Financialised Privatisation, Affordable Housing and Institutional Investment: The Case of England
Year: 2020
Type: article
Abstract: 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.
Source: Critical Housing Analysis
Authors: Gertjan Wijburg, Richard Waldron
Institutions: Utrecht University, Queen's University Belfast
Language: English
Subfield: Finance
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W3034834966