Suchergebnisse

This article is concerned with new modes of property-led financial accumulation emerging in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Focusing on the United States, the article traces the creation of an asset class derived from securitizing the rental income of foreclosed homes turned rental properties. The study strategically combines conceptual agendas often pursued separately. Theories of market formation rooted in science and technology studies inform the method of analysis so as to attend to the work of realizing markets, the role of calculative devices in market formation, and the contingent and conditional aspects of markets. This analysis reveals the single-family rental (SFR) asset class as a practical accomplishment. However, a broader framework rooted in political economy is necessary to attend to the broader significance of the SFR asset class in terms of power, politics, and the dynamics of capital accumulation. The article particularly focuses upon the historical and geographic contingencies making it possible to conceive of a large-scale SFR market, the work of state and capital market actors in reframing repossessed single-family homes as rental properties and the role calculative practices played in this process, and the strategies of issuers and credit rating agencies to frame a novel asset class for institutional investors. The SFR asset class affirms the fundamental role for housing in the ideology of capital, and speaks to new entanglements of financial actors and home life as financial accumulation is adjusted to the postcrisis context. Beyond shedding light on postcrisis housing financialization, the article demonstrates how economic geographers can carefully integrate theoretical perspectives to critically examine both the circumstances of market formation and the social, spatial, and political consequences of markets.

The 2008 financial crisis and its impacts on the urban landscape contributed to a proliferation of research on the financialization of urban space, particularly of housing. Today, financialization is a mainstream focus of study within geography. But while scholars have responded to earlier calls to center space and place in their research, it has only been quite recently that geographers have taken up efforts to politicize and contest the financialization of urban space. This essay assesses the emerging body of literature on urban struggles with financialization. It first draws on historical materialist perspectives to situate financialization within urban contexts, showing why there is a particular relationship between this process and urban space, and how moments of crisis reveal tensions in this relationship. Reviewing literature focused on places exposed to the most systemic housing–financial crises in 2008, the essay then explores how residents, activists, and movements have grappled with financialization. It argues that a key aspect of such struggles is the ability to make their presence felt within chains of financial intermediaries or the corporate headquarters of foreign investors. The essay also highlights how moments of crisis open space for more radical tactics that disrupt the dominant production of space and emphasize the social value of housing. It suggests ways to fruitfully expand geographic inquiry into urban struggles with financialization through focusing on the formation of political subjectivities and engaging geographies beyond the global north.

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of "predatory equity," a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid-2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.

The pace and scope of digital innovation targeting the real estate industry has intensified over the past decade. This article is therefore concerned with the digitization of the residential real estate industry, and how critical housing scholars might shape a research agenda on this transformation. We set out platform logic, digital labor, and financialization as a conceptual vocabulary for studying new digital modalities of real estate practice. Platform logic highlights questions of power and politics relating to the data collection capacities potentially obscured by platforms' convenience and ease of use. Digital labor points to how platform real estate may change relationships among incumbent real estate professionals, investors and property owners, and tenants and residents. Financialization shifts the focus to how digital platforms participate in the contemporary political economy of housing. The article concludes with an agenda for critical housing research on digital real estate platforms.

This paper compares how recent waves of private equity real estate investment have reshaped the rental housing markets in New York and Berlin. Through secondary analysis of separate primary research projects, we explore financialisation's impact on tenants, neighbourhoods, and urban space. Despite their contrasting market contexts and investor strategies, financialisation heightened existing inequalities in housing affordability and stability, and rearranged spaces of abandonment and gentrification in both cities. Conversely cities themselves also shaped the process of financialisation, with weakened rental protections providing an opening to transform affordable housing into a new global asset class. We also show how financialisation's adaptability in the face of changing market conditions entails ongoing, but shifting processes of uneven development. Comparative studies of financialisation can help highlight geographically disparate, but similar exposures to this global process, thus contributing to a critical urban politics of finance that crosses boundaries of space, sector and scale.

This intervention reflects on critical perspectives on algorithms and geographical work on the urban-digital interface to highlight a set of approaches for studying the politics of platform urbanism. In several ways, platforms may be understood as black boxes due to the proprietary nature of algorithms, the secrecy of corporate ownership structures, and the emphasis on confidentiality and privacy in the venture capital industry. While thus raising concerns about scrutiny and accountability, inclinations to "open the black box" of platforms reflect a limited and limiting horizon of political possibility. In a different vein, geographers concerned with the digital-urban interface are working to think about the potential for a counter-politics that is not rooted exclusively in resistance or antagonism. Drawing on these insights, this intervention complements recent work on digital methods by emphasizing tracing, counter-mapping, and proxying as approaches that do not privilege the revelation of visibility so much as potentiality, slipperiness, and movement.

This paper uses the twin metaphors of 'gatekeeper' and 'gateway constructor' as devices to explore the role of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) as intermediaries between global corporate finance and specific institutions – housing associations in England. The analysis utilises a financialisation framing, whereby the practices, logics and measurements of finance capital, increasingly permeate government, institutional and household behaviour and discourse. This paper examines how housing associations have increasingly resorted to corporate bond finance, partly in response to reductions in government funding, and in the process engaged with CRAs. Surprisingly little research has been undertaken on the role and function of CRAs, and their impact on the organisations they rate. The case of housing associations (HAs) is of particular interest, given their historical social mission to build and manage properties to meet housing need, rather than operate as commercial private landlords conversant with market-based rationales. A case study of the large London-based HAs draws on a narrative and financial analysis of annual reports, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with senior HA finance officers to explore how CRA methodologies have been internalised and have contributed to changes in strategic and operational activities. We conclude that CRAs act both as a gatekeeper to the financial markets but also as a gateway constructor for the financial markets to enter new arenas, such as the HA sector. This dual nature of CRAs is intended as our contribution to emerging debates about the nature, the practice and the impact of financialisation on public services.

This paper uses the twin metaphors of 'gatekeeper' and 'gateway constructor' as devices to explore the role of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) as intermediaries between global corporate finance and specific institutions - housing associations in England. The analysis utilises a financialisation framing, whereby the practices, logics and measurements of finance capital, increasingly permeate government, institutional and household behaviour and discourse. This paper examines how housing associations have increasingly resorted to corporate bond finance, partly in response to reductions in government funding, and in the process engaged with CRAs. Surprisingly little research has been undertaken on the role and function of CRAs, and their impact on the organisations they rate. The case of housing associations (HAs) is of particular interest, given their historical social mission to build and manage properties to meet housing need, rather than operate as commercial private landlords conversant with market-based rationales. A case study of the large London-based HAs draws on a narrative and financial analysis of annual reports, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with senior HA finance officers to explore how CRA methodologies have been internalised and have contributed to changes in strategic and operational activities. We conclude that CRAs act both as a gatekeeper to the financial markets but also as a gateway constructor for the financial markets to enter new arenas, such as the HA sector. This dual nature of CRAs is intended as our contribution to emerging debates about the nature, the practice and the impact of financialisation on public services.

This paper uses the twin metaphors of 'gatekeeper' and 'gateway constructor' as devices to explore the role of Credit Rating Agencies (CRAs) as intermediaries between global corporate finance and specific institutions – housing associations in England. The analysis utilises a financialisation framing, whereby the practices, logics and measurements of finance capital, increasingly permeate government, institutional and household behaviour and discourse. This paper examines how housing associations have increasingly resorted to corporate bond finance, partly in response to reductions in government funding, and in the process engaged with CRAs. Surprisingly little research has been undertaken on the role and function of CRAs, and their impact on the organisations they rate. The case of housing associations (HAs) is of particular interest, given their historical social mission to build and manage properties to meet housing need, rather than operate as commercial private landlords conversant with market-based rationales. A case study of the large London-based HAs draws on a narrative and financial analysis of annual reports, supplemented by semi-structured interviews with senior HA finance officers to explore how CRA methodologies have been internalised and have contributed to changes in strategic and operational activities. We conclude that CRAs act both as a gatekeeper to the financial markets but also as a gateway constructor for the financial markets to enter new arenas, such as the HA sector. This dual nature of CRAs is intended as our contribution to emerging debates about the nature, the practice and the impact of financialisation on public services.

London's housing crisis is rooted in a neo-liberal urban project to recommodify and financialise housing and land in a global city. But where exactly is the crisis heading? What future is being prepared for London's urban dwellers? How can we learn from other country and city contexts to usefully speculate about London's housing future? In this paper, we bring together recent evidence and insights from the rise of what we call 'global corporate landlords' (GCLs) in 'post-crisis' urban landscapes in North America and Europe to argue that London's housing crisis—and the policies and processes impelling and intervening in it—could represent a key moment in shaping the city's long-term housing future. We trace the variegated ways in which private equity firms and institutional investors have exploited distressed housing markets and the new profitable opportunities created by states and supra-national bodies in coming to the rescue of capitalism in the USA, Spain, Ireland and Greece in response to the global financial crisis of 2007–2008. We then apply that analysis to emerging developments in the political economy of London's housing system, arguing that despite having a very low presence in the London residential property market and facing major entry barriers, GCLs are starting to position themselves in preparation for potential entry points such as the new privatisation threat to public and social rented housing.