In the name of housing: corporate rental housing as financial asset

The article is a commentary for the Special Issue ‘Institutional Investment in Urban Housing Markets: Global Trends, Local Manifestations and the State’. This special issue examines the current and variegated trends of financialization of rental housing across ten European contexts, highlighting the growing concentration of residential assets in corporate hands and the pivotal role of the state in this process. States have acted as market-makers, de-risking institutional investment through privatization, fiscal incentives, legal reforms and crisis-driven asset disposals. These mechanisms have expanded financial logics into the rental sector, intensifying affordability crises, tenure insecurity and social displacement. Yet, local resistances and progressive municipal policies reveal the political contestation of housing’s commodification. The contributions collectively demonstrate how rental housing has become the new frontier of housing financialization – an adaptable, service-oriented asset class linking finance and real estate. Those new arrangements between financial capital and states were basically aimed to solve financial capital problems – in the name of housing – rather than really addressing housing needs. On other hand, as a result of the impact of policies adopted in different phases of housing financialization, political mobilizations have emerged, which were eventually able to reform policies. The articles expose the state’s contradictory role as both the enabler of the taking over of residential stocks by finance but also as a battle ground for housing policies directed to promote access to adequate housing to growing sectors of residents immersed in situations of housing precarity and permanent transitoriness.