Home is Where the Capital is: The Culture of Real Estate in an Era of Control Societies (original) (raw)
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In the late twentieth century, homeownership became entrenched in a wider societal project associated with transformations in the economy and increased social inclusion. The ‘promise of homeownership’ asserted the potential of mortgaged owner-occupation in providing all with not just a stable home, but also the chance to accumulate assets and establish economic security. Underlying these ideologies was the implicit promise that homeownership can be widespread, equalizing and secure. Despite transformations in market conditions, especially since the Global Financial Crisis, such narratives have continued to drive policy approaches and support for marketised housing. Through an investigation of three ‘homeowner societies’ – the US, UK and Australia - the empirical evidence in this paper reveals declining access to homeownership, high levels of housing wealth concentration exacerbating social inequality, and intensifying housing price volatility undermining asset security. The paper contends that the socioeconomic potential of homeownership that has sustained the logic of housing policy for the last half decade may be increasingly recognized as a ‘false promise’ that has justified growing housing commodification, ongoing labour insecurity, and continued state retrenchment wherein housing markets increasingly function as a dimension of growing inequality and insecurity.
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Journal of Urban Affairs, 2009
This article explores the contributions of neoliberal practice to the expansion of homeownership and the foreclosure crisis to illuminate the contradictions between the rhetorical goals of homeownership and the actual experiences of new homeowners. In doing so we explore the theories and practices that homeowners deploy to try to survive and keep their lives together. First, we review the aspects of housing policy in neoliberal regimes that led many of the homeowners we studied into both homeownership and foreclosure. In the second part, we analyze conversations from 14 focus groups in five cities with homeowners threatened with foreclosure to understand how neoliberal rhetoric and practices participated in their buying and potentially losing their homes and how they come to understand and act on their experiences of threat and failure. We conclude by redefining the foreclosure crisis and discussing the political moment of challenge to neoliberalism it created. With the foreclosure crisis deepening and little help for homeowners on the horizon, the financial sector received a $700 billion bailout in 2008. Although the bailout includes provisions for foreclosure mitigation efforts and assistance to homeowners, at the end of 2008 the Treasury had declined to use bailout funds to stave off foreclosures among distressed homeowners, with Treasury Secretary Paulson insisting upon a distinction between "investing" in troubled financial institutions versus "spending" on rescue efforts for homeowners (Andrews, November 19, 2008). This pattern of adherence to market discipline for "Main Street" and government intervention to save Wall Street could be taken from a play book written by critics of neoliberalism (cf. Harvey, 2005), though it remains an open question as to whether the magnitude of the crisis and the economic and political events of 2008 will signal a turn away from this script. In this paper, we explore the ways that neoliberal practice contributed to the expansion of homeownership and the ongoing foreclosure crisis to illuminate the contradictions between the rhetorical goals of homeownership, the actual experiences of new homeowners, and the ways they came to terms
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Belgium is a typical homeowner society where homeownership is not only the largest but also the 'normalized' form of tenure. The origins of the Belgian homeownership ideology go back to the early days of industrialization but the discourses surrounding the ideology are reproduced in the 21 st century. Our investigation of the largest region of Belgium, Flanders, reveals four main homeownership discourses: affordable homeownership, conservative housing finance, asset-based welfare and tenure neutrality. With a nod to Kemeny's 'The Really Big Trade-Off Between Homeownership and Welfare', we demonstrate that there is also a 'Really Big Contradiction' between the discourses that support homeownership as the 'normalized' form of tenure in Belgium and the reality of declining affordability, progressively less conservative housing finance, the fractions and inequalities of housing-based wealth, and the lack of tenure neutrality. In short, we argue that the financialized homeownership model is undermining the stability of homeowner realities and practices, but not so much the discourses and ideologies that support and reinforce the homeowner society.
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America's "infatuation with homeownership" has been identified as one cause of the latest financial crisis. Based on codings of 1,809 party manifestos in 19 OECD countries since 1945, this paper addresses the question of where the political ideal to democratize homeownership came from. While conservative parties have defended homeownership across countries and time, center-left parties have oscillated between a pro-homeownership and a pro-rental position. The former occurs in Anglo-Saxon, Northern and Southern European countries, while the latter prevails among German-speaking countries. Beyond partisan effects, once a country has a majority of homeowners and parties defending homeownership, larger parties are more likely to support it. The extent of center-left parties' support for homeownership is conditionally associated with higher homeownership rates, more encouraging mortgage regimes, and a bigger housing bubble burst after 2007. The ideational origins of the...
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The issue of “housing” has generally not been granted an important role in post-war political economy. Housing-as-policy has been the preserve of social policy analysis and of a growing field of housing studies; housing-as-market has been confined to mainstream economics. This paper insists that political-economic analysis can no longer remain relatively indifferent to the housing question since housing is implicated in the contemporary capitalist political economy in numerous critical, connected, and very often contradictory ways. The paper conceptualizes this implication by identifying the multiple roles of housing when “capital” – the essential “stuff” of political economy – is considered from the perspective of each of its three primary, mutually-constitutive guises: as process of circulation, as social relation, and as ideology. Mobilizing these three optics to provide a critical overall picture of housing-in-political-economy (more than a political economy of housing), we draw on and weave together the many vital contributions of housing research to our evolving understanding of capitalism. Keywords: housing, political economy, capital, circulation, ideology, social relations
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The paper "Capital, housing and inequality in 21st century" raises critical questions for housing researchers by introducing debates from economics into the field of housing studies. The authors conclude “it is time to debate housing capital in the century ahead” and stress “there is an urgent need for a renewed political economy of housing policies”. We agree that housing studies would not only benefit from a re-engagement with political economy, but also that “a wider understanding of housing systems is required to make sense of how global capitalism has developed since the 1980s.” However, whereas Duncan Maclennan and Julie Miao quickly reduce housing researchers to housing economists and political economy to political-economy-within-economics, we would like to acknowledge the fundamentally interdisciplinary nature of both housing studies and political economy. To us, the focus of Maclennan and Miao—debating the mechanics of Piketty and its relevance to housing economics—is too narrow. We argue that one should take Piketty’s Capital to the next level and present the broader range of issues and conceptual debates that need to be included in an examination of housing, capital and inequality in the 21st century. In particular, we feel that the rich tradition in geography, urban studies and political economy to study the effects of overaccumulation on real estate and the built environment needs to be included in a political economy of housing. If we want to contemplate about the long-term outlook of capital and housing, we need to think about the dialectics of the toxic nature of housing centred financialization. The urbanization of capital (à la Lefebvre and Harvey), or the metamorphosis of capital (à la Piketty), is simply not a stable set of social relations. While Piketty’s arithmetic underlying growing inequality may be a correct assessment of actually existing trends, the long-term durability of real estate as store-of-value is not as straightforward as suggested. Housing studies should not be reduced to housing economics, and political economy should not be reduced to a political economy approach within economics in which politics plays the second fiddle to so-called economic laws. We need to understand the role of real estate in the political economy as real world phenomenon rather than as the outcome of a universalistic deduction that exists separate from time and space. Housing as carrier of practices of capital accumulation is variegated in space, across national manifestations of capitalism and is shaped by historical trajectories, culture and institutions. The rise of housing as carrier of wealth needs to be understood as part of larger political economic developments, in which the twin phenomena of neoliberalization and financialization are key to understand the shifting power relation, the ‘regulated deregulation’ (Aalbers 2016b) of both housing and mortgage markets, and the return of the rentier class. Although ‘real world economic’ aspects of housing are introduced at the end of Maclennan and Miao’s paper, we believe they need to be at the core of how we perceive the future of capitalism and inequality. Housing is central to the variegated political economy of contemporary societies and therefore key to understanding actually existing capitalism and inequality.
digital commodity of real estate, the neoliberal invention of housing as a liquid asset and source of welfare provision, and the bundling of car and home in housing markets. The more-than-human relations of housing and home are articulated through the role of subur ban nature in the making of Australian modernity, the marketing of nature in waterfront urban renewal, the role of domestic territory in subversive social movements such as seasteading and tiny houses, and the search for home comfort through low-cost energy-effi ciency practices. The transformative politics of housing and home are explored through the decolonising of housing tenure, the shaping of housing policy by urban social movements, the lived importance of marginal spaces in Indigenous and other housing, and the affective lessons of the ruin. Beginning with the diverse elements gathered together in housing and home, the text opens up the complex realities and possibilities of human dwelling.