Housing Under the Empire of Finance

The post 2008-crisis scenario has been marked by global market shifts and opportunities for investors to freely move their liquid capital across borders, sectors and projects. The built environment in general, and housing in particular became new frontiers of speculation and rentiership. The housing crisis, which resulted from the financialization of housing in the mortgage/homeownership phase, became the basis to roll out a new asset class based on rental housing. New information technologies allowed investors to concentrate ownership of dispersed units, extract income flows and data and bundle them into capital markets, in operations managed by digital platforms and apps. Those changes have not only enabled a new form of financialization of housing from above – via partnerships between corporate landlords and the State, but also generated new and perverse links between labor precarity, informality and financial capital.

This lesson will start with a lecture given by Raquel Rolnik, followed by a moment of interactions between the chairholder and the audience.