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

The Eviction of Critical Perspectives from Gentrification Research

Recent years have seen an extraordinary resurgence of interest in the process of gentrification, accompanied by a surge of articles published on the topic. This article looks at some recent literature - both scholarly and popular - and considers the reasons why the often highly critical perspectives on gentrification that we saw in earlier decades have dwindled. Whilst a number of reasons could be put forward, three in particular are discussed. First, the resilience of theoretical and ideological squabbles over the causes of gentrification, at the expense of examining its effects; second, the demise of displacement as a defining feature of the process and as a research question; and third, the pervasive influence of neoliberal urban policies of 'social mix' in central city neighbourhoods. It is argued that the 'eviction' of critical perspectives from a field in which they were once plentiful has serious implications for those at risk from gentrification, and that reclaiming the term from those who have sugarcoated what was not so long ago a 'dirty word' (Smith, 1996) is essential if political challenges to the process can be effective. Copyright (c) 2006 The Author. Journal Compilation (c) 2006 Joint Editors and Blackwell Publishing Ltd..

Geographies of Housing Finance: The Mortgage Market in Milan, Italy

The geography of financial exclusion has mainly focused on exclusion from retail banking. Alternatively, and following the work of David Harvey, this paper presents a geography of access to and exclusion from home mortgage finance. The case of Milan shows that capital switching to the built environment is partly a sign of economic crisis and partly a sign of the intrinsic opportunities that the built environment provides. A major factor in both is the deregulation of the mortgage market that has enabled the loosening of historically stringent lending criteria, leading to a tremendous growth of the mortgage market, while leaving the co-evolution of family and home ownership intact. In addition, capital switches within sectors of the economy and between places. In Milan, once "unattractive" but currently gentrified nineteenth-century districts underwent cycles of devalorisation and revalorisation. Even though access to mortgages has increased throughout Milan, geographical disparities in mortgage lending persist: at present, yellowlining (differential access, based on less favourable terms) is common in parts of the Milanese periphery. The creation of boundaries makes the realisation of class-monopoly rent possible; while the subsequent redrawing of these boundaries creates new submarkets in which surplus value can be extracted. Based on the Milan case, one cannot explain the timing and geography of formation and reformation of submarkets in other cities, but it helps us to see how Harvey's abstract ideas of class-monopoly rent, submarket creation, and capital switching take place in the real world. Copyright 2007 Blackwell Publishing.

The Potential for Mixed Methods: Results from the Field in Urban South Africa

With the “cultural turn” in geography, scholars have become more focused on the politics of representation, politics of fieldwork, and politics of the research setting. In human geography, this epistemological shift has been accompanied by a methodological move toward intensive methods at the expense of extensive methods. In this article, I suggest that mixed methods that utilize the strengths of both intensive and extensive methods can offset the weaknesses of each method. Moreover, results from the field suggest that the combination of intensive and extensive methods could produce unique insights only possible from a mixed method approach