The financialisation of rental housing: A comparative analysis of New York City and Berlin

By Desiree Fields, S. Uffer. 2016

413 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper compares how recent waves of private equity real estate investment have reshaped the rental housing markets in New York and Berlin. Through secondary analysis of separate primary research projects, we explore financialisation’s impact on tenants, neighbourhoods, and urban space. Despite their contrasting market contexts and investor strategies, financialisation heightened existing inequalities in housing affordability and stability, and rearranged spaces of abandonment and gentrification in both cities. Conversely cities themselves also shaped the process of financialisation, with weakened rental protections providing an opening to transform affordable housing into a new global asset class. We also show how financialisation’s adaptability in the face of changing market conditions entails ongoing, but shifting processes of uneven development. Comparative studies of financialisation can help highlight geographically disparate, but similar exposures to this global process, thus contributing to a critical urban politics of finance that crosses boundaries of space, sector and scale.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Finance, Urban Studies

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/9c4e1c3b45122842a7b7a2a4b58c41ac5080f891

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Citations in the corpus

Build-to-Rent and the financialization of rental housing: future research directions (2020, background): “…productive in highlighting the vital role played by governments, and associated local settings, in sponsoring, facilitating and participating in the financialization of rental housing and therefore in shaping the scale, speed, and profile of specific local investments (e.g. Fields & Uffer, 2016).”
Financialization and housing: Between globalization and Varieties of Capitalism (2016, background): “…scoring of (potential) homeowners (Aalbers, 2008; Hall, 2012), land use planning (CoqHuelva, 2013; Kaika and Ruggiero, 2014; Savini and Aalbers, in press), housing rights (Rolnik, 2013), private serviced residences (Trouillard, 2013) and subsidized housing (Fields and Uffer, 2014; Heeg, 2013).”
The Financialisation of Rental Housing 2.0: Releasing Housing into the Privatised Mainstream of Capital Accumulation (2018, background): “…1.0 to 2.0, this paper adds to the literature on the financialisation of rental housing (Aalbers 2016; Bernt et al. 2017; Beswick et al. 2016; Fields and Uffer 2016; Soederberg 2017; Wijburg and Aalbers 2017a) but also contributes real-world examples to the literature that argues that real…”
The de-financialization of housing: towards a research agenda (2020, background): “But how can such a revival of public housing interventions be legitimated within a socio-political system dominated by the ideology of private home ownership and public-private partnerships? And how can states and local authorities take back the initiative? Needless to say, a reconstitution of the p”
The alternative financialization of the German housing market (2017, background): “…literature on the financialization of social and rental housing in Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, the UK and the US (Aalbers, 2016; Aalbers et al., in press; Bernt et al., in press; Chua, 2015; Fields, 2015; Fields & Uffer, 2016; Heeg, 2013; Uffer, 2011; Wainwright & Manville, in press).”
Constructing a New Asset Class: Property-led Financial Accumulation after the Crisis (2018, background): “The rapid postcrisis transformation of SFR into an institutional asset class underlines both how crucial housing is to the circulation of capital (Aalbers and Christophers 2014), and the adaptability of financialization to changing market conditions (Fields and Uffer 2016).”
Demolishing the Present to Sell off the Future? The Emergence of ‘Financialized Municipal Entrepreneurialism’ in London (2018, background): “…agenda focussed on “‘asset management’, valuations and risk modelling” (ibid: 6).1 In another context, Desiree Fields’ (Fields 2013; Fields 2017; Fields & Uffer 2016) work on the financialization of private rent-regulated housing in New York and Berlin illustrates how…”