‘Mortgaged lives’: the biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation

Abstract

The paper expands the conceptual framework within which we examine mortgage debt by reconceptualising mortgages as a biotechnology: a technology of power over life that forges an intimate relationship between global financial markets, everyday life and human labour. Taking seriously the materiality of mortgage contracts as a means of forging new embodied practices of financialisation, we urge for the need to move beyond a policy-and macroeconomics-based analysis of housing financialisation. We argue that more attention needs to be paid to how funnelling land-related capital flows goes hand in hand with signing off significant parts of future labour, decisionmaking capacity and well-being to mortgage debt repayments. The paper offers two key insights. First, it exemplifies how macroeconomic and policy changes could not have led to the financialisation of housing markets without a parallel biopolitical process that mobilised mortgage contracts to integrate the social reproduction of the workforce into speculative global real-estate practices. Second, it expands the framework of analysis of emerging literature on financialisation and subjectification. Focusing on the mortgage defaults and evictions crisis in Spain, we document how during Spain's 1997-2007 real-estate boom the promise of mortgages as a means to optimise income and wealth enrolled livelihoods into cycles of global financial and real-estate speculation, as home security and future wealth became directly dependent on the fluctuations of financial products, interest rates and capital accumulation strategies rooted in the built environment. When, after 2008 unemployment escalated and housing prices collapsed, mortgages became a punitive technology that led to at least 500 000 foreclosures and over 250 000 evictions in Spain.

Urban struggles with financialization

“…By the 2000s, the debts financing real estate investments had become “raw materials” for “securities, derivatives, and the related products of a financialized economy” (Newman, , p. 315). Of course, this process also depends upon social actors who understand their daily life and life chances through the logic of investment: a “constant pursuit of opportunities and the negotiation of risk in order to yield rewards” necessitated by the hollowing out of postwar welfare states (Allon, , p. 367; García Lamarca & Kaika, ; Haiven, ; Langley, ; Martin, ). As Haiven () and García Lamarca and Kaika () observe, social reproduction is increasingly organized in ways that reproduce financialized capitalism.…”

“…Of course, this process also depends upon social actors who understand their daily life and life chances through the logic of investment: a “constant pursuit of opportunities and the negotiation of risk in order to yield rewards” necessitated by the hollowing out of postwar welfare states (Allon, , p. 367; García Lamarca & Kaika, ; Haiven, ; Langley, ; Martin, ). As Haiven () and García Lamarca and Kaika () observe, social reproduction is increasingly organized in ways that reproduce financialized capitalism. Thus, the growth of homeownership helped realize a spatial fix for finance capital.…”

Discourses of Thrift and Consumer Reasonability in Czech State-Socialist Society

“…The responsibilisation of 'ordinary' households thus had already appeared during the socialist era, and does not, therefore, represent the hallmark of a 'new' financialised reality [cf. Greenfield and Williams 2007;Saegert, Fields and Libman 2009]-the implication being that socialist discourse of thrift had formed a discursive and practical basis for what in contemporary literature is termed the financialisation of everyday life [Pellandini-Simányi, Hammer and Vargha 2015;García-Lamarca and Kaika 2016;Lai: forthcoming]. This process of the financialisation of the day-to-day relies heavily on the notions of self-care and self-responsible citizens using financial products to secure themselves for the duration of their life rather than relying on traditional state-organised means to provide for their welfare [Doling and Ronald 2010: 165;Giesler and Veresiu 2014;van der Zwan 2014: 112].…”

To repay or not to repay: financial vulnerability among mortgage debtors in Spain

“…The most prominent movement, the PAH, has promoted the conversion of mortgage debtors into a significant social and political actor in the public sphere. Their prior stigmatisation and invisibilisation has been overcome to a great extent, thanks to several audacious campaigns that, by identifying the common interests and circumstances of mortgage defaulters in different socio-economic positions, have consolidated an alternative narrative of the mortgage crisis (Mangot 2013;Mir et al 2013;Sabaté 2014;García-Lamarca and Kaika 2016). Ada Colau and Adrià Alemany (2012: 71), two of the founders of the PAH, have summarized this task as follows:…”