societate cooperativă de locuințe (a housing cooperative society) among its forms. It is defined as an association of people formed to build, buy, conserve, renovate and administer homes for its members. No member-share mechanism or limited-equity rule has grown up around it, because the form has hardly been used. What every Cluj block does have is an asociație de proprietari (an owners' association). It manages the stairwells, roofs and heating risers together, but each household owns its flat outright and can sell it at the market price.

The history explains the gap. Cluj grew fastest in the 1960s and 1970s, when the state housed incoming workers in large estates such as Mănăștur and Gheorgheni. The city's own strategy work found that about three quarters of its blocks date from before 2000, and three quarters of residents live in them. Decree-Law 61/1990 then let sitting tenants buy those flats cheaply. By the 2011 census, 98% of the city's dwellings were privately owned. Even the public rentals built for young people after 1998 by ANL (the National Housing Agency) could be bought by their tenants, draining the one non-market tier the country had rebuilt.

The actors who push for non-market housing today fall into three clusters, and they face different obstacles. The first is public delivery: City Hall and ADI Zona Metropolitană Cluj (the intercommunity association of the city and its communes), which buy and build social homes with EU and Norwegian money. Their constraint is cost, because every flat is bought or built at Cluj prices. The second is a housing-justice movement led by Căși sociale ACUM! (Social Housing NOW!), with its tenants' group Vocea Chiriașilor (Tenants' Voice), and the Cluj Tenants' Association. Its fight is over access: who is eligible, and whether evicted Roma families are shut out. The third is research at Babeș-Bolyai University, where sociologists such as Norbert Petrovici and Enikő Vincze have mapped the city's housing divide for more than a decade. None of them is a cooperative, and none is building one.

Organisation in focus

ADI Zona Metropolitană Cluj (Cluj Metropolitan Area Intercommunity Development Association)

Implements metropolitan social‑inclusion and social‑housing projects such as Pata‑Cluj, Pata 2, Cluj4Home.

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Organisation in focus

Căși sociale ACUM! (Social Housing NOW!)

Cluj's housing-justice campaign for a larger public and social stock.

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Policy frames non-market housing as a safety net rather than a tenure. The municipal strategy speaks of social homes for the poorest and support with rent for others. Nationally, the offer to the middle is ANL rentals for people under 35 and state-backed mortgages to buy. Cooperatives appear in neither. That leaves the politics to decide whether the public stock stays a last resort or becomes a route into the city for teachers, nurses and graduates.

Emil Boc, a former prime minister who has been mayor since 2012, answers the crisis by buying and building social homes one block at a time. The city's strategy for its social stock aims at about 475 social homes at maturity, with 350 new units planned for 2026 to 2030. A block of 35 social homes is rising on Sobarilor Street. The city also buys flats on the open market and pays households in difficulty up to €300 a month towards rent. On 28 July 2026 the Local Council approved LOCUS (Housing, Opportunities and Sustainable Urban Cohesion). It will buy 50 homes for families from Pata Rât for 30 million lei, almost all of it EU money.

The levers sit unevenly across three tiers. Bucharest sets the Housing Law of 1996, which defines who qualifies for a social home, and funds ANL's youth rentals. It adopted a National Housing Strategy to 2050 in 2022. Yet the country has the smallest social stock in the EU. A Friedrich Ebert Foundation data brief counts 16,290 social homes, 0.17% of all dwellings, against more than 40,000 applications. The metropolitan association carries the EU and Norwegian projects across municipal borders, and the city holds the land, the permits and its own budget. It is also the city that sets the allocation rules, and those are now contested in court. In June 2026 the Bucharest Court of Appeal ruled that Cluj's permanent exclusion of anyone once labelled an "abusive occupant" indirectly discriminates against Roma families. The city is appealing.

From our library

Problema locuirii în România: Cererile de locuințe sociale sunt de 2,5 ori mai mari decât fondul locativ social existent

Romania's social housing is the EU's smallest at 0.17%, yet faces over 40,000 applications.

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From our library

Romanian Court of Appeal Rules Cluj-Napoca Housing Policy Indirectly Discriminates Against Roma

The 2026 ruling that Cluj's social-housing exclusion rule discriminates against Roma.

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No programme supports cooperatives, so the instruments on the table are municipal ones. The 2021-2030 housing strategy, drafted with Bogdan Suditu of the University of Bucharest and World Bank experts, proposes an urbanisation levy on large private developments. It would need a change in national law. Until then, developers win permits by handing the city roads, bridges and nurseries, a cost that buyers end up carrying. Campaigners want the city to go further. At a public debate on the crisis in 2018, the tenants' association proposed a quota of below-market homes in every large development and a cap on rent rises.

On vacancy, the city's main tool is fiscal. Since 2016, owners who let buildings decay pay a property-tax surcharge of up to 500%. By the end of 2025 1,088 buildings had been restored, though the city collected under 15% of the fines it issued. The measure restores facades; it does not turn empty space into homes. Activists have asked for that step, pointing to an empty railway building on Cantonului Street beside an overcrowded settlement and demanding that idle state property be handed to the city for social housing.

Climate targets run through the same stock. In 2023 Cluj won the EU Mission label for its plan to become climate-neutral by 2030, one of the first 10 cities to receive it. Its bid for Recovery and Resilience funds covered 40 apartment blocks with 2,164 flats for thermal retrofit. Because almost every flat is privately owned, each retrofit needs an owners' association to agree and co-finance it. That makes the public stock the easiest place to meet energy targets, and it is still the smallest.

Pata-Cluj, the pilot that ADI Zona Metropolitană Cluj ran from 2014 to 2017, was the first attempt to undo the segregation at Pata Rât. More than 1,500 people lived in about 400 households around the landfill, most of them Roma. The European Urban Initiative's case study counts 35 families, 143 people moved into flats in Apahida, Florești and Baciu, twelve of them newly built in Apahida and 23 bought. The method outlasted the money: a participatory way of allocating social homes, shaped by the families' own needs rather than a top-down list.

From our library

Housing for the vulnerable and most deprived in Cluj Metropolitan Area

Case study reveals 35 families relocated, 143 individuals supported, aiming to dissolve Pata Rat by 2030.

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Pata 2, the follow-up funded by the 2014-2021 EEA and Norway Grants, scaled the method. It planned 63 social homes for 61 families and two emergency flats, with support after each move. The Municipality of Bergen partnered on it, and Cluj staff trained in Bergen on building and running social housing.

Cluj4Home, a joint project of City Hall and the metropolitan association, applies the same matching to low-income households across the city. It spent 5 million lei from the local budget on flats bought on the open market. Each home was matched to the family's size, ages, disabilities and ties to relatives. Six families received their keys on 29 December 2025. Across the earlier projects, 123 families from Pata Rât have moved into social homes. LOCUS and the Sobarilor Street block extend that pipeline to 2030.

Căși sociale ACUM! is the movement that keeps the pressure on. It took shape in the years after the Coastei Street eviction and brings Romanian, Hungarian and Roma activists together. In 2021 it asked the city to house all 222 applicants it had declared eligible, recalling that more than 270 social homes were allocated in 2008. Its core demand, that evicted families not be shut out of social housing, was upheld in 2026 on complaints brought by the European Roma Rights Centre and the Centre for Legal Resources. Through Vocea Chiriașilor it now organises private tenants as well.

Asociația Chiriașilor Cluj (the Cluj Tenants' Association) gave renters a voice in the country's most expensive city. Its founders documented raises imposed "because that is the market" and leases never registered. They called on universities to build dormitories, noting that Babeș-Bolyai's student numbers had tripled in 15 years while dormitory places lagged. Their proposals, a quota of new homes returning to public ownership and limits on rent rises, remain on the table.

Together these projects answer the headline only in part. Cluj has learned to buy, match and support tenants one family at a time, and to defend their access in court. What it has not yet built is a non-market home for the students, researchers and young workers who fill its lecture halls and festival fields.