Special issues

Introduction to the special issue "Social Movements against Housing Financialization".

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.

The world’s most unequal country suffers from various housing crises, especially when it comes to excessive reliance upon a private sector prone to market failures, especially affordability. State housing finance strategy during the transition from apartheid to democracy relied upon augmentation of formal banking finance so as to promote home ownership. But as macro-economic conditions changed in the late 1980s, the resulting mass defaults on individual families’ home mortgage bonds led not only to foreclosures by a (white) state, but (black) working-class resistance organised by the country’s leading urban social movement, known as the ‘bond boycott.’ Even after democracy, a worsening housing backlog coincided with resurgence of household debt crises in the wake of the 2008 global financial meltdown. That generated a new housing finance strategy led by Mastercard and a local fintech firm (supported by the World Bank): collateralisation of welfare grants which in turn allowed debit orders for repayment of microfinance (typically used for minor home improvements). Again, social resistance played an important role, as the strategy caused even worse personal debt crises, and a welfare NGO’s successful fight to close Mastercard’s partner. But beyond periodic revolts of these sorts, a durable housing finance policy has remained elusive.

Research conducted over the past decade examining the impact of social movements on urban politics and housing policy has significantly enhanced our understanding of how these movements resist housing financialisation through direct action, social protest, and advocacy. However, further investigation is still required to comprehend the influence of housing movements on policy design and implementation, in order to understand the paths taken and how social movements shape housing and urban policies. This paper focuses on the self-management branch of the My House, My Life – Entities (Minha Casa, Minha Vida - Entidades), a mass housing programme in Brazil. The paper has two objectives. Firstly, it identifies the strategies that nationally organised urban and housing movements employ to advocate for the inclusion of housing self-management in federal mass housing programmes. Secondly, it examines the policy implications of implementing a participatory governance model (co-management) in national housing programmes, with an emphasis on policy lessons learned. To accomplish this, policy documents, housing movement reports, and news media items were utilised to systematically trace the trajectory to success and examine the policy lessons for participatory governance. This paper makes two contributions: it enriches the literature on social movements against housing financialisation by analysing citizen participation in housing policy design and implementation and it contributes to the field of research on the consequences of social movements by examining the influence of social movements in shaping and housing policies.

The article looks at the role of knowledge production in conceptualising the impact of social movements, taking the campaign Deutsche Wohnen & Co. Enteignen (Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen & Co.) as an example. The campaign proposes to socialise the assets of all (financialised) landlords who own more than 3,000 apartments in Berlin. The article analyses how the campaign has developed and popularised strategic knowledge about housing financialisation and definancialisation. Empirically, the article analyses two phases of the political work. It discusses the beginnings of the campaign in the run-up to the 2021 referendum, where the campaign translated knowledge about the role of institutional financial investors in Berlin’s housing crisis into a demand for socialisation. The article also analyses the phase after the successful referendum in 2021, where the knowledge production shifted to the juridical field as the Berlin Senate set up an expert commission to discuss the constitutionality of housing socialisation.

During the last decade, following years of austerity and rapid growth driven by tourism, real estate, and external investment, Lisbon has become a paradigmatic case of the financialisation/crisis nexus in the housing field. The simultaneous emergence and growth of social movements for the right to housing has been widely documented, with some accounts focusing on anti-financialisation struggles. In this article, we present the repertoires and claims of four activist groups and platforms born between 2022 and 2023 and discuss how Portuguese social movements are contending with the increasing centrality of financialisation in housing. In sum, we present three broad patterns of rescaling – intersectionality, internationalisation, and relations with political parties – in relation to the general endeavour to build a mass movement.

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.