(De)financializing housing through collective land ownership: Towards a conceptual framework

Keywords: financialization, housing, property, community land trust
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Tuesday
Session Start / End Time: 3/1/2022 11:20 AM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 3/1/2022 12:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 50

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to highlight considerations in how we might conceptualize the (de)financializing of housing through collective land ownership approaches, such as CLTs, and LECs. Housing financialization, and market-based housing approaches generally, have been implicated in making housing more expensive, less stable, and a site for wealth extraction that drives economic inequality. The negative impacts of housing financialization are too often borne by groups most socially, politically, and economically marginalized, including working-class and BIPOC households and families. Recent scholarship has argued that housing financialization stems from historical trajectories of racism and capitalism, whereby racial difference is foundational to capital accumulation – what has been termed ‘racial capitalism.’ Private property has been central to the operation of racial capitalism and racial dispossession. Recently, scholars and practitioners have suggested that community land trusts (CLTs) and other forms of social housing bear the potential to rework relations of housing financialization. Yet, there has been limited empirical and theoretical research into how CLTs might achieve this. Furthermore, this claim seems to side-step the fact that CLTs (and other forms of social housing) are enmeshed in networks of finance – from development to purchase. This reliance on finance capital also limits the degree to which CLTs can serve lower-income households most in need of stable and affordable housing. For these reasons, this paper seeks to outline the considerations necessary for a conceptualization of housing (de)financialization in relation to contemporary forms of collective land ownership.