Author
Name: Gertjan Wijburg Organisation: Utrecht University, The Netherlands Position: Assistant Professor |
Community-Led Alternatives to Housing Financialization: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Over the past decades, housing financialization has deeply reshaped global housing systems, making housing increasingly less accessible, adequate and affordable while global financial markets actors, homeowners and private landlords have disproportionately benefited from surging property prices and rental income. An emerging body of scholarship examines how insurgent practices at the grassroot contest such acts of housing financialization from within civil society. However, emphasis on community-led housing alternatives, be them rooted in legislative activism or concrete land trust movements, remains somewhat under-scrutinized. Drawing on examples from Latin America, Southern and Eastern Europe, we pay attention to such movements and how they can reshape the global housing system in more equitable and inclusive ways. In doing so, we explore the potential of community-led housing alternatives and how they can evolve into mainstream housing repertoires that inform twenty-first century housing policy and market reform. Much like during the late nineteenth-century, when orchestrated housing initiatives laid the foundation of post-war social rented housing, we see the contours of a changing global landscape where community-led housing alternatives locally push for new housing institutions. Whether these alternatives can really be adapted at a global and national level depends on their overall effectiveness and the ongoing support for financialized housing coalitions.
Social Movements against Housing Financialization: An Introduction to the Special Issue
Introduction to the special issue "Social Movements against Housing Financialization".
Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England
Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that ‘financialised privatisation’ is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.
