Follow the Firm: Analyzing the International Ascendance of Build to Rent

Brill, Frances; Özogul, Sara

doi:10.1080/00130095.2021.1931108

Cited by 20 publications

(24 citation statements)

References 54 publications

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“…Such an approach to collaboration—after the fact—can be meaningful (Heslop et al., 2020; Montero & Baiocchi, 2021) but it requires taking seriously the differences and bring them into a productive conversation. In other comparative projects, we have worked alongside established teams where researchers based and highly integrated in different places have tried to raise the same questions (Fricke & Gualini, 2017) and think through instances of seeming repetition (Brill & Özogul, 2021). As has rightly been pointed out, such approaches can be laborious even when the project is designed that way (Deville et al., 2016) and they bring their own challenges, especially during the pandemic (Rose‐Redwood et al., 2020), and during the later months in a world of ‘zoom fatigue’.…”

Section: Challenges Researching In the Pandemic And Methodological Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative urbanism in times of Covid‐19 and beyond

Fricke

Brill

2022

Geography Compass

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Living with a pandemic has transformed the everyday lives of citizens globally. For researchers engaged in qualitative comparative approaches that are contingent on travelling across borders, especially those of us living and writing in locations away from where we research, the pandemic has raised practical and methodological questions. Restricted movements and heightened border controls since March 2020 have transformed our practices as early career academics seeking to work alongside, help advance and build on the rich work within urban geography's comparative conversation. In this article, we build on the comparative tradition within urban studies and geography, reflecting on current efforts to challenge dominant paradigms within the discipline(s). We highlight the specific methodological challenges thrown up by the pandemic and address how we sought to work around potential comparative failures and traps. In particular, we focus on the implications of restricted mobilities and accesses to policy making sites for empirical research. We discuss the notions of site and event as potential entry points for studying virtual and material policy spaces, and for geographical research on urban policy making. Our paper contributes to both ongoing debates about the value and practicalities of a comparative urban agenda, and the methodological questions that reflect a re-thinking of our relationships with sites and place, and how this impacts a

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Section: Challenges Researching In the Pandemic And Methodological Co...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Comparative urbanism in times of Covid‐19 and beyond

Fricke

Brill

2022

Geography Compass

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“…Creating a space for real estate finance: National state policies after the financial crisis Corporate landlords became more prominent across Europe and North America in the 1990s as investors targeted favourable regulatory regimes, privatisation programmes and the erosion of rent control to acquire stock at scale in counties such as the US, Canada and Germany Beswick et al, 2016;Fields and Uffer, 2016). This prominence spread after financial disruption in the 1990s, as the combination of falling property prices and households' more limited access to mortgage finance generated opportunities for companies to acquire residential properties and exploit captive demand for private rent in cities such as Amsterdam, Berlin, Dublin and Madrid (Beswick et al, 2016;Brill and Özogul, 2021;Nethercote, 2020). BTR in the UKunderstood as housing owned at scale and under single professional management (Wilson et al, 2017) was initially relatively constrained, with residential property accounting for less than 1% of institutional investment into real estate in 2011, compared to 47% in the Netherlands (Bate, 2017: 17).…”

Section: Capturing Btr Investment For Greater Manchestermentioning

confidence: 99%

From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester

2023

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Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global–local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 development projects incorporating 45,069 new housing units, we show that new-build BTR units have outpaced ‘build to sell’ (BTS) units almost two to one in Manchester's city-regional centre since 2012. We also found stronger international investment in BTR relative to BTS, illustrating BTR's more globalised and financialised form. Our paper understands BTR growth in Manchester as the outcome of a transcalar territorial network – an assemblage of national policy objectives, local state actors’ urban regeneration activity and heterogenous global investor groups with different priorities all seeking a return. We highlight the important role of national and local state subsidies and local authority joint ventures in constructing a territory conducive for BTR investment in Manchester. We also show how the fungibility of BTR assets as a ‘networked product’ widens the investment appeal of the tenure type, broadening and deepening housing financialization.

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“…There is an additional methodological implication: to prise open the ‘black box’ elements in hybrid governance mechanisms facilitating deal-making, while tracing these in relation to both global finance, corporate firm strategies and the social networks of urban elites across state, community and private sectors (Ayres, 2017; Brill and Özogul, 2021; McManus and Haughton, 2021; Prince, 2012; Weller, 2017). Unlike ‘soft’ governance networks between grassroots, state and non-profit actors, which promote open face-to-face contact and contribute to public value via relational forms of leadership (Ayres, 2019), Unsolicited Proposals are reliant on closed networks of elite state and corporate actors, with access to ministers and high-level bureaucrats tightly controlled.…”

Section: More-than-neoliberal Urban Governance: Elite Deal-makingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

2022

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In this commentary, we argue that augmented concepts and research methods are needed to comprehend hybrid urban governance reconfigurations that benefit market actors but eschew competition in favour of deal-making between elite state and private actors. Fuelled by financialisation and in response to planning conflict are regulatory reforms that legitimise opaque alliances in service of infrastructure and urban development projects. From a specific city (Sydney, Australia) we draw upon one such reform – Unsolicited Proposals – to point to a broader landscape of hybrid urban governance, its reconfigurations of power and potential effect on cities. Whereas neoliberal governance promotes competition and views the state and private sectors as distinct, hybrid urban governance leverages state monopoly power and abjures market competition, instead endorsing high-level public–private coordination, technical and financial expertise and confidential deal-making over major urban projects. We scrutinise how Unsolicited Proposals normalise this approach. Commercial-in-confidence protection and absent tender processes authorise a narrow constellation of influential private and public actors to preconfigure outcomes without oversight. Such reforms, we argue, consolidate elite socio-spatial power, jeopardise city function and amplify corruption vulnerabilities. To theorise hybrid urban governance at the intersection of neoliberalism and Asia-Pacific state-capitalism, we offer the concepts of coercive monopoly (where market entry is closed, without opportunity to compete) and de jure collusion (where regulation reforms codify informal alliances among elites connected across government and corporate and consultancy worlds). We call for urban scholarship to pay closer attention to public–private hybridisation in governance, scrutinising regulatory mechanisms that consecrate deal-making and undermine the public interest.

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Follow the Firm: Analyzing the International Ascendance of Build to Rent

Cited by 20 publications

References 54 publications

Comparative urbanism in times of Covid‐19 and beyond

Comparative urbanism in times of Covid‐19 and beyond

From homes to assets: Transcalar territorial networks and the financialization of build to rent in Greater Manchester

Deal-making, elite networks and public–private hybridisation: More-than-neoliberal urban governance

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