3.2. Social Mobilisation and Policy Pushback in Metropolitan Housing
The dismantling of residence-by-investment regimes highlights a critical tension between transnational capital regulation and embedded urban financialisation. While international housing demand is frequently driven by cross-border push and pull factors that channel external liquidity into target metropolitan centres (crossref-10-1201-9781351265805-7, 2018), policy restrictions on direct foreign acquisitions only partially address the domestic transformations wrought by sustained investment regimes. In Portugal, the shift from viewing housing as a fundamental social good to treating residential property as a speculative asset has become deeply institutionalised in local market representations and practices (W4416313197, 2025). Consequently, urban social movements argue that legislative phase-outs of golden visas fail to rectify socio-spatial inequalities unless paired with substantive structural interventions against broader real estate financialisation (W4360855240, 2023). By analysing the pushback from grassroots organisations alongside shifting domestic property norms, it becomes evident that foreign capital acts primarily as a catalyst for deeper systemic restructuring rather than as an isolated driver of affordability crises. Therefore, while restricting transnational investor pathways reduces specific acquisition pressures, the enduring assetisation of residential real estate continues to constrain access to metropolitan housing, demonstrating that regulatory rollbacks must intersect with comprehensive tenure protections to achieve genuine market rebalancing.