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Description:

Property plays an enduring role in liberal societies, but the social relations of property and the internal workings of property markets are historically and geographically specific. Across a range of advanced and emerging economies, 21st century digital innovations are catalyzing changes in the politics of property and the operation of land and housing markets. In this talk I discuss the relations of ownership in the U.S. housing market as a site for experimentation by a combination of private equity, venture capital, algorithms, and platform business models. The confluence of Wall Street and Silicon Valley has fostered crucial shifts in the market landscape in the post-2008 era, initially by facilitating the emergence of institutional-scale landlords, then by making thinkable a range of other novel (e.g., algorithm-assisted property acquisition) and resurrected (e.g., rent-to-own) market strategies. Public debate around these developments often considers them in isolation from one another, lacks fluency in the processes (such as the power of leverage) that make models like iBuying (to take one example) operative, and interprets their technological novelty as a break with longstanding property relations. My intervention focuses on debt and scale as crucial instruments of contemporary housing ‘innovation, situating these instruments in a longer history of “property technologies” openly organized to uphold white dominance, e.g. appraisal science. The expansive scale of the financial and digital spheres makes possible finer-grained modes of accumulation that include marginalized places and populations on extractive terms. Operations of debt and scale are key to how racial difference is produced and leveraged in the 21st century housing market, and thus to housing futures.

Non-Presenting Participants