The ripples of housing financialization: Old actors, new practices in Beirut (Lebanon)

Numerous cities in the Global South display the symptoms of housing financialization without the vehicles through which investment capital typically circulates toward the built environment. In this paper, we put forward the notion of “ripples of financialization” to point to the extension of the speculative practices engendered by financialized building practices well beyond the high-end developments in which global capital lands via banking transactions. We do so through a case study of two lower-income neighborhoods in Beirut (Lebanon) with similar sociopolitical characteristics during the building boom (2004–2014) that followed the adoption of an aggressive national policy designed to incentivize the flow of foreign investments into real estate. Methodologically, the paper traces the practices of developers operating in these neighborhoods, showing that they exploited their positions in social, religious, and political institutions to channel capital flows into real estate development. Without directly relying on the new infrastructures of finance, developers and future homebuyers adopted “speculative attitudes” that reproduced the spatial patterns of housing financialization, effectively inducing deep transformations in how the city is built and inhabited. While reflective of Lebanon’s context, these patterns are likely to be reproduced in other contexts where the adoption of the neoliberal mantra has influenced urban governance. The findings are based on surveys of all housing production in Beirut since 1996, at least 40 in-depth interviews with developers, and the embodied knowledge of the researchers, who are long-term residents of the city.