Financialised privatisation, affordable housing and institutional investment : the case of England

• Authors: Gertjan Wijburg , Richard Waldron
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that ‘financialised privatisation’ is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.

Keywords

EN

financialised privatisation; financialisation; affordable housing; institutional investors

Discipline

• SOCIOLOGY: SOCIOLOGY

• Publisher: Institute of Sociology, Czech Academy of Sciences
• Journal: Critical Housing Analysis
• Year: 2020
• Volume: 7
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 114-129
• Document type: ARTICLE

Contributors

author

Gertjan  Wijburg

• Critical Housing Analysis, redakce,Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i. Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic

author

Richard  Waldron

• Critical Housing Analysis, redakce,Sociologický ústav AV ČR, v. v. i. Jilská 1, 110 00 Praha 1, Czech Republic

Identifiers

DOI

10.13060/23362839.2020.7.1.508