Situating financialisation in the geographies of neoliberal housing restructuring: reflections from Ireland and Australia

Abstract

The growing literature on housing financialisation offers an increasingly fine-grained analysis of how financial actors shape housing markets and systems internationally. Nevertheless, a lack of clarity remains about the geographical and temporally specific ways that financialisation grafts onto and amplifies wider neoliberal housing restructuring, as well as the role the global financial crisis (GFC) plays in its variegated trajectories. In this paper, we address this problematic by situating housing financialisation within the context of longer-term neoliberal restructuring via a comparative analysis of Ireland and Australia. Our empirical and conceptual aims are two-fold. First, we deploy our comparison to disentangle housing financialisation from wider processes of neoliberal restructuring and identify the moments in which financialisation acts as a crucial accelerant that amplifies but also mutates extant path dependent trajectories. Second we mobilise comparison to reflect critically on the role that crisis and crisis discourses play in facilitating regulatory restructuring through financialised logics. While in Ireland the crash formed a juncture for regulatory capture by financial actors and the deepening of financialisation as a core component of housing, Australia’s response to the GFC was a reassertion of the neoliberal status-quo. However, we contend that Australia’s housing markets are now characterised by many aspects of financialisation and remain vulnerable to its impacts. We argue that comparative analysis allows us to view the path dependent nature of neoliberal restructuring as well as the variegated geographies and temporalities of financialisation on housing regimes internationally.

Australian housing markets, the COVID-19 pandemic and black swan events

“…Several factors protected Australia from GFC contagion, including exposure to risks associated with the US subprime crash limited by Australia’s strong resource economy, banks’ better capitalisation, limited exposure to international borrowing and prudential lending practices. Furthermore, Australian states had the autonomy to set fiscal policy responses, and these focused on reasserting the extant housing regime, legitimatised as protecting the housing sector from market failures and crisis impacts (O’Callaghan and McGuirk, 2021). To this end, the Australian housing market is resilient and shows different dynamics under extremely impactful events, compared to the housing economies of other Western countries.…”

Key Themes of Build-to-Rent: Developing a Conceptual Framework for Achieving Successful Developments through a Systematic Literature Review

“…The practice has been observed from the 1990s and has the power to shape the housing development scenario in general [16][17][18]. Despite being associated with a decline in housing affordability, displacement, and a decrease in the quality of housing, the practice has continuously been facilitated by governments due to the benefits it brings to the economy and housing supply [14,[18][19][20]. As the housing financialisation market matured, it expanded to the rental housing market.…”

Assetization and the ‘new asset geographies’

“…As housing is the most accessible and significant asset for most people, its assetization has been fundamental to the changing welfare regimes, patterns of distribution, and class relations. The fostering of so-called ‘property-owning democracies’ and correspondent regimes of debt has been central to contemporary politics and policymaking ( García-Lamarca and Kaika, 2016 ; Feliciantonio and Aalbers, 2018 ; August, 2020; O’Callaghan and McGuirk, 2021 ). The expansion of mortgage markets combined with denigration of universal social welfare provision has been a driver of asset-based welfare, especially in the erosion of universal pensions and their replacement by housing wealth to be tapped into upon retirement (see, inter alia, Watson, 2009 ; Doling and Ronald, 2010 ).…”