Contesting the Financialization of Urban Space: Community Organizations and the Struggle to Preserve Affordable Rental Housing in New York City

Abstract

As cities have become both site and object of capital accumulation in a neoliberal political economy, the challenges to community practice aimed at creating, preserving, and improving affordable housing and neighborhoods have grown. Financial markets and actors are increasingly central to the workings of capitalism, transforming the meaning and significance of mortgage capital in local communities and redrawing the relationship between housing and urban inequality. This article addresses the integration of housing and financial markets through the case of “predatory equity,” a wave of aggressive private equity investment in New York City's affordable rental sector during the mid‐2000s real estate boom. I consider the potential for community organizations to develop innovative, effective, and progressive practices to contest the impact of predatory equity on affordable housing. Highlighting how organizations employed discursive and empirical tactics as well as tactics that reworked the sites, spaces, and structures of finance, this research speaks to the political possibility of contemporary community practice.

Old Wine in Private Equity Bottles? The Resurgence of Contract‐for‐Deed Home Sales in US Urban Neighborhoods

“…Private equity flowing into the residential sector was not a new phenomenon (e.g. Fields, 2015). However, the crisis gave the sector new profit-making opportunities, including at the bottom end of the real estate market.…”

The globalisation of real estate: the politics and practice of foreign real estate investment

“…These three 'disposable asset' categories (HNWI, UHNWI and UUHNWI) exclude primary residences, collectables and other consumables (Atkinson, 2016(Atkinson, , p. 1307Harrington, 2016;Hay, 2013;Rogers, 2016a, p. 8). Wealth management funds might include a portfolio of ultra-expensive residential or commercial real estate properties in cities such as London or New York (Atkinson, 2016;Fields, 2015;Harrington, 2016;Madden & Marcuse, 2016;Rogers, 2016a).…”

“…We are not suggesting that this is a definitive list of the methodological challenges that will confront further empirical and theoretical scholarship in this area. Certainly, there are many more methodological challenges that we have not covered, such as the financialisation of real estate (Fields, 2015), reports of black and grey financial channels, lucre and suspect money sources, and corruption (Rogers & Dufty-Jones, 2015), or the financial, digital and global commodification of real estate (Madden & Marcuse, 2016;Rogers, 2016b). Nonetheless, reading across the articles we find four methodological challenges that deserve a short expose in this editorial; they are (1) investor cohorts and property types, (2) regulatory settings, (3) geopolitics, and (4) spatial differences and temporal trajectories.…”

Embedding financialization: a policy review of the EnglishAffordable Homes Programme

“…Other housing studies have addressed the resistance that inancialization of housing has generated (Fields, 2015); predatory lending practices (Newman, 2009); the changing nature of housing association inance sources (Wainwright & Manville, 2017) and securitization of mortgages (Aalbers, 2008).…”