Housing and Labour

Background:

Financialisation leads to increasing precarity for workers on two levels:

• through deregulation of the financial system, leading to capital flowing into financial markets at the expense of manufacturing (since there’s a better short-term return to be made in markets than manufacturing), yet it also
• leads to increased precarity for workers as tenants/homeowners – as this financial capital flows into real estate (as all huge build-ups of capital inevitability do) leading to people losing their housing.

But this “financialisation of housing” also leads to wild price swings in housing costs and larger long-term economic instability. Apart from erosion of housing affordability, it also leads to overly leveraged banks and high levels of household debt. States feel compelled to bail out banks when property prices come crashing down – yet States themselves fostered this situation by abandoning: 1) a commitment to provide housing, and 2) deregulation of financial markets,
which created so much liquidity (that feeds into rising property prices).

Additionally, as governments (particularly on a local and municipal level) themselves have appropriated a neoliberal logic of housing as an asset (versus a social right), they’ve also become dependent upon developers for increasingly scarce funding – so development and the politics of the use of the city and land space have become developer, as opposed to State, led. A logic of “partnership” with developers has flowed from this, instead of viewing people’s rights as paramount above private interests.

Objectives of the project:

A comparative study of the effects of financialisation on housing rights, across countries, but also on a more local level, with a focus on municipalities but this could even involve specific neighbourhoods.

Practically, what might this look like:

• This could take a view of comparing different national/regional/local experiences with housing issues – with a global connection looking as to how financialisation has led to a degradation of housing rights.