A tale of property ownership and murder

Had the death of Zak Kostopoulos in central Athens on 21 September 2018 not been recorded on video, it would have gone unnoticed by the general public: another marginal city youth, a drug addict who attempts armed robbery of a jewellery store at a rough city area and loses his life in the process. Or so the news reports went initially. Soon, witnesses and videos surfaced that told a different story: Zak had entered the store unarmed, fleeing an altercation in a nearby restaurant. The store owner, aided by a real estate broker who kept shop nearby, is seen viciously kicking the defenceless young man, who laid on the floor trying to crawl out of the store. When he achieved it, policemen attacked him anew. He was taken to the hospital handcuffed, only to be pronounced dead.

The shocking episode of public lynching caused widespread protest and the condemnation of practices of self-redress by human rights defenders. The public discussion on who was the victim and who was the perpetrator went on for long, revolving around the concept of the noikokyraios, a term roughly translating as householder, denoting the average conservative property-owning citizen. Zak was everything his respectable, householding killers were not: an HIV-positive queer rights activist, who worked nights as a drag queen; his mere presence at the store triggered a violent reaction that culminated in murder. Conservative news outlets and influencers clung onto the armed robbery story and justified the right of the shop owner to defend his property using violence; some even stressed the deceased’s identity as a marginal queer youth as self-evident proof of his culpability. Critics countered that the egotistic, prejudiced and small-minded nature of the householder identity is potentially murderous and at the root of social ills.

How has the subject of property, and residential property at that, become embroiled in this seemingly unrelated dispute over social mores, criminality, justice and murder? The incident described above took place in the context of the 2010s debt crisis and its ensuing austerity adjustment, which provoked a chain reaction of political, social, economic and moral crises, whereby dominant values were discredited and destabilised, and deep social divisions surfaced. The resignification of property and its attendant values was one point of contention. At the height of the crisis in 2013, comedian and political commentator Thymios Kalamoukis took a swing at the figure of the average propertied family man, the noikokyraios, the householder:

Householders are responsible for our bad fate. They are the kind of people who vote for those who promise them the most. Reckless, spineless, small-time swindlers who sell out to the highest bidder without blinking an eyelid. Minding their own business, sucking up to the powerful, uncultured, uneducated, motivated by nothing but their own petty interest, indifferent to the general good. Commenting from the other side of the political spectrum, Yale professor Stathis Kalyvas reminisced about the times when the word had only positive connotations:

[Householders were] moderate, modest, hardworking, austere people, who valued saving more than consumption, and investment in their children more than the satisfaction of their desires. They had manners and principles, respected hierarchies, visited the church regularly, were respectful of tradition and suspicious towards innovation. Conservative in their values, they were the backbone of a society that attempted the great leap of development.

Indeed, it is only by reference to small property and its related values that we can make sense of Greece’s post-WWII “great leap of development”, that is, a project of accelerated industrialisation, whereby the country found its competitive advantage in cheap labour. Unable and unwilling to establish a redistributive welfare state, as other countries were doing at the time, Greece turned to a model of generalised homeownership as a guarantee of welfare. This was pursued through a system of informal, bottom-up urbanisation model resting on familial self-provision, with minimal state involvement. Therefore, the construction of the self-interested home-owning subject, the noikokyraios, was integral to the operation of Greek capitalism. Through individualist – or, rather, familist – self-initiative, proletarians were integrated into the social mainstream by being turned into small property owners. Real estate property signified a ticket to the middle class, a factor of egalitarianism and a means of value accumulation for households through constant land price appreciation. Real estate assets become a guarantee of welfare and financial security for the family unit, to compensate for the precarity of the labour market and the absence of state welfare. Out of the class strife of the previous decades, a new middle-class subject was born, hard-working, self-reliant and disciplined, demanding not collective social change, but individual – or, again, familial – social mobility. Homeownership in this sense was a project of nationalist normalisation, the creation of the normative citizen defined against a constitutive outside: the communist, the ethnic other, the homosexual, etc.

The model of generalised property ownership is today under attack, as austerity and the shrinking of incomes have blocked all avenues to homeownership, and owing to a prolonged non-performing loan crisis, homeowners are being massively dispossessed, losing their homes to large financial actors. The slow violence of dispossession and displacement is met with attempts to reject and renegotiate the role of property on the part of social actors, but also often with the reassertion of propertarian identities centred on individualistic rent-seeking; this is tied to a backlash against the threatening, wasteful, parasitic “other”, of which the justification of self-redress in the murder of Zak is an extreme but not atypical example. Despite the conviction of Zak’s killers in 2022, a large part of society is hardening its stance against everyone perceived as an outsider, as attested by the predominance of nationalist, xenophobic and racist policies and narratives.

Slow violence
Financialisation