Author
Name: Valesca Lima Organisation: Dublin City University, Ireland Position: Assistant Professor |
New Politics for Housing: Unpacking the Role of Financial Actors in Promoting the Financialisation of Housing in Portugal
Housing is increasingly playing a key role in the global economy, acting as a catalyst for capital expansion, international investment, and wealth accumulation. The transformation of the Portuguese housing system, which has been influenced by financial actors, illustrates the expansion of finance into housing systems. This paper unpacks recent housing policy and reports on the dimensions of the changes and alterations in financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives dominant in Portugal. We find that while the liberalisation of the rental market has sparked interest from private sector investors in recent years, the anticipated improvements in housing provision and affordability have not been realised thus far. These findings shed new light on the key features of the financialisation of the Portuguese housing sector and the extent of the political power of financial actors in promoting the financialisation of housing.
The Political Outcomes of Housing Movements: Participatory Governance in Mass Housing Programmes
Research conducted over the past decade examining the impact of social movements on urban politics and housing policy has significantly enhanced our understanding of how these movements resist housing financialisation through direct action, social protest, and advocacy. However, further investigation is still required to comprehend the influence of housing movements on policy design and implementation, in order to understand the paths taken and how social movements shape housing and urban policies. This paper focuses on the self-management branch of the My House, My Life – Entities (Minha Casa, Minha Vida - Entidades), a mass housing programme in Brazil. The paper has two objectives. Firstly, it identifies the strategies that nationally organised urban and housing movements employ to advocate for the inclusion of housing self-management in federal mass housing programmes. Secondly, it examines the policy implications of implementing a participatory governance model (co-management) in national housing programmes, with an emphasis on policy lessons learned. To accomplish this, policy documents, housing movement reports, and news media items were utilised to systematically trace the trajectory to success and examine the policy lessons for participatory governance. This paper makes two contributions: it enriches the literature on social movements against housing financialisation by analysing citizen participation in housing policy design and implementation and it contributes to the field of research on the consequences of social movements by examining the influence of social movements in shaping and housing policies.
Delivering Social Housing: An Overview of the Housing Crisis in Dublin
This paper explores the responses to the housing crisis in Dublin, Ireland, by analysing recent housing policies promoted to prevent family homelessness. I argue that private rental market subsides have played an increasing role in the provision of social housing in Ireland. Instead of policies that facilitate the construction of affordable housing or the direct construction of social housing, current housing policies have addressed the social housing crisis by encouraging and relying excessively on the private market to deliver housing. The housing crisis has challenged governments to increase the social housing supply, but the implementation of a larger plan to deliver social housing has not been effective, as is evidenced by the rapid decline of both private and social housing supply and the increasing number of homeless people in Dublin.
