Origins of State Housing Policy in Canada: the Case of the Central Mortgage Bank

In the literature, Canadian federal housing policy is most often considered to be a post-Second World War phenomenon and to have been effectively initiated, at least in an institutional sense, with the establishment of Central Mortgage and Housing Corporation (chmc) in 1945 (Bettison, 1975; Hatch. 1975; Rose, 1980). It is generally accepted that the state was led to intervene in the private housing market as a result of an unprecedented demand from returning servicemen. This demand was heightened by increasing levels of disposable income and exacerbated by reduced levels of housing production during the war. In this scenario. the state is seen to have been responding to a specific market crisis; the response resulted in the creation of various agencies, most notably cmhc, and in National Housing Act amendments, virtually all of which took place in the post-war era. The ‘market-crisis’ perspective to the study of federal housing policy tends to overlook the initiation of state monetary and credit system management during the 1930s and its implications for the form of state intervention in housing during the 1940s and beyond. I wish to make a case here for pushing back the study boundaries to at least the early 1930s in conjunction with a brief examination of the Central Mortgage Bank (cmb). The argument is that the essential ‘actors’ in the determination of housing policy at the federal level (i.e. the Department of Finance, the institutional lenders [particularly the insurance companies], and the provinces) came to be delineated in the 1930s around the issue of debt management in the wake of widespread mortgage default, especially in the rural districts of the prairie provinces. The cmb, although never becoming active, is seen here as the first substantial collaboration between the state and finance capital in the area of residential mortgage lending practices. It represents an additional facet of state monetary and credit system management that proceeded apace with the formation of the Bank of Canada in 1935.     

Housing Regeneration and the Private Finance Initiative in England: Unstitching the Neoliberal Urban Straitjacket

Abstract: This paper responds to recent debates in human geography about ideal‐type versus contingent neoliberalism, or what Gibson‐Graham conceptualises as “strong” vs “weak” theory, by offering some reflections from an in‐depth study of the private finance initiative (PFI) in England. It first introduces the history and purpose of the PFI as the Labour government's flagship public–private partnership (PPP) approach to public infrastructure modernisation. It then critically analyses its use in inner‐city regeneration through a case study of a PFI housing scheme in the northern English city of Leeds. The paper argues that, when seen through the lens of “strong theory”, a PFI appears to be a consciously designed “neoliberal straitjacket” intended to lock‐in gentrification‐based regeneration at the neighbourhood level, guarantee long‐term profits to (finance) capital, and create powerful privatising and marketising pressures across the local public sphere. However, it is equally possible to construct a preliminary “weak theory” of the PFI that unhides its inherent contradictions and shows how everyday activism by local community actors can successfully influence and contest how neoliberalism is rolled out on the ground.     

Finance,Home Building,and Urban Residential Structuring

Abstract: The aim of this article is to improve our understanding of finance in home building by introducing an actor perspective in structure‐oriented theories of capital circulation. David Harvey's three‐circuit theory, with fixity‐motion processes and (de‐/re)‐territorialisation, is taken as the starting point. The analysis is based on a case study of Norwegian home‐building finance, outlining the emerging structure of housing and finance under the Norwegian version of neoliberalism; comprising deregulation and re‐regulation phases. The article delineates today's home‐building finance, and identifies large banks, small banks, large investment funds and small investment funds as structural actors operating within actual fixity and motion processes, causing a distinct territorialisation of urban landscapes, as exemplified by gentrification.     

Temporal and Spatial Dynamics of the New Residential Areas around Tallinn

New housing construction is the most visible manifestation of the rapid suburbanization process taking place in the former centrally planned countries of Central Eastern Europe. This paper analyses residential housing construction around Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, in the period 1991–2005. Our data comes from the New Residential Area Survey that was carried out in 2006. The main results of the study reveal that housing construction was modest in the 1990s, but grew rapidly in the 2000s. In comparison with the Soviet period, private interest led new housing construction to take place in areas closer to Tallinn that were earlier reserved for other functions; that is former agricultural and coastal (often military) areas. Instead of the sprawl of detached housing further away from the capital city seen over time, we find increasing in-fills and multifamily housing construction in the 2000s around Tallinn. This leads to changes both in the internal structure (small but merging settlements close to Tallinn are different from the Soviet time compact settlements located all over the rural areas) and functioning (increase in daily commuting) of the metropolitan area. We argue that the transition period ends in the housing market when a new and better balance between public and private interests emerges in Estonia like in Western Europe.     

中国大城市新建中产阶层化现象的供给端解析

中产阶层化是一个多元、复杂、变化的社会空间重构现象。作为我国大城市中产阶层化的主流模态,新建中产阶层化是由政府和资本力量主导,通过拆建实现的社区建成环境改善和社会结构跃升现象。以南京内城为例,分别从政府经营城市、资本循环增值和资源非均衡配置逻辑解读新建中产阶层化的驱动机理,进而从城市空间嬗变、社会阶层分化和被置换群体利益剥夺等方面探讨新建中产阶层化的多重效应,随后在分析中产阶层化模式将由“拆建型”向“侵替型”演进的趋势下,提出未来中产阶层化研究应更多强调供给与需求等多视角的互补与融合,构建符合中国特色的中产阶层化理论模型,并引导中产阶层化社会空间实践走向更加公平与可持续。     

Subprime Housing Goes South: Constructing Securitized Mortgages for the Poor in Mexico

Mexico represents the largest market for residential mortgage‐backed securitization (RMBS) in Latin America. Despite its significance to questions of development, there has been no critical analysis on the social implications and power dimensions of RMBS with regard to low‐income housing in Mexico. This essay fills this gap by demystifying the technical and thus apolitical nature of RMBS as well as by explaining how and why state‐sponsored securitization schemes subsidize financial and construction interests in the name of expanding home ownership for the poor. In so doing, the analysis employs a historical materialist approach that, first, places RMBS within the contradictory nature of capital accumulation processes in Mexico and relations of class‐based power therein, and second, views RMBS as an integral feature of housing policy that is inextricably linked to the nerve centre of capital accumulation, namely: the credit system.     

New Globalism, New Urbanism: Gentrification as Global Urban Strategy

This paper uses several events in New York in the late 1990s to launch two central arguments about the changing relationship between neoliberal urbanism and so–called globalization. First, much as the neoliberal state becomes a consummate agent of—rather than a regulator of—the market, the new revanchist urbanism that replaces liberal urban policy in cities of the advanced capitalist world increasingly expresses the impulses of capitalist production rather than social reproduction. As globalization bespeaks a rescaling of the global, the scale of the urban is recast. The true global cities may be the rapidly growing metropolitan economies of Asia, Latin America, and (to a lesser extent) Africa, as much as the command centers of Europe, North America and Japan. Second, the process of gentrification, which initially emerged as a sporadic, quaint, and local anomaly in the housing markets of some command–center cities, is now thoroughly generalized as an urban strategy that takes over from liberal urban policy. No longer isolated or restricted to Europe, North America, or Oceania, the impulse behind gentrification is now generalized; its incidence is global, and it is densely connected into the circuits of global capital and cultural circulation. What connects these two arguments is the shift from an urban scale defined according to the conditions of social reproduction to one in which the investment of productive capital holds definitive precedence.     

Buying and Borrowing in Adelaide: Mortgage Commitments of Home Buyers, 1986

In April 1986 housing finance allocation procedures were deregulated. The impact of this decision on levels of finance borrowed by households was assessed for 2562 buyers of houses and home units in the Adelaide Statistical Division during May and June 1986. Sales price and mortgage data suggest two tendencies influencing the relationship between price and mortgage. Firstly, low price purchasers have small deposits and borrow heavily to effect their purchase. Secondly, high price buyers, with large deposits, are nevertheless taking out large loans to finance housing. Levels of gearing show market socio-economic bias, low cost buyers being more likely to be overcommitted.     

GENTRIFICATION IN CENTRAL MOSCOW ‐ A MARKET PROCESS OR A DELIBERATE POLICY? MONEY,POWER AND PEOPLE IN HOUSING REGENERATION IN OSTOZHENKA

ABSTRACT. The recent process of housing redevelopment in central Moscow is examined in the light of the theory of gentrification. The study is based on the case of Ostozhenka as an emblematic example of a large–scale transformation of a central residential neighbourhood into the most expensive quarter of central Moscow. Using data collected through interviews, archive enquiries and field surveys, the paper addresses the preconditions, dynamics and mechanisms of this socio–political process. It is argued that gentrification in Ostozhenka shares many features observed in the other large cities of the world but, as predicted by theory, is locally embedded. It has been a product of a complex interplay of the market pressure aiming to meet demands from Moscow's successful post–Soviet economy and Moscow government's entrepreneurial and pro–development strategy for the city centre regeneration. The government privileges market forces: it empowers them vis-à-vis the original population and allows them to circumvent conservation institutions, while the achieved profit is shared between the private and public sides. Whereas the physical improvement of the city centre signifies departing from the Soviet legacies of under–investments in the housing built environment, the growing socio–spatial polarization undermines the social achievements of the Soviet system and denotes the triumph of the neoliberal urban regime in Moscow.     

A RESIDENTIAL ENERGY MARKET MODEL: AN ECONOMETRIC ANALYSIS*

This paper develops a multisector residential energy policy model. This model hypothesizes that household energy behavior is affected by conditions in the housing, the mortgage finance, and the energy markets. The relationships encompassed by the model are specified with 32 single and simultaneous equations and tested with quarterly data drawn from behavior in Delaware. After the testing and evaluation of the model for its statistical performance, thereafter, three energy policies are simulated a 5 percent residential energy consumption tax, a set of conventional insulation requirements for all new housing, and a passive solar-installation requirement for all new housing. These policy choices are evaluated in terms of their impact on energy consumption, prices, demand and size of different types of housing permits, and mortgage financing. Finally, the economic and social implications of these policy impacts are discussed.     

Gentrification within Australia’s ‘Problem City’: Inner Newcastle as a Zone of Residential Transition

Inner Newcastle has undergone a significant reorientation of both its residential composition and physical form over the last decade. The process of gentrification within two inner city suburbs (Cook’s Hill and Newcastle East) indicates the existence of an emergent consumer class within inner Newcastle. The spatial occurrence of this group within inner Newcastle can be considered as a strategy for the creation of a distinctive identity based upon inner city residency and conspicuous consumption. Consumption of the inner city operates at a variety of scales including the refurbishment of historic terraced housing and cottages and participation within inner Newcastle’s developing café culture.     

边缘化新白领的中产阶层化研究:内容、理论构架与未来

随着国际金融海啸后社会经济矛盾的地理大转移,广大新兴市场化国家内城市新白领阶层的社会经济生境边缘化趋势不可避免。边缘化的新白领必然导致其中产阶层化历程的异化,与常规的中产阶层化特征、机制与社会空间后果相异。本文将新白领及其边缘化中产阶层化机理纳入中产阶层化一般化研究之内,继而构建新白领中产阶层化研究理论构架,以便进一步补充、完善一般中产阶层化理论体系。最终,希望为"十二五"以来面临新转型的中国大城市内城再城市化、更新和转型提供一些发展引导思路。     

Disrupting Gentrification: From Barricades and Housing Occupations to an Insurgent Urban Subaltern History in a Southern City

Housing struggles are key to disrupting gentrification capital flows and dispossessions. Based on life histories, key informant interviews, and six years of engaged ethnography with slum activists in the Philippine capital, this paper explicates political geographies of insurgent housing practices, including community barricades and housing occupations, and marks a history of militant subaltern struggles for the right to the city. I contend that these highly-organised insurgent practices disrupt real estate capital pathways and nurture political subjectification where emancipatory spaces and socialities of care can be founded. Moreover, I intervene in the lack of attendance to the co-constitution of barricades and occupations to less visible forms of insurgent housing practices. As these are emplaced to other subaltern times and spaces, political knowledges and subjectivities developed against forced evictions and demolitions enhance anti-gentrification struggles. In tracing this militant urban history, I mark the incremental advance of subaltern housing struggles in a Southern economy highly reliant on real estate capital investments.     

Private rental investment and socio-spatial disadvantage in Sydney,Australia

This article unpacks the connection between a growing cohort of small-scale but purposive property investors and urban socio-spatial restructuring. We analyse private rental housing as a tenure share to demonstrate its spatial correlation with the suburbanisation of socio-economic disadvantage in Sydney, Australia, between 1991 and 2016. Then, we show how investors drive this emerging pattern by reference to the geography of property owners’ stated investment objectives—low capital outlay, rental yields, and capital growth prospects. We contend that the link between their small-scale activities and the city’s changing socio-spatial structure is an overlooked consequence of private rental sector (PRS) housing financialisation. Importantly, our focus on behaviours exhibited by small-scale rental property owners in PRS financialisation transcends existing analyses that have concentrated on corporate entity activity in this space. That focus also contrasts with framings of private rental growth as a residual outcome of developments elsewhere in the housing market. Such work is significant because it demonstrates the impacts of real estate investment on urban form.     

Social Polarization and the Politics of Low Income Mortgage Lending in the United States

ABSTRACT The structured inequalities of capital investment and disinvestment are prominent themes in critical urban and regional research, but many accounts portray ‘capital’ as a global, faceless and placeless abstraction operating according to a hidden, unitary logic. Sweeping political‐economic shifts in the last generation demonstrate that capital may shape urban and regional processes in many different ways, and each of these manifestations creates distinct constraints and opportunities. In this paper, we analyze a new institutional configuration in the USA that is reshaping access to wealth among the poor – a policy ‘consensus’ to expand home‐ownership among long‐excluded populations. This shift has opened access to some low‐ and moderate‐income households, and racial and ethnic minorities, but the necessary corollary is a greater polarization between those who are able to own and those who are not. We provide a critical analysis of these changes, drawing on national housing finance statistics as well as a multivariate analysis of differences between owners and renters in the 1990s in New York City. As home‐ownership strengthens its role as a privatized form of stealth urban and housing policy in the USA, its continued expansion drives a corresponding reconstruction of its value for different groups, and inscribes a sharper axis of property‐rights inequalities among owners and renters in the working classes.     

西方城市绅士化理论纷争及启示

西方城市绅士化研究自20世纪60年代出现以来,历经近半个世纪,已经形成相对完整的学术流派和理论体系。其中最具代表性的要数NeilSmith从政治经济学角度提出的"地租落差"理论,强调内城区绅士化住宅的供给和生产,以及DavidLey从后工业社会城市转型角度强调绅士化群体的文化需求和住宅消费。不同理论学派在绅士化成因等问题上存在不同的理解与争议,了解西方主流绅士化理论流派,以及探讨绅士化概念与理论演进的脉络、特征和趋向,有助于更好地开展中国城市绅士化研究。     

On wine,rent and regions: labour market change and housing market processes in non‐metropolitan South Australia

This article reports on research into the relationship between labour market change and the private rental market in non‐metropolitan South Australia for the period 1990–2000. Using Small Area Labour Market data, Census data and records from the Residential Tenancy Tribunal the study investigates the capacity of the private rental market to respond to labour market and population growth. The article finds that there is considerable ‘stickiness’ within the private rental market in regional South Australia and that there has been a limited supply response to changing levels of demand. This has contributed to housing and labour shortages in some regions and over supply in others. Each circumstance has generated considerable dilemmas for public policy. The reasons underlying the imperfect market response are considered and the implications for the future development of the regions are discussed.     

Gentrification in inner Melbourne: problems of analysis

Measurement and analysis of survey data for the period 1961–76 show that the concept of ‘gentrification’, borrowed from the British inner housing scene by local media and social scientists, does not capture the most salient features of the recent inner Melbourne experience. Serious inadequacies are revealed in the census data and alternative data sources are tapped. Positivist methods say nothing about the ‘meaning’ of inner city social changes, leaving room for interpretation based on the socio-political stance of the observer. This is seen in the attribution of motives for the ‘gentry's’ entry into inner Melbourne and for their environmental and political activities.     

Widespread and diverse neighborhood gentrification in Jerusalem

Gentrification in Jerusalem is much more complex than is often perceived or observed. It is not just an inner city process and has a substantial representation in the outer areas of the city, too. In the inner city gentrification was made possible by the growing willingness to upgrade old houses, formerly looked down upon by upwardly mobile individuals. In the outer areas gentrification was as result of a growing suburbanization of the Jewish middle-classes. Geopolitical circumstances played a substantial role in the spatial pattern of gentrification, especially along the former cease-fire line that has divided Jerusalem between 1949 and 1967. Once that line did not exist functionally gentrification was in motion, as a spontaneous process or an institutional one. What emerges from the study of gentrification is its diverse nature. Each particular neighborhood has its specific circumstances in terms of its physical layout, geopolitical setting and social composition, which in turn have an impact on the nature of gentrification.     

RENEWING URBAN RENEWAL IN LANDSKRONA,SWEDEN: PURSUING DISPLACEMENT THROUGH HOUSING POLICIES

The city of Landskrona in the South of Sweden has never fully recovered from a phase of heavy deindustrialization during the 1970s and 1980s. After years of socially inspired plans and projects, the local authorities have now decided to shift gear and tackle problems of criminality, unemployment and social exclusion through a renovation and eviction plan of the inner city. The basic thought behind the plan is to radically alter the social fabric of the inner city through major alterations of the housing market. The Crossroads Centre/East plan proposes that the municipal authorities, together with five real estate companies, form a new company to renovate houses, convert rental apartments to condominiums, demolish and rebuild. One hundred million Swedish kronor are invested in the company – 95 million will come from municipal funds. The proposal in the City Council, led by the Liberal Party, was supported by 49 out of 51 Councillors, including the Social Democrats and the extreme right‐wing Sweden Democrats. The aim is not hidden: welfare recipients should be actively steered away from the city centre and make place for a (imaginary) wealthy middle class. The overall objective of the company is ‘to improve both the physical and socio‐economic status in Landskrona's central and eastern parts’. To understand this urban renewal proposal, we would like to present Landskrona as an example of a watershed in Swedish housing politics that forces us to consider: (1) the nature of gentrification processes in Scandinavia – from gentle to brutal; (2) the shift in viewing affordable housing as a problem, rather than a solution; and (3) the possible introduction of “renoviction” in Sweden.