206 lines
34 KiB
Markdown
206 lines
34 KiB
Markdown
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title: "Debt and Housing Struggles"
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---
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# How do we challenge the shame of housing debt?
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We have been led by states and financial institutions to believe that it is natural to enter into personal debt in order to have a home. The easy access to credit has been equated with the right to housing. Narratives, politics and practices about home have become, at different paces, in different places, a question of individual property through which we mortgage our future, our pensions, our education. As Raquel Rolnik puts it in her book Urban Warfare: "Through the finance of private home purchase, global capital market expansion was based on private indebtedness, establishing an intimate link between individuals' biological lives and the global process of income extraction and speculation". Since the 1990s mortgage became one of the main driving forces of financial market operations. The push towards housing debt economy was global, while the responsibility became individualized. Those that could not pay instalments were deemed lazy and incompetent. This created a feeling of shame and a sense of personal failure in life. One of the main victories of the people affected by mortgages in Spain was to assign guilt and shame where they are due - in financial institutions and states.
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## Proposed resources
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- **Read about the role of housing debt in the construct of dominant economy:** .
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- **Read about the toxic housing debt in the ex - socialist countries:**
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- **Read about the struggles around housing and debt in Spain:** 
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- **Watch the film about struggles in Spain:**
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[Si se puede: seven days with PAH in Barcelona](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=elnjoFVv_Os)
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## How to learn together
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Read the proposed articles before you come to the session. Watch the film together. Organize a discussion round. Use a mind map to collectively organize your thoughts. Feed in as much detail as you can. Use critically what you have read. Include your personal experience. Share your mind map with other Pirate Care Syllabus users by downloading it on the web page.
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{{< raw >}}
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<div class="pagebreak" style="font-family: vg5000-regular,sans; font-size: 1rem; padding-top: 2rem; padding-bottom: 2rem; color: #996561">▒ ☠ ▒ ▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒ 🐟▒ ☄ ▒▒▒▒ ▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒▒</div>
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{{< /raw >}}
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# Raquel Rolnik: 'The Global Financialisation on Housing'
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**In *Urban Warfare: Housing Under the Empire of Finance*, Verso, 2019**
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**Scenes from the beginning of the twenty-first century, September 2010.**
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It was a cold and windy morning in Astana, the futuristic capital of Kazakhstan. After crossing a sort of plateau ablaze with the shiny creations of fashionable big-name architects, we finally arrived in a large tent to meet the hunger strikers. Lying on hammocks surrounded by signs written in Kazakh and Russian, Asian-looking elderly people were mixed with red-haired white women and middle-aged couples, taking shifts in beds and chairs. Having paid the instalments for apartments they had acquired off-plan, they were victims of construction companies that had gone bankrupt and disappeared, leaving the buildings’ skeletons unfinished and families with neither home nor money.
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Astana’s hunger strikers were just the most daring among the 16,000 borrowers affected by the bankruptcy of – mainly Turkish – construction companies that had already halted 450 projects.[^1] In addition to the hunger strikers, there were also those affected by foreclosures in Almaty, the country’s historic capital and economic centre. During the years of credit boom, Kazakh banks and their clients contracted debts in both US dollars and euros, and were now struggling to pay their obligations.
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In Astana and Almaty, the victims of the economic crisis, many now homeless, told us that they had been strongly encouraged by the government to buy apartments via mortgage credit certificates. (The president, Nursultan Nazarbayev, led the Communist Party during the USSR era and has been head of the government since Independence.) They also reported that the public institutions in which many of them used to work had even sponsored the sales of apartments to their employees. The group of strikers in Almaty, mostly made up of women, received me in a small apartment decorated with a banner that read: ‘Government, help your people’.[^2]
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**May 2012**
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We climbed the highest hill of Puente Alto, in Santiago de Chile’s metropolitan region, in order to look across the Bajos de Mena area. It is one of the neighbourhoods in which thousands of social housing projects built by private companies are concentrated. They were commercialised via an association of mortgage credit certificates and governmental subsidies to low-income borrowers. These estates have been built in Chile since the beginning of the 1980s. The view is impressive: a sea of houses and four- or five-storey buildings as far as you can see.
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The housing rights activists who accompanied me pointed to Volcán II, a housing estate in the process of being demolished. They explained that this neighbourhood has become one of the metropolitan region’s most problematic areas from a social point of view: drug addiction and trafficking, domestic violence and social vulnerability.[^3]
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They also showed me a 1983 document, written at the moment of the launch of Chile’s housing program. It was signed by the then minister of housing and urbanism, a man from the Chilean Chamber of Construction. In the document, he declared that the need for housing is ‘an element of social order that is translated and expressed in square metres’ and that the demand for housing is ‘a factor of economic order that is materialised in monetary quantities’.[^4]
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**Autumn 2009**
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The streets of Pacoima, a few kilometres away from Los Angeles, California, looked like a ghost town. In the suburban landscape of front yards reaching to the streets, signs of abandonment were everywhere: mountains of forgotten rubble; dozens of ‘For Sale’ and ‘For Rent’ signs next to mailboxes; doors and windows sealed with wood or bricks. The minister of a local church, who accompanied me in the visit, told sad stories of families who’d had to leave their homes because they could not afford the repayments on their loans. He evoked the difficulties of those who remained in the neighbourhood, struggling to survive in a town that, having lost its fiscal base, could not keep basic services running.
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At the end of a street, in an old SUV transformed into a home, Roger, Mary and their young children were cooking pasta on an improvised stove: ‘We’ve lost our house and we simply have nowhere to go.’
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**November 2012**
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As morning broke in a neighbourhood of Bilbao in the Basque Country, cash machines and bank headquarters were covered in graffiti: ‘murderers’. It was the day after fifty-three-year-old Amaia Egaña’s suicide. She jumped from the window of her fourth-floor apartment, moments before being evicted. She had failed to pay the instalments for the bank loan that she had taken out to buy the apartment. This was the second death in similar circumstances in less than one month.[^5] Bilbao was not the only – nor the most seriously – affected city in terms of foreclosures. According to data from the Spanish judicial system, between 2007 and the third trimester of 2011, 349,438 home foreclosures were initiated in Spain. According to the same source, on each day of 2011, 212 new foreclosure processes were opened.[^6]
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**1 March 2012**
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In Barcelona, one of the cities most rocked by the crisis, I attend an assembly of the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (Platform for People Affected by Mortgages). Since 2009, this social movement has worked to organise the people concerned in order to make the crisis visible, establishing support networks and lobbying for the promotion of public policies to address this situation. I listen to dozens of testimonies during the meetings: Latin American migrants who lost their jobs and could no longer pay the instalments; pensioners who, as guarantors of their children’s loans, now must hand over their own home to banks; couples who lost their home and still have huge debts … All this because, in Spain, with the drop in property prices after the bubble burst, the value that banks obtain from the sale of a house does not cover the entirety of the debt.
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Moreover, if no buyer is present at the auction of the confiscated house (which happens in 90 per cent of cases), the law stipulates that the value of the property covers only 60 per cent of the total loan.[^7] As a result, in addition to losing their homes, people remain mired in debt.
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**Summer 2011**
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At dawn in Tel Aviv, one of the city’s most important arteries, Dizengoff Street, is filled by tents. The occupation of public spaces was part of the strategy of thousands of demonstrators – mostly young people – against the lack of accessible housing. The decade-long spiralling rise of real-estate prices had reached its peak. The lack of rental options and public housing in areas in which economic opportunities are concentrated had put housing policy at the centre of Israel’s political agenda that summer.
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**August 2013**
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When I entered the nineteenth-century hall of an old factory, now converted into a culture and events centre in Manchester, I remembered Friedrich Engels’s writings and thought: ‘The saga started here’.[^8]
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We arrived just as the first part of the meeting was about to finish. On the walls, signs written in marker spelt out strategies and schedules for the following months. It was one of the regional meetings for the campaign against the bedroom tax – one of the coalition government’s recently implemented fiscal austerity measures that most severely affected residents of British housing estates. Our presence was announced, and anyone who felt comfortable sharing their experience was invited through to another room.
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Around thirty people gathered next door. There was hesitation at first. Many of them had known each other for months, having participated together in preparatory mobilisations and meetings; however, they had never talked about their personal dramas. A middle-aged lady stood up and said that she was a professional nurse, a widow, and that she used the extra bedroom in her house to occasionally host her two granddaughters. Her daughter, addicted to cocaine, was unable to look after the children in moments of relapse. Losing the two-bedroom house would mean inability to provide this support to her daughter and granddaughters.
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Another woman said she suffered from depression and, having lived for thirty years on the same estate, could count on a network of friendly neighbours to help her keep stable. Therefore, she said, she chose not to move out, despite having to pay a penalty to live alone in a two-bedroom apartment. Ashamed, she admitted that now she could hardly afford to buy food, so that, as well as resorting to food banks,[^9] she had often looked for left-overs in the estate’s bins.
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Other accounts followed, but the most touching moment – at least for me – was when a young man, in an electric wheelchair and showing clear signs of a learning disability, said that he could never move away from the estate where he lived, alone, in a two-bedroom apartment. For him, daily life required a herculean effort to remain autonomous and dignified despite his extremely fragile physical and mental situation. His life was entirely based on his existence – and permanence – in that community.
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**October 2010**
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After walking for seventy kilometres, a forty-year-old Indian carpenter suffers a fatal heart attack. The goal of his walk was to borrow money from friends who lived in a different town, in order to pay his micro-credit debts. A report from the Indian government stated that his death was ‘due to pressure put by the micro-finance institutions for repayment’. In 2002, the carpenter had borrowed US$350 from a micro-credit institution in order to build a room in his house. His wife, working in a tobacco factory, had already borrowed US$1,100 from her employers. In 2008, he was persuaded by another micro-credit agent to borrow an additional US$330 in order to cover the previous debts. When he died, the payment of all three loans was more than twenty weeks late. This was not the first nor the last death related to micro-credit debts occurring that year in the state of Andhra Pradesh.[^10]
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The scenes I have described – in places as diverse as Europe, the US, Latin America, the Middle East and Asia – are the expression and result of a long process of deconstruction of housing as a social good and its transformation into a commodity and a financial asset, which began in the first decade of the twenty-first century.
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The extent and impact of this process go far beyond the financial subprime mortgage crisis that, spreading from the US since 2007, contaminated the international financial system. It is, in fact, the takeover of the housing sector by finance – the structural element of contemporary capitalism. We live under the empire of finance and fictitious capital hegemony, an era of increasing dominance of rent extraction over productive capital.[^11] The international literature on political economy of housing has termed this process ‘financialisation’, that is, ‘the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households’.[^12]
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The promotion of the ideology of homeownership,[^13] already deeply rooted in some societies and more recently introduced in others, has been a central element of the new paradigm of housing. Together with the ‘socialisation of credit’, it supported a double movement: on one hand, the inclusion of middle- and low-income consumers into financial circuits; on the other, the takeover of the housing sector by global finance. This process opened a new frontier for capital accumulation, allowing the free circulation of funds throughout almost all urbanised land.[^14]
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Between 1980 and 2010, the value of the world’s financial assets – stocks, debentures, private and government bonds, bank investments – increased by a factor of 16.2, while the world’s GDP increased by less than a factor of five in the same period.[^15] This pool of super-accumulation resulted not only from the profits earned by large corporations, but also from the emergence of economies such as China. This ‘wall of money’[^16] increasingly sought new fields of application, transforming whole sectors (such as commodities, education financing and health care) into assets to feed the hunger for new vectors of profitable investment. The imbalance between the size of the available financial capital and the domestic markets from which they originated resulted – mainly from the 1990s – in the search for internationalisation of investments. This environment was responsible for creating a structural scarcity of high-quality collateral. There was a wall of money as if airborne, seeking a ‘spatial fix’ (David Harvey’s concept), a place to land.[^17]
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The creation, reform and strengthening of housing financial systems became one of these new fields for surplus investment, both for macroeconomics and domestic finance and for this new flux of international capital. The creation of a subprime mortgage market was one of the main vehicles used to connect domestic systems of housing finance to global markets. However, other non-bank financial instruments, as well as interbank loans, allowed local banks and other intermediaries to increase their leverage, enlarging credit availability.[^18] The entrance of global surpluses of capital allowed credit to grow beyond internal markets’ sizes and capacities, creating and inflating real-estate bubbles.
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The takeover of the housing sector by finance does not represent the mere opening of another field of investment for capital. It is, in fact, a peculiar form of value storage, as it directly relates macroeconomics to individuals and families, and allows, through financing mechanisms, the interconnection of many central actors of the global financial system – such as pension funds, investment banks, shadow banking, credit institutions and public institutions.[^19]
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In highly dynamic economies, including some EU countries and the US, homeownership, because of its capacity to feed growth via credit, was also responsible for propelling the rise in household consumption in a context of wage reduction and limited employment growth.[^20]
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On the other hand, the public or semi-public nature of housing institutions and financial policies defines this sector as one of high political relevance.[^21] No setting-up of housing financing systems – regardless of its degree of connection to global finance – can happen without state action. Government intervention is needed not only to regulate finance, but also to build the political hegemony of the notion of home as a commodity and financial asset. Therefore, in every context that I have observed in different nation states, this movement also had significant political effects by creating and consolidating a conservative popular base, in which citizens are replaced by consumers and players in capital markets. It is in this sense that we may affirm, with Fernandez and Aalbers, that ‘This housing-finance elixir acts like a political drug.’[^22]
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Finally, we must flag up the huge impact that changes in housing provision formats have over cities’ structures. Through land markets and urban regulation, the new political economy of housing also involved a new political economy of urbanisation, restructuring cities. It is not only a new housing policy, but also a redesign of cities by the expansion of an urban, real-estate/financial complex.[^23]
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Thousands of mortgaged lives, the subprime victims of a decade-long credit supply boom; empty neighbourhoods, desolate cities; demonstrators occupying streets and public spaces for months; a hunger strike of proprietors deprived of their promised apartments. Some of the scenes described at the beginning of this chapter took place in the immediate wake of the 2007 US subprime mortgage crisis. After the bubble burst, the crisis quickly spread across the world, at the speed of financial products and with the intensity of the globalisation of markets to which the mortgage market was connected. It is not surprising that the first sector affected by the crisis was housing. Supplied by pension funds, hedge funds, private equities and other ‘fictional products’, housing became a fictional product itself when it was taken over by finance.[^24]
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The intensity of this change can be described as a movement that transformed a ‘sleeping beauty’ – the hitherto inert, immobile and illiquid housing from the Bretton Woods period – into a neoliberal ‘fantastic ballet’, in which assets leap from hand to hand through fast and constant transactions.[^25]
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That movement led to a change in the paradigm of housing policy in almost every nation on the planet. Formulated in Wall Street and in the City of London, rolled out for the first time by North American and British neoliberal politicians at the end of the 1970s and beginning of the 1980s, the change in the economic role of housing was further powered by the fall of the Berlin Wall and the free market hegemony that followed. Adopted by governments or imposed as a conditionality to access loans by multilateral financial institutions – such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) – the new paradigm is based mainly on the implementation of policies that create stronger and bigger housing financial markets, drawing in the low- and middle-income consumers previously excluded from them.
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At the end of the 1970s and throughout the 1980s, in response to economic and fiscal crises, a series of policies began to dismantle the basic institutional components that sustained the welfare state systems. Among the roots of these crises, especially relevant were the drop of Fordist sectors’ profitability, the intensification of international competition, the exacerbation of deindustrialisation and mass unemployment, and the suspension of the Bretton Woods monetary system. The set of policies adopted by states after the crisis of Fordist development was generically named ‘neoliberalism’.[^26]
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Despite being a general tendency, neoliberal restructuring strategies are applied to specific institutional configurations, particular socio-political power constellations, and pre-existing spatial configurations. In other words, since neoliberalism is an eminently unequal process, any perspective that ignores each country’s political and economic context has little explanatory strength.
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The importance of contexts becomes clear when we examine the reforms of housing systems in different countries in that period. In general terms, there is a move to dismantle social and public housing policies, destabilise security of tenure – including rental arrangements – and convert the home into a financial asset. However, this process is path-dependent: the institutional scenarios inherited by each country are fundamental for the construction of the emergent neoliberal strategies. Neoliberal policies must be understood as an amalgam between these two moments: it is a process of partial destruction of what exists and of trend creation of new structures.
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In countries such as Britain or the Netherlands, with their strong welfare state systems, the new watchword was privatisation – or even destruction – of public housing stocks, and drastic reduction of public funding for social housing. Instead, the creation of a mortgage-based financial system was stimulated in order to encourage the purchase of homes in the private market. Moreover, subsidies began to be redirected towards supply rather than demand.
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This budget reduction and the demolition of public housing units also occurred in the US. However, there are significant differences. Firstly, the idea of a welfare state system was never fully implanted there. Moreover, the support for homeownership based on mortgage credit certificates has been the guiding principle of US housing policy since the 1930s. Throughout the 1980s, the building of public housing units by the state was gradually replaced by a policy of mass stimulation of home purchase via subprime credit. Everywhere, the presence of these credit certificates and the deregulation of the rental market were designed to dismantle existing options of access to housing, and stimulate home-purchase as the only pathway to a roof over one’s head. Spain is one of the paradigmatic examples of this route.
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Twenty years ago, an influential World Bank report – Housing: Enabling Markets to Work – summarised this new line of thought on housing policy.[^27] This document contains not only arguments about how important the housing sector would be to the economy, but also directives to governments on how best to formulate their policies. Since the 1990s, housing financing grew radically in developed economies. In the US, UK, Denmark, Australia and Japan, for example, residential mortgage markets represent between 50 and 100 per cent of GDP.[^28]
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According to another World Bank document, intended to promote mortgage markets in emergent economies, other countries have also seen an increase in housing financialisation, although at a slower pace. Residential mortgage markets in South Korea, South Africa, Malaysia, Chile, and the Baltic countries accounted for 20 to 35 per cent of their GDPs. More recently, this phenomenon arrived in other countries (China, Thailand, Mexico, the majority of EU new members, Morocco, Jordan, Brazil, Turkey, Peru, Kazakhstan and Ukraine), where residential mortgage markets represent between 6 and 17 per cent of GDP. According to the World Bank, this ‘progress’ can also be observed in some less developed countries such as Indonesia, Egypt, Pakistan, Senegal, Uganda, Mali, Mongolia and Bangladesh, ‘but not on a large-enough scale to address some of the chronic housing issues they face’.[^29]
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From the old Central Asian and Eastern European Soviet Bloc all the way to Latin America, and from Africa to Asia, the takeover of the housing sector by finance has been a massive and hegemonic tendency. So much so, that a World Bank publication crowed – one decade after the launch of the housing private market manifesto referred to previously – that ‘the genie is out of the bottle.’[^30]
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The mercantilisation of housing – as well as the increased use of housing as an asset integrated into a globalised financial market – deeply undermined the right to adequate housing around the world. The belief that markets could regulate the allocation of housing, combined with the development of experimental and ‘creative’ financial products, led to the abandonment of public policies that regarded housing as part of the social commons. In the new political economy, centred around housing as a means of access to wealth, the home becomes a fixed capital asset whose value resides in its expectation of generating more value in the future, depending on the oscillations of the (always assumed) rise of real-estate prices.[^31]
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Like other social spheres, housing was affected by the dismantlement of basic welfare institutions and by the mobilisation of a series of policies aiming to expand market discipline, competition and commodification.[^32] These new ideas confronted the welfare systems and economic-political coalitions around housing that had previously existed in each country.
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In former socialist countries, in the US and in many European countries, the privatisation of public housing and drastic cuts in state investment in social housing were combined with reductions in welfare programs and rental subsidies. These measures were accompanied by the deregulation of financial markets and by a new urban strategy, allowing domestic capital mobilisation and international capital recycling. The new tendencies had a smaller impact in less developed countries, where welfare housing systems had never existed, or were small and marginal compared to the housing needs. The global imposition of neoliberalism has been highly unequal – both socially and geographically – and its institutional forms and socio-political consequences vary significantly around the world. In each context, much depends on specific interactions between inherited regulatory landscapes and emerging market-oriented restructuration projects.[^33]
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By considering the World Bank’s first document as a starting point and the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis as the first large international trigger, this first chapter of the book has mapped some of the key elements of the neoliberal perspective on housing and its impact on the right to housing in different contexts.[^34]
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Through observing different countries’ housing trajectories during my mandate as the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing, I detected three forms that the process of financialisation of housing can assume, which differ from each other not only in their origin, but also in the kind of impact they have on economies, cities and people’s lives. They are: mortgage-based systems; systems based on the association of financial credit with direct governmental subsidies linked to the purchase of market-produced units; and micro-finance schemes.
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As with every generalisation, these are for the most part models abstracted from the specificity of concrete situations, and not a rigorous classification. However, they allow us to understand the patterns of financialisation governing the takeover of the housing sector – in all its diversity – by the financial sector.[^35]
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In the US and the majority of European countries – which had previous experience of public housing provision, and enjoyed significant economic development in the Fordist period – the development of a residential mortgage financial market was the main mechanism for the promotion of homeownership. It increasingly replaced rental systems – however regulated, provisioned or subsidised by the state – as the dominant form. It is these countries’ experience that I will analyse in the next pages.
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[^1]: Raquel Rolnik, *Report: Mission to Kazakhstan*, A/HRC/16/42/Add.3, 2011, written in collaboration with Stefano Sensi. All mission and thematic reports that I presented to the UN and that are cited in the book are available on the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights’ website: ohchr.org. The identification provided after the report’s title in the Notes is the easiest way of finding the text through the website search tool.
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[^2]: Olzhas Auyezov, ‘Troubled Kazakh Homeowners Protest over Foreclosures’, Reuters, 18 March 2009. Available at: in.reuters.com, accessed 4 Dec. 2014.
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[^3]: Alfredo Rodríguez, Ana Sugranyes and Manuel Tironi, ‘Anexo 1: Resultados de una encuesta’, in Alfredo Rodríguez and Ana Sugranyes (eds), *Los con techo: Un desafío para la política de vivienda social* (Santiago, SUR, 2005), pp. 225–6.
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[^4]: Ana Sugranyes, ‘La política habitacional en Chile, 1980–2000: un éxito liberal para dar techo a los pobres’, in Rodríguez and Sugranyes (eds), *Los con techo*, pp. 23–33; Fernando Jiménez Cavieres, *Chilean Housing Policy: A Case of Social and Spatial Exclusion?* (doctorate thesis in Architecture, Fakultät VII, Architektur Umwelt Gesellschaft, Technische Universität Berlin, 2006).
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[^5]: Martin Roberts, ‘Spanish Banks to Restrict Evictions after Suicides’, *Guardian*, 12 November 2012. Available at: theguardian.com, accessed 6 Oct. 2014.
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[^6]: Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany, *Vidas hipotecadas: De la burbuja inmobiliaria al derecho a la vivienda* (Barcelona, Cuadrilátero de Libros, 2012).
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[^7]: Raúl Guillén, ‘Em Madri, vidas hipotecadas’, *Le Monde Diplomatique Brasil*, São Paulo, dossier n. 8, year 1 (Nov.–Dec. 2011).
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[^8]: See Friedrich Engels, *The Condition of the Working Class in England* (1845) and *The Housing Question* (1872).
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[^9]: Food banks stock farmers’ surplus produce and food donated by individuals. In the UK, food banks usually donate directly to the person in need, referred by social services.
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[^10]: Soutik Biswas, ‘India’s Micro-Finance Suicide Epidemic’, BBC, 16 Dec. 2010. Available at: bbc.co.uk, accessed 6 Oct. 2014.
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[^11]: David Harvey, *Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism* (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 241.
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[^12]: Manuel Aalbers, ‘Corporate Financialization’, in Noel Castree et al. (eds), *The International Encyclopedia of Geography: People, the Earth, Environment, and Technology* (Oxford, Wiley, 2015). Available at: academia.edu, accessed 8 Oct. 2015. See p. 3.
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[^13]: Richard Ronald, *The Ideology of Home Ownership: Homeowner Societies and the Role of Housing* (New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2008).
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[^14]: David Harvey, *The Urban Experience* (Oxford, Blackwell, 1989); Ugo Rossi, ‘On Life as a Fictitious Commodity: Cities and the Biopolitics of Late Neoliberalism’, *International Journal of Urban and Regional Research*, vol. 37, no. 3 (May 2013).
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[^15]: Leda Maria Paulani, ‘O Brasil na crise da acumulação financeirizada’, IV Encuentro Internacional de Economía Política y Derechos Humanos, 2010, p. 5. Available at: madres.org, accessed 6 Oct. 2014.
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[^16]: Manuel Aalbers and Rodrigo Fernandez, *Housing and the Variations of Financialized Capitalism*, international seminar, The Real Estate/Financial Complex (Refcom), Leuven, 2014, mimeo, p. 1.
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[^17]: International Monetary Fund, *Long-Term Investors and Their Asset Allocation: Where Are They Now?* (Washington, DC, IMF, 2011), cited in Aalbers and Fernandez, *Housing and the Variations of Financialized Capitalism*, p. 13.
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[^18]: Aalbers and Fernandez, *Housing and the Variations of Financialized Capitalism*, p. 14.
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[^19]: Ibid.
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[^20]: Herman M. Schwartz and Leonard Seabrooke, ‘Conclusion: Residential Capitalism and the International Political Economy’, in Schwartz and Seabrooke (eds), *The Politics of Housing Booms and Busts* (London, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), p. 210.
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[^21]: Ibid. p. 209.
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[^22]: Aalbers and Fernandez, *Housing and the Variations of Financialized Capitalism*, p. 4.
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[^23]: The concept of real-estate/financial complex was presented to me by Manuel Aalbers. He leads research focused on the relationship between real estate, finance and the state, drawing a parallel with the US military–industrial complex. See: ees.kuleuven.be/geography, accessed 10 Aug. 2015.
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[^24]: Mariana Fix, *Financeirização e transformações recentes no circuito imobiliário no Brasil* (PhD thesis in Economic Development, Campinas, IE-Unicamp, 2011); Rossi, ‘On Life as a Fictitious Commodity’.
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[^25]: Schwartz and Seabrooke, ‘Conclusion’, p. 210; Philippe Zivkovic, ‘Financiarisation de l’immobilier: La réponse innovante du groupe BNP Paribas’, 2006, cited in Higor Rafael de Souza Carvalho, *A cidade como um canteiro de negócios* (Undergraduate Final Work in Architecture and Urban Planning FAU-USP, São Paulo, 2011), p. 155.
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[^26]: Neil Brenner and Nik Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism” ’, in Brenner and Theodore (eds), *Spaces of Neoliberalism: Urban Restructuring in North America and Western Europe* (Oxford, Blackwell, 2002).
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[^27]: World Bank, *Housing: Enabling Markets to Work* (Washington, DC, World Bank, 1993).
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[^28]: Herman M. Schwartz and Leonard Seabrooke, ‘Varieties of Residential Capitalism in the International Political Economy: Old Welfare States and the New Politics of Housing’, in Schwartz and Seabrooke (eds), *The Politics of Housing Booms and Busts*, p. 16.
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[^29]: Loïc Chiquier and Michael Lea (eds), *Housing Finance Policy in Emerging Markets* (Washington, DC, World Bank, 2009), pp. xxxi–ii.
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[^30]: Robert M. Buckley and Jerry Kalarickal (eds), *Thirty Years of World Bank Shelter Lending: What Have We Learned?* (Washington, DC, World Bank, 2006), p. 41.
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[^31]: David Harvey, *Limits to Capital* (London and New York, Verso, 2007); *A Companion to Marx’s Capital*, 2 vols (London and New York, Verso, 2013).
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[^32]: Brenner and Theodore, ‘Cities and the Geographies of “Actually Existing Neoliberalism” ’.
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[^33]: Ibid.
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[^34]: World Bank, Housing: Enabling Markets to Work.
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[^35]: Raquel Rolnik, *Thematic Report about the Impact of Financialization on the Right to Adequate Housing*, A/67/286, 2012, in collaboration with Lidia Rabinovich.
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