Tenant movements are increasingly impacting urban governance and the development of housing in Canadian cities. Tenants resisting violent and ‘gentler’ forms of gentrification—through outright expulsion or being priced out of their communities—have demonstrated their unwillingness to allow financialized real estate to determine their housing futures. At the same time, tenants also have to contend with discourses of urban improvement that increasingly dominate the terrain of financialized rental housing (re)development. Community benefits agreements and other similar arrangements emphasizing neighbourhood liveability and wellbeing are increasingly deployed as devices to justify housing (re)development, but also work to facilitate gentrification. Through an examination of a struggle between tenants and a financialized real estate investment firm in Canada’s capital city Ottawa—which aspires to be North America’s most liveable mid-sized city—this article explores the implications of a Community Wellbeing Framework for a neighbourhood redevelopment project forged through tenant resistance efforts.

Disenfranchised urban communities worldwide are increasingly vulnerable to land dispossession and cultural erasure as neoliberal regimes unleash intensified financial speculation within polarizing and splintering local/global class and racialized disparities. A dilemma of disenfranchised communities when confronting speculative intrusions where prospective allies have become marginalized or eliminated is whether, and to what degree, to resist such threats contentiously at the risk of zero-sum defeat versus accommodative negotiations seeking to rescue modest benefits while mitigating dislocations. The forms and intensities of community responses can be conceptualized as embedded within multiscalar state society and local politico-spatial configurations. From that perspective, I address a predominantly Black immigrant district, Miami’s Little Haiti, as it confronts mega-real estate speculation within a metropolitan political economy of corporate real estate hegemony and accelerating racialized expulsions. The contentious versus accommodative dilemma and local/supralocal political landscape fractured and neutralized the Haitian collective responses. I conclude by discussing the case’s theoretical/comparative implications.

This paper argues that financialisation exacerbates gender inequity in the United States. During the Recession, wealth-stripping activities targeted single female homeowners prompting severe asset depletion among single women, people of color, and those who depend on them. Rather than protecting them from risk, their home equity and bodies absorbed the failures of capitalism within their network. The paper draws on a thematic analysis of interviews with 21 single female homeowners who experienced mortgage default. Rather than focusing on risk incidence, I take their relational pathways as the object of inquiry demonstrating how activities of gendered care work act as conduits and amplifiers of financialised risk that extends the responsibility for unpaid social provision throughout the lifespan. The analysis demonstrates how their status as homeowners positioned them in between market failures and the consequences of austerity thereby restructuring the function of home equity.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the recent challenges faced by stakeholders concerned with providing socially minded housing in Cyprus in view of the increased need for affordable housing in the five years after the financial crisis, which hit Cyprus in the spring of 2013 and impacted households. The demand was exacerbated by the influx of immigrants from South-eastern Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa in the same period. The paper discusses these challenges by examining the historical context of providing socially minded housing in Cyprus since the first institutional attempts were made in the years following the Second World War. The paper also presents some case studies, which are illustrated with design proposals that are the results of research in design by students and staff in the Department of Architecture of the University of Cyprus.

In recent years, the Evaluation Department of the Council of Europe Development Bank has conducted a series of independent evaluations of CEB-financed operations in the social housing sector targeting special vulnerable groups. Building on evaluation evidence and experience, two strategic issues are presented: the high level of complexity of such operations and the various facets of their sustainability. This paper underlines the significant learning and accountability potential of evaluations of social housing operations. At the same time, it underscores the added value of a holistic approach to evaluation, in the face of a simplistic, but currently predominant, output-oriented focus during monitoring.