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Place, Exclusion, and Mortgage Markets
... Second, this disadvantage does not hold everywhere: it may be more pronounced in countries where mortgages are a driving force in home acquisition compared to those where mortgages play a more limited role. Third, our comparison of two post-socialist societies expands the body of national cases in studies of how consumer credit-especially mortgage markets with respect to housing-affect social inequality, beyond long-standing market economies (Aalbers 2011;Dwyer 2018). Finally, for the literature on market transition, our findings suggest that credit institutions, which vary in post-socialist reform trajectories (Rona-Tas and Guseva 2014), matter for their patterns of inequality, despite having been largely overlooked in prior studies. ...
... A related, but distinct, impediment to acquiring a home more clearly distinguishes nonstandard from standard jobs: their income uncertainty, which results from their disproportionate precarity (Barbieri and Scherer 2009;Gebel and Giesecke 2011;Giesecke and Groß 2003), association with irregular, unpredictable work hours (LaBriola and Schneider 2020), and possible wage cuts (OECD 2011). Even at relatively high levels of current income, income uncertainty may inhibit nonstandard employees from taking mortgage loans (because the down payment is in jeopardy if income loss leads to foreclosure) and deter lenders from granting them (Aalbers 2011;Diaz-Serrano 2005). ...
... We propose that the resulting cross-national variation in the prevalence of mortgages may help explain variation in the disadvantage of NSE for attaining homeownership. If, as we argue, a primary mechanism creating the NSE disadvantage for homeownership entry operates via access to mortgages, then the NSE disadvantage should be greater in countries where mortgages are a widespread means of acquiring homes, given the fact that nonstandard employees are more likely to be excluded from obtaining mortgages because bank lenders reject applicants with low income and high employment instability (Aalbers 2011 This stylized example illustrates the simple point that disadvantages nonstandard employees experience in accessing mortgage loans only translate into larger scale disadvantages in the overall rates of home acquisition if mortgage loans are a common means for purchasing homes: if mortgages are rare because few banks issue them or interest rates are exceedingly high, then the NSE disadvantage only pertains to a rarely used mechanism, so it does not convert into a substantial overall disadvantage. Even if the effect of NSE on obtaining a mortgage is the same in all countries, the overall gap between nonstandard and standard employees in the rate of entry to homeownership would tend to be greater in countries where a larger percentage of home purchases involve mortgages. ...
Nonstandard employment (NSE) is a disadvantage for entry into homeownership because it is associated with both lower average income and greater uncertainty of future income. These features of NSE make formal mortgage loans from banks riskier to take on and harder to obtain. This mechanism implies that the relative disadvantage of NSE for homeownership entry is greater in societies where, due to institutional and macroeconomic factors, mortgages are a more prevalent means to acquire homes. We test these theoretical expectations by analyzing entry to homeownership using panel surveys from Russia and urban China, two former state socialist countries with comparable labor market regulations, housing regimes, and welfare protections, but different mortgage prevalence. NSE is associated with lowers rates of entering homeownership in urban China, where mortgages are far more common, but not in Russia. Moreover, this negative effect in urban China pertains only to home acquisitions via mortgages, not to homeownership entry via other paths. Our findings broaden sociological understanding of how NSE contributes to inequality by highlighting the role of income uncertainty. They also suggest that cross-national differences in financial institutions may moderate the disadvantages of NSE and thus shape the consequences of market transition for stratification.
... Many governments have taken direct action to ensure the wide availability of mortgage credit (Aalbers 2015;Dewilde and De Decker 2016;Haffner 2009). In the U.S., for instance, the government spun off quasi-public agencies with the purpose of securitizing originated mortgages to ensure a steady flow of credit availability to new borrowers (Aalbers 2011;Mirowski 2013;Sowell 2011). These organizations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while nominally for-profit organizations, acted with a widely assumed-albeit tacit-government backstop that became quite explicit when both organizations entered government conservatorship after the mortgage crisis of 2008 (Aalbers 2011;Schwartz 2010). ...
... In the U.S., for instance, the government spun off quasi-public agencies with the purpose of securitizing originated mortgages to ensure a steady flow of credit availability to new borrowers (Aalbers 2011;Mirowski 2013;Sowell 2011). These organizations, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, while nominally for-profit organizations, acted with a widely assumed-albeit tacit-government backstop that became quite explicit when both organizations entered government conservatorship after the mortgage crisis of 2008 (Aalbers 2011;Schwartz 2010). In the UK, the government sold off council housing stock in order to stimulate government revenue and transform residents to homeowners (Ronald 2008). ...
... However, such strong-arm tactics could just as easily inflame the problem. A number of scholars suggest rolling back lender-and borrower-side subsidies that have the effect of encouraging individuals to view their home primarily as an investment, such as a mortgage tax deductions or a lending subsidy (Aalbers 2011;Crook and Kemp 2011;McCabe 2016). Theoretically, a reduction in these incentives could have downstream impacts on the financial behavior of individual homeowners and ameliorate their concomitant engagement with the politics of exclusion. ...
Affordable housing policy in the developed world has been undergoing a systematic commodification for several decades, including a push for homeownership as the normalized tenure and a commodity unto itself. Scholars suggest this push for homeownership is part and parcel of a neoliberal asset-based welfare to supplement, or even outright replace, traditionally defined benefit pension schemes. These policies individualize risk and re-fashion individual citizens as long-term financial planners, navigating the uncertainty inherent in international financial markets and general financial management. Less deeply explored, however, are the perverse incentives this system creates for homeowners to protect their home “investment” by leveraging planning policies, zoning, and land-use restrictions to preserve the community status quo and lock in the value of their home. In a policy environment in which long-term financial risk is individualized and public social welfare and pension systems are relegated to the smallest number of individuals possible, this type of NIMBYism (Not in My Backyard) is rather rational behavior, even as it simultaneously staunches the supply of new housing and drives up prices for non-homeowners. As such, this analysis synthesizes the existing research to make a formal theoretical connection between the neoliberal push for commodified housing, asset-based welfare, and the intractable political problem of NIMBYism.
... Macro dynamics, such as the global economy (Sassen, 2012;Sites, 2003), the national economy, and federal policy directives (Halpern, 1995;Peterson, 1981), are important factors that shape urban neighborhoods. Furthermore, city-level economic and political factors, such as housing market conditions and political actions, mediate global and national forces to influence neighborhood change (Aalbers, 2011;Hirsch, 1998;Hyra, 2008;Logan & Molotch, 2007;Stone, 1989). Not only are multiple external neighborhood dynamics important for understanding community change, but internal neighborhood circumstances, such as organizational structure (Wilson, 1996) and collective efficacy, that is neighborhood norms of trust and collective action (Sampson, Raudenbush, & Earls, 1997), influence the neighborhood change process. ...
... The greenlining of credit in minority communities was seen as controversial (Aalbers, 2011;Squires, 2005Squires, , 2008. 2 On the one hand, it provided minorities, who had once been denied loans, the ability to buy a home and attain the American Dream. 3 Furthermore, it was associated with the revitalization of historic, once divested, Black communities (Hyra, 2012). ...
... In certain neighborhoods the availability of below market properties, brought on, in part, by foreclosure concentration, might encourage investors to buy homes, renovate them and sell them to newcomers who perceive that the neighborhood properties are good values compared to other homes in more expensive parts of the city (Li & Morrow-Jones, 2010;Maeckelbergh, 2012). 5. We assess the tightness of metropolitan housing market conditions through comparing the homeownership vacancy rates in the Chicago, New York and Washington, DC MSAs. We assume that upper-and middle-income people are more willing to move to and invest in low-income neighborhoods in metropolitan areas with tighter housing markets (see Aalbers, 2011;Guerrieri, Hartley, & Hurst, 2010). Metros with lower vacancy rates are considered tighter housing markets. ...
The United States experienced the Great Recession between 2007 and 2009 and many American cities and communities are still suffering from its legacy. During the prior period of the early and mid-2000s, many inner city African American communities were experiencing gentrification, driven in part by the real estate bubble that popped in 2007. While much has been written about the institutional and structural causes and consequences of the Great Recession, this article seeks to better understand its community-level implications by investigating the relationship between lending and property value patterns in three gentrifying African American communities just before, during and after this economic calamity. In particular, we investigate Bronzeville in Chicago, Harlem in New York City and Shaw/U Street in Washington, DC. Evidence suggests the Great Recession differentially influenced the development trajectories of these urban neighborhoods. In Bronzeville severe and prolonged property decline resulted, while much less economic stagnation was experienced in Harlem and Shaw/U Street. The Great Recession did not have uniform implications for urban African American neighborhoods: distinct community and city contexts, in particular racial and class neighborhood transitions and citywide unemployment and housing market conditions, mediate the influence of national economic decline and recovery.
... Lo anterior resulta en una valoración desigual del suelo y una forma de discriminación basada en la clase social (Rolnik, 2013) y la localización geográfica. Para Aalbers (2011), esta relación entre la financiarización y la intensificación de la desigualdad urbana se ve como una nueva geografía de la exclusión. ...
Este trabajo analiza el proceso de producción social del espacio urbano, a partir del papel fundamental del capital inmobiliario y la participación del Estado y del sector financiero en el desarrollo urbano, con énfasis en la comprensión de las prácticas y estrategias de los agentes que intervienen y en la transformación de la estructura de estos agentes, dentro de un contexto evolutivo reciente, a partir de la financiarización, y, en la forma en que dichas estrategias han reconfigurado el espacio urbano. En este sentido, se retoman conceptos neomarxistas como los circuitos de circulación del capital, la propiedad del suelo y la formación de rentas urbanas, el problema de la vivienda y sus distintas formas de producción, para abordar la representación de los promotores inmobiliarios como agentes dominantes de la producción del espacio. Partiendo de esto, se segmenta a la promoción inmobiliaria en fases o procesos multiescalares y se analiza a los agentes promotores y sus estrategias en cada fase. De este modo, se abordan a los agentes dentro del funcionamiento del mercado del suelo, vinculado, a su vez, a la intervención estatal en la transición hacia un modelo de mercantilización del desarrollo urbano. Posteriormente, se emprende una revisión de la ampliación financiarizada del espacio global de acumulación, que impulsó el despliegue de una multitud de circuitos productivos, financieros y de consumo, materializados en proyectos inmobiliarios locales, a través de una nueva estructura de agentes y de nuevos instrumentos financieros. Asimismo, se examina la industrialización y la reorganización de la división del trabajo en los procesos productivos de la vivienda, a partir de la adopción de estrategias de crecimiento por parte de las empresas promotoras, tales como las economías de escala, la integración vertical u horizontal, la formación de corporaciones o la especialización; así como la adopción de ventajas competitivas genéricas, que respaldan los objetivos empresariales corporativos y que se relacionan más con las fases de circulación y de consumo de las mercancías inmobiliarias: diferenciación o enfoque de segmentos, de productos o de cobertura geográfica. Finalmente, se realiza una reflexión acerca de cómo estas transformaciones en los sectores financiero, productivo y de consumo han influido en el modelo actual de ciudad, es decir, en la expresión espacial de la producción de vivienda financiarizada, que se manifiesta en una nueva morfología urbana.
... A common starting point is the New Deal and post-World War II programmes of state intervention in the housing system, including various homeownership programmes backed by the state and public investment in non-market housing. Black households and others racialised as nonwhite were excluded from many of the home ownership opportunities created by these programmes, through mechanisms including redlining and racially-restrictive covenants (e.g., Aalbers, 2011;Gotham, 2014;Hernandez, 2009). While these processes are not mirrored precisely in other Anglo settler societies, there are some similarities. ...
... En las últimas décadas, la obra literaria de David Harvey ha revitalizado a través de un lenguaje crítico a los estudios urbanos actuales, ya que ha ayudado a inspirar distintas interpretaciones de la relación entre espacialidad y capital (Castree 1998;Jessop 2006;Alessandri 2008;Aalbers 2011). La producción científica de Harvey en este terreno ha sido prolífica. ...
Ideas destacadas:
artículo de reflexión que ofrece avances de investigación sobre el pensamiento de David Harvey, al analizar la producción del espacio bajo la lógica del capital. Su eje explicativo es que dicha dinámica vincula las políticas neoliberales pro empresariales y de estrategias de mercantilización, como la creación del imaginario urbano atractivo, a través de la producción del capital simbólico colectivo y de las marcas especiales de distinción.
... Monopoly rent has since been differentiated between monopolies based on natural or inherent rare qualities (e.g. grape vintage) (MR1) and those class-monopoly rents based on scarcities induced through socio-legal arrangements such as neighborhood red-lining (MR2) (see Aalbers, 2011;Anderson et al., 2022). Here, rentiership is understood as a particular class position defined by its relationship to surplus value extraction, specifically aimed at squaring a labor theory of value with the existence of a significant landlord class extracting value without being directly involved in production. ...
... These technologies establish, first, who can get specific credit products (boundary classification). For example, redlining isor used to bea practice of excluding inhabitants of specific neighbourhoods from mortgages (Aalbers, 2011;Dwyer, 2018). Second, they establish with what conditionsinterest rate, collateral value, guarantors, etc.people can get credit (within market classification), depending on the group into which they have been classified, typically through credit scoring (Marron, 2007). ...
While critical marketing studies have discussed algorithm-driven marketing’s role in governmentality, subjectivity formation and capitalist accumulation, its role in shaping class inequalities is less studied. Drawing on the performativity of marketing, ‘classification situations’ and critical algorithm studies, this paper uses the case of credit marketing to propose a twofold framework to analyse how algorithmic marketing shapes the cultural and economic inequalities of class. First, algorithms used for categorizing consumers and matching them with marketing messages and products provide access (1) to different symbolic resources and (2) to credit products with different financial consequences to different consumers depending on their categorization, which contribute to the creation of cultural and economic inequalities, respectively. Second, algorithms of financial advice devices overtake parts of consumer choice. Insofar as different financial preferences and rationalities are scripted into the devices for different client groups, these technologies constitute an additional process that affects social divisions.
Open access:
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14705931231160828
... The financialization of housing is the result of significant changes in the way housing is loaned, particularly in the emergence of "mortgage-backed securities"" [3]. The mortgage market is not only financial capital but also an economic space structured by power relations between different actors maintained through a combination of social, cultural, and symbolic capital [4]. The emergence and widespread use of mortgage-backed securities have changed the definition of space by liquidating housing and urban space. ...
The multidimensional nature of the house housing makes it different for each individual, group, and actor As Madden and Marcuse point out, the housing may be a speculative commodity for one actor but a home for another Housing also plays an essential role in the reproduction of social life In this context, for those who want to live with people with similar cultural and economic capital, housing becomes an identity construction, and gated communities contribute to forming this identity This new housing supply, which started in the United States in the 1980s, began to be seen in different world geographies in a short time Gated communities have quickly turned into a preferred housing supply, as can be seen in the global north countries as well as in the global south countries Although these residences were produced for the upper and middle-upper classes when they first emerged in Turkey, they started to serve the middle classes as well, within the framework of the construction-oriented growth approach determined by Turkey after 2002 In this context, the mortgage law enacted in Turkey in 2007 was influential in accelerating access to these residences Thus, a period was entered in which white-collar workers took long-term loans and started to own houses in communities formed by people like themselves Kayapınar Municipality, established within the borders of Diyarbakır Metropolitan Municipality in 2008, increased its population by 211.6 % from 2008 to 2021 as a particular example of this background This district accounted for over half of the mortgage loans used in Diyarbakır Even though Kayapınar has emerged as a natural new development area due to the macro form of the city, it has grown faster than the target This growth in Kayapınar has been a process in which large landowners who want to benefit from urban rent with the new housing demand of the middle class and effective use of mortgage loans come to the fore Over the years, many gated communities have been built in the settlement This study examines the relationship between mortgage loans, one of the tools that have an essential role in the financialization of urban space, and gated communities serving the middle class In this context, using different data sets together, this study also sheds light on the people who buy housing with mortgage loans in this area
... Amsterdam's population and economy were growing up until 2008, when the Great Financial Crisis (GFC) hit. This crisis, its effect on housing markets and its political and institutional aftermath 70 would have a great impact on the city (Aalbers, 2011a), creating a turning point in Amsterdam's social history. ...
Between 1980 and 2015, Amsterdam changed from a poor city under a radical left-wing government to a city dominated by middle classes. Our central concern is to explain and understand this transformation; the (re-)making of Amsterdam as a middle-class city. This book asks the question how can a city ruled by the socialist or social democratic Labour Party for a century, and internationally famed for its social policies, become a place where gentrification sets the tone and (neo)liberal urbanism takes hold again? To answer, we focus on the interlocking socio-economic and political dynamics that have reshaped Amsterdam’s social geography.
... There is growing recognition that income and profit have become outweighed by wealth and rent in recent decades, meaning that societies' surplus is accruing to asset-holders rather than wage earners (extensively evidenced in the work of Piketty, 2014; see also Christophers 2019; Birch and Muniesa 2020). In the Global North this has occurred primarily through residential land markets (Knoll et al. 2017), leading to debate over how we conceptualise class in an asset economy where social reproduction is increasingly dependent on housing wealth (Adkins et al. 2020;. This turns on the treatment of land as a financial asset, meaning that land is being managed for its exchange value (as an investment) as opposed to its use value (e.g., in the case of residential land, as the site of a home). ...
The social life of land is one of struggle to appropriate resources and extract financial value; a struggle we characterise, we argue, by ‘asset-class war’. A fictitious commodity in Polanyi’s sense, land has both use value and exchange value but no value understood as socially necessary labor time. As a result, land has a distinct political economic role, which means that to understand its social life under capitalism requires theoretical attention. In particular, while land (and its appurtenances) has always been pivotal to sustaining expanded capital circulation, its enrolment into accumulation dynamics has been greatly intensified under financialized capitalism. The social life of land under financialized capitalism resides precisely in its potential to be enrolled as an asset in circuits of financial capital circulation.
The problem of land has always been a vexed one in political economy, turning on how something that is not produced through socially necessary labor time can be imbued with exchange value. Explaining the particular nature of monetary returns that can be extracted from land requires a particular sub-field of political economy centred upon the theorization of rent. In this chapter we will rehearse Marxist rent theory, highlighting the production and distribution of rent, its central co-ordinating role in contemporary capitalism, as well as the relationship between rent production and the expanding circulation of fictitious (financial) capital, as crucial to understanding the social life of land in contemporary capitalism.
Further, building on rent theory, we argue that the possibilities for rent production and extraction resides fundamentally in the process of ‘assetization’. This refers to the socially, politically, and culturally contested process through which land (or other things) is turned into an asset, so providing the potential basis for its insertion in the capitalist circulation and valorization process. The making of land into an ‘asset’ involves not only the enclosure of imposing (private) property relations but also the formation of a wide range of institutional and regulatory configurations as well as calculable dispositifs that sustain its transformation into a fungible financial product. It is through the process of assetization that struggle over the distribution of societal resources unfolds most intensely, and around which divergent political claims crystallize in the present choreography of capitalist transformation. Conflict unfolds around the modalities of assetization on the one hand, and the distribution of resource access and resulting profits on the other – a nexus of sociotechnical contestation we refer to as ‘asset-class struggle’.
... Both these strands of literature touch on race in mostly indirect and descriptive terms-highlighting communities of color's demands for credit access, as well as their vulnerability to predatory forms of credit provision. I argue, however, that without theoretically situating credit expansion as a specific kind of technology deployed in the racial stratification of the market economy (see Massey and Denton 1993;Gotham 2000;Stuart 2003;Oliver and Shapiro 2006;Aalbers 2011), these studies cannot fully understand the problem of expanding credit-and, as I will argue, of making markets-for the marginalized. ...
... This is why it is fundamental to better understand the agency of institutional and noninstitutional actors within transforming neighborhoods. Market actors such as landlords, real estate brokers, and financial institutions should be considered as intentionally and unintentionally restructuring local real estate markets, thus producing or contributing to the processes of neighborhood change (Aalbers 2011). For example, in certain conditions, it becomes rational and logical for individual landlords to "milk" properties, by crowding people and extracting inflated rents from tenants who are expelled from alternative rental markets. ...
Neighborhood change addresses the dynamics of the physical, social, and demographic composition of specific places and spaces with symbolic cohesion in the city. Understanding this transformation requires a theoretical framework that includes both the agency of individual and institutional actors and the structural power arising from urban capital accumulation. Hence, neighborhood change exemplifies the social and spatial injustices of contemporary capitalism and class struggle. Its analysis relates us to the reasons why people live, move, and concentrate in certain areas, while being systematically excluded from others.
... One limitation to the spatial analysis approach is that, while it is generally accepted that financial exclusion is a form of social exclusion (Carbo, Gardener, and Molyneux 2005;Aalbers 2011), representing the relationship between financial ecologies and individual behavior has proved to be chal- lenging, and therefore assigning causality to particular societal factors is problematic (Clark 2013). Spatial analysis studies have long addressed such limitations. ...
The availability of retail financial services in low-to-moderate income (LMI) neighborhoods remains a controversial topic, with significant underexplored questions about the potential presence of alternative financial service providers (AFSPs) and the absence of banks and credit unions (BCUs). In LMI neighborhoods across the United States, consumers regularly utilize AFSPs, including payday lenders, for basic financial transactions and services. This article addresses the geographic relationship between retail financial services locations, neighborhood level demographic variables, and mortgage lending activity in three U.S. metropolitan study areas: Las Vegas, Nevada; Los Angeles, California; and Miami, Florida. The neighborhood-level predictors of the presence of both AFSPs and BCUs are examined at the Census-tract level using Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) and simultaneous autoregres-sive (SAR) statistical models. The results reveal that sociodemographic variables, including median household income and race/ethnicity, have a significant predictive relationship on AFSP location, even when controlling for spatial clustering.
... Many economic studies of peripheralization deal, for instance, with processes of shrinkage, outmigration, innovation weakness and dequalification, which they observe mainly at a regional scale (Copus, 2001;Danson and De Souza, 2012;Crone, 2012). Many sociological studies, in contrast, mostly on the urban scale, equal peripheralization with processes of marginalization, segregation, impoverishment and exclusion (Aalbers, 2011;Atkinson, 2000;Billson, 2005;Gough et al., 2006;Wacquant, 2008). Common to many definitions, however, is that they conceptualize peripheralization as a matter of power relations: peripheries are regarded as "powerless" because they are repressed, excluded and depending from by ruling elites (Blowers and Leroy, 1994;Friedmann, 1973;Gottmann, 1980;Herrschel, 2011;Lang, 2012;Wacquant, 2008). ...
In recent decades socio-economic inequalities in Europe have been aggravated due to economic globalisation and the transformation of the welfare state. A large number of European states are characterized by a polarization between dynamic, growing metropolitan regions and rural or old industrial regions experiencing shrinking processes. Thereby, it is not only great metropolises such as London or Paris that are booming as a result of an influx of migrants, equity investments and the expansion of urban infrastructure (e.g. airports and rapid transit systems).
Objective: One of the most complex social phenomena in today's cities is inequality. This inequality in urban space has led to problems, especially in metropolitan areas. One of these issues and problems is the social exclusion of some citizens in the urban space. The purpose of this paper is to survey urban space in terms of indicators of social exclusion. Methods: The present paper is applied in terms of purpose and descriptive-analytical in terms of method. First, the data were collected using questionnaire tools for indexing and then Shannon entropy method was used to weight social exclusion indices. The target neighborhoods are then ranked and leveled based on the Coopers model and analyzed spatially through a map in ArcGIS.
This essay elaborates the terms of our central argument about the current intensification of global disjunctures. We introduce a crucial dimension of our engaged theory of globalization that can usefully be brought to the fore to understand these cleavages and tensions. The essay scrutinizes two key conjunctures, comparing the current Global Covid Crisis with the 2008–2009 Global Financial Crisis. It concludes that massive disjunctures in the way we live locally and globally have had incongruous effects on the global-local nexus, but without leading to positive transformation. Rather, they are both expressions of a longer-term transformation we have been calling the Great Unsettling. Without reflexive counter-practices, the most likely mid-term prognosis for the world is an intensification of tensions and disjunctures that are leading to a further thickening of this complex dynamic.
The aim of this paper is to clarify the meaning of comparative urban analysis, to distinguish three approaches to it, and to argue for the importance of two of them which has not been recognized in the past. Although the examples are drawn from urban and regional studies the arguments made apply equally to comparative anslysis in other fields.' The paper is divided into five parts. First we consider the uses of comparative studies, and distinguish between comparative research and comparative analysis. We then present some conflicting views about the execution of comparative analysis which reflect different theoretical positions and different ideas about underlying causal relations in society. Section I11 uses examples to introduce the three approaches to comparative analysis. Two of these involve the idea of plural causation and the importance of this concept and its implications in urban and regional studies are stressed in the fourth section. We conclude by discussing the scope of comparative analysis in the light of the earlier arguments. I Throughout this paper we shall use the term comparative to refer to crossnational comparisons. This is a conventional but entirely arbitrary usage. Comparisons between cities, classes, genders, etc. are no less important, and the same arguments that will be advanced here can be applied to them, mutatis mutandis.
Demand for owner-occupied housing has expanded dramatically across modern-industrialized societies in recent years leading to volatile increases in residential property values. This book explores the rise of modern home-ownership as a cultural, socio-political and ideological phenomenon.
The proverbial American dream of owning a home has become an all-too-real nightmare for a growing number of families. The most vulnerable segments of our society—including minorities, the elderly, and working families—are being victimized by financiers who lure them into commitments they cannot fulfill. Collectively known as predatory lending, these practices include offering higher interest rates than can be justified by the risk, high pre-payment penalties that lock families into exploitative loans, and monstrous balloon payments that often result in default and the loss of the home. The net result can be disastrous: damage to one's credit rating, bankruptcy, and even the loss of lifelong savings.
Why the Poor Pay Moreis an incisive exposure of these practices: how they have evolved, why they have become so prevalent in recent years, and how their negative effects can be quantified. It features in-depth analysis from prominent scholars, legal experts, and community leaders, who shed new light on the social, political, and economic consequences of predatory lending. Why the Poor Pay More is much more than an indictment of these insidious discriminatory practices. It is a call to arms for anyone concerned about how the financial-political system can be corrupted to serve the needs of the wealthy. Highlighting community initiatives already underway to combat predatory lending and an extensive listing of practical resources,Why the Poor Pay Moreoutlines active roles that individuals, advocacy groups, financial and legal service providers, and policymakers can play in reversing this destructive trend.
The nature and effects of globalization are coming under critical scrutiny across all continents. This book focuses on one aspect, the globalization of cities. It examines the claim that the state is powerless to influence events, and that history, geography, and culture have become irrelevant in the worldwide trend towards a uniform urban model; a model which features increased segregation, decline of the central city, and social polarization. The international team of contributors is well placed to put these claims in perspective. Drawing on their experiences of cities as diverse as New York and Warsaw, Istanbul and Sao Paulo, they demonstrate that states and cities have adopted widely varying approaches to the advent of globalization; and that its impact has been constrained by each city's history, physical layout, location, environment, role in the international economy, and demographic composition. The diversity of urban development and political response revealed is enormous, and provides ample practical examples of what might be done to bring about improvements for the increasing number of people who live in cities.
The nature and effects of globalization are coming under critical scrutiny across all continents. This book focuses on one aspect, the globalization of cities. It examines the claim that the state is powerless to influence events, and that history, geography, and culture have become irrelevant in the worldwide trend towards a uniform urban model; a model which features increased segregation, decline of the central city, and social polarization. The international team of contributors is well placed to put these claims in perspective. Drawing on their experiences of cities as diverse as New York and Warsaw, Istanbul and Sao Paulo, they demonstrate that states and cities have adopted widely varying approaches to the advent of globalization; and that its impact has been constrained by each city's history, physical layout, location, environment, role in the international economy, and demographic composition. The diversity of urban development and political response revealed is enormous, and provides ample practical examples of what might be done to bring about improvements for the increasing number of people who live in cities.
The Golden Age of post‐war capitalism has been eclipsed, and with it seemingly also the possibility of harmonizing equality and welfare with efficiency and jobs. Most analyses believe that the emerging post‐industrial society is overdetermined by massive, convergent forces, such as tertiarization, new technologies, or globalization, all conspiring to make welfare states unsustainable in the future. This book takes a second, more sociological and institutional look at the driving forces of economic transformation. What stands out as a result is that there is post‐industrial diversity rather than convergence. Macroscopic, global trends are undoubtedly powerful, yet their influence is easily rivalled by domestic institutional traditions, by the kind of welfare regime that, some generations ago, was put in place. It is, however, especially the family economy that holds the key as to what kind of post‐industrial model will emerge, and to how evolving trade‐offs will be managed. Twentieth‐century economic analysis depended on a set of sociological assumptions that now are invalid. Hence, to grasp better what drives today's economy, it is necessary to begin with its social foundations. After an Introduction, the book is arranged in three parts: I, Varieties of Welfare Capitalism (four chapters); II, The New Political Economy (two chapters); and III, Welfare Capitalism Recast? (two chapters).
Originally published in 1996, Urban Land and Property Markets describes the intricacies of the Italian urban planning system, and the interconnections between the property sector, the national economy, and recent historical developments, including the new challenges facing Italy after the early 1990s collapse of the party system. The book’s underlying thesis is that property values are ultimately created by urban planning and investment in infrastructure. Negotiations between local government and developers focus on three basic issues: the ultimate use of urban land, the quantitative control of development via planning permissions relating to city master plans, and the nature of public investment to support growth and property values.
Habermas outlines three aspects of advanced capitalist societies: the economic system, the administrative system, and the legitimation system. The economic system consists of the market-regulated systems of production and consumption within the private sector and the support of military and space-travel in the public sector. The administrative system consists primarily of the state apparatus as it regulates the economic and social order. Finally, the legitimation system becomes necessary to support the other two stystems when their logical support is no longer self-evident. When flaws in the political system are revealed, advanced capitalism must contend with what Habermas calls a "legitimation crisis," in which the legitimizing system does not succeed in keeping an acceptible amount of loyalty from the populace.
Introduction
The previous chapter gave an account of the historical development of large housing estates, referring also to the problems of these estates in the process of their ‘natural’ development. This chapter features a separate discussion of the period of privatisation (starting in the early 1980s in Great Britain and continuing on a large scale in the 1990s in the post-socialist countries), since this highly political process has had a profound effect on the future perspectives of the housing estates in these countries.
As previously outlined, the large housing estates, which are the subject of this book, have a range of elements in common. The estates were built at the same time; they were built by either a local government authority, or the state, or not-for-profit organisations; and they represented contemporary, state-of-the-art, professional architectural and engineering views on residential development. The estates also had their differences: some were the first, or even the only, modern not-for-profit housing available in a period of recovery after the Second World War and in economies with no tradition of social-rented housing; others were a new element in established social- and public-rented housing provision. In these cases the estates did not necessarily offer the most desirable dwellings or locations and this drawback often became more apparent over time. In some cases this generation of public and social-rented housing was targeted at different social groups and had a different place in the policy agenda: rehousing households from urban renewal or slum housing neighbourhoods rather than meeting general housing needs.
All these elements of similarity and difference existed when the estates were built. The standing and quality of these estates, however, is not purely attributable to these initial characteristics. The history of maintenance and repair has affected the quality and attractiveness of the estates. At the same time the characteristics of the households living in the estates has changed and it has been argued that in some countries these estates have been more profoundly affected by the process of residualisation than other estates.
This chapter is concerned with a further element in the changing nature of these estates: the changes in patterns of ownership and control associated with privatisation.
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