From Property Abandonment to Predatory Equity: Writings on Financialization and Urban Space in New York City

Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today\u27s global capitalism, even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This financialization changes the role of mortgage capital in urban space from building place-bound wealth to facilitating the extraction of value from place. This dissertation addresses questions about how financialization operates in the rental market, specifically its relation to: earlier processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical debates about the contingent relationship between today\u27s urban context and landscapes inherited at the end of the 1970s, the constraints and possibilities for today\u27s community-based organizations and the consequences of finance\u27s permeation into everyday life. Using qualitative, archival and geographic methods, the research design revolves around a long temporal frame beginning with the 1970s urban crisis of property abandonment and continuing through the present. Geographic data was used to analyze relationships between property abandonment and private equity real estate investment. Archival data and interviews with veteran (n=11); mid-career (n=5); and emerging (n=9) nonprofit professionals provided insight on community responses to disinvestment and financialization. Focus groups (N=5) with tenants (n=27) addressed social and psychological consequences of financialization. Today\u27s financialization of housing shapes uneven geographies of power: finance can make itself felt in property, but is often beyond the reach of community organizations and the city. Concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods, investors\u27 financial risks undermined tenants\u27 ontological security and social reproduction. Community organizations\u27 development of discursive, data-driven and spatial tactics speaks to the political possibilities of contemporary community practice to contest financialization. The findings are relevant to efforts of community organizations to contest urban inequality, concerns about planning economically sustainable cities and policy approaches to affordable rental housing. This study contributes to research on geographies of financialization; in particular it responds to the need for critical attention to the socially and spatially uneven nature of processes associated with financialization of the domestic

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities

Housing Justice in Unequal Cities is a global research network funded by the National Science Foundation (BCS 1758774) and housed at the Institute on Inequality and Democracy at UCLA Luskin. This open-access volume, co-edited by Ananya Roy and Hilary Malson, brings together movement-based and university-based scholars to build a shared field of inquiry focused on housing justice. Based on a convening that took place in Los Angeles in January 2019, at the LA Community Action Network and at the University of California, Los Angeles, the essays and interventions situate housing justice in the long struggle for freedom on stolen land. Embedded in the stark inequalities of Los Angeles, our work is necessarily global, connecting the city’s Skid Row to the indebted and evicted in Spain and Greece, to black women’s resistance in Brazil, to the rights asserted by squatters in India and South Africa. Learning from radical social movements, we argue that housing justice also requires a commitment to research justice. With this in mind, our effort to build a field of inquiry is also necessarily an endeavor to build epistemologies and methodologies that are accountable to communities that are on the frontlines of banishment and displacement

Constructing a New Asset Class: Property-led Financial Accumulation after the Crisis

This paper is concerned with new modes of property-led financial accumulation emerging in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. Focusing on the US, the paper 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 paper 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 singlefamily 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 post-crisis context. Beyond shedding light on post-crisis housing financialization, the paper 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 financialisation of rental housing: A comparative analysis of New York City and Berlin

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

Contesting the financialization of urban space: Community organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New York City

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

From Experimenting with Property to Experimenting on Place: A Rejoinder to Migozzi and Safransky

This rejoinder engages with the commentaries on my article on ‘Digital experiments with landed property’ from Julien Migozzi and Sara Safransky. In my response, I share my reflections on the valuable provocations and interrelated themes offered in these generous commentaries. First, I argue that an especially distinctive aspect of digital experiments with landed property is the volumetric property relations they are generating. Second, I attend to subjectivities cultivated within and against digitised property relations, and how they relate to structures of power. Third, I extend my thinking on the glitchiness and fallibility associated with processes of experimentation

Digital Experiments with Landed Property: Robots, Race, and Rent

A wide range of digital innovations has changed property relations globally over the past fifteen years. What are we to make of these digital experiments with landed property? I argue we should not mistake their technological novelty for a break with the geographic and historical specificities of property relations. The yoking of property to modernity and civilization makes technological progress a fundamental part of how relationships to land are constituted and reconstituted, and in whose interests, throughout global capitalism. In this article, I situate 21st century housing market technologies within sedimented relations of landed property in the United States, showing the history of property innovation in the United States is also one of racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession. I interpret current anxieties about ‘robot landlords’ as anxieties about how the shifting landscape of property ownership appears to threaten the economic benefits associated with racial dominance