In New Warsaw Mortgage credit and the unfolding of space and time

Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted between 2010 and 2013, this essay explores the everyday life of those with mortgage credit in owner-occupied homes of Warsaw, Poland and its suburbs. Mortgages have become available and popular in postsocialist Poland only recently, giving rise to a historically novel set of sensibilities, aspirations and anxieties. This essay shows how mortgage credit makes a world for mortgagors that is ordered through space and time. The first section, 'Spaces of aspiration', connects the history of Warsaw's housing crunch with contemporary middle-class desires for more spacious homes. The proliferation of mortgages unfolded more space and enabled mortgagors to pursue self-transformation by means of interior design and furnishing. Enacting a break with the past, those deemed creditworthy manipulated sensuous materialities in order to align themselves with emerging forms of middle-class citizenship. The second section, 'Mortgage time', proceeds from the observation that alongside brick and mortar, the currency of the mortgage contracts constitutes an inextricable aspect of a mortgaged home. That currency - in many cases the Swiss franc rather than the Polish zloty - exerts a futural pull in the everyday life of young mortgagors as they come to experience their adulthood through notions of predictable, middle-class career embedded in 30-year-long contracts. The unforeseen 2008-2011 appreciation of the franc against the zloty, which plunged many into negative equity, suggests that the good life with mortgage credit emerges from the rare fortuitous confluence between market rhythms and biographical rhythms. Taken together, observations on spatial and temporal orders fostered by the Swiss franc mortgage point to the emergence of 'the pro-cyclical everyday', a space-time expanding and constricting with the booms and busts of the markets.