No abstract

Over the last decade, Greater Manchester's city-regional centre has become an important site for build to rent (BTR) housing development in the UK. The growth of this new tenure raises important empirical and conceptual questions about how far and through what means BTR has extended in post-industrial cities like Manchester, as well as how to theorise the global–local relations involved in BTR development. Drawing on a self-built database of 155 development projects incorporating 45,069 new housing units, we show that new-build BTR units have outpaced ‘build to sell’ (BTS) units almost two to one in Manchester's city-regional centre since 2012. We also found stronger international investment in BTR relative to BTS, illustrating BTR's more globalised and financialised form. Our paper understands BTR growth in Manchester as the outcome of a transcalar territorial network – an assemblage of national policy objectives, local state actors’ urban regeneration activity and heterogenous global investor groups with different priorities all seeking a return. We highlight the important role of national and local state subsidies and local authority joint ventures in constructing a territory conducive for BTR investment in Manchester. We also show how the fungibility of BTR assets as a ‘networked product’ widens the investment appeal of the tenure type, broadening and deepening housing financialization.

This paper provides a critical intervention into recent geographical debates on racial capitalism, interrogating the role that Housing Associations (HAs), the main form of UK social housing, play in its (re)production. Housing Associations are institutional, third-sector spaces within which novel forms of financialisation and bordering take place. Race is central to these processes, but insufficient critical attention has been afforded to the intersections of class, race, and migratory status in extant research on UK HAs. Moreover, existing research into housing and racial capitalism is provincial in its North American focus, typically examining home ownership and private renting. We argue this is a significant lacuna given that new and multiple forms of racialised exclusion, inequality, and extraction cohere in social housing.There is accordingly a pressing need for a robust interrogation of racial capitalisms through UK HAs, and of the role of HAs via the conceptual lens of racial capitalism. In concluding, the paper argues for a new focus on 'actually existing' racial capitalisms, and the need for detailed analyses of the logics and practices of racial capitalisms across a variety of sites and scales, helping debates move beyond their conceptual heartland in North America.