Abstract
Rental housing has been regarded as the new ‘frontier for financialisation’ since the 2007 financial crisis. But research examining financialisation of de-commodified rental housing is limited and is primarily focused on stock acquisitions by financial investors and the enabling role of either national or local governments. This critically overlooks the emergence of the financialised production of social rented housing, the interplay between levels of government (particularly with the regional level), and the leading role of the state in these processes. By combining a political sociology approach to policy instruments with a housing system studies perspective, the paper investigates how Italy, through the interplay between national, regional (Lombardy) and local (Milan) governments, led the financialisation of its social rented housing production. Through analyses of six decades of financial-legislative changes in the housing system regarding production/provision, finance and land supply, it identifies a three-stage journey towards financialisation: (1) the rise and fall of publicly-owned rental social housing (1950s to 1990s); (2) the regionalisation and marketisation of the sector up to the late 2000s; and (3) the upward transfer from the first local-scale experiment with the real estate mutual investment fund in Milan to the creation of a national-scale System of Funds for the production of social rented housing. The study shows that the re-commodification of housing and land initiated in the 1980s were intertwined and a conditio-sine-qua-non for financialisation; that the state played a crafting—rather than solely enabling—role in this process; and that trans-scalar legislative–financial innovations transformed social rented housing into a liquid asset class.
Highlights
Since 2010, Italy has been witnessing a return to the production of social rented housing (SRH hereafter) with 2.4 million sqm planned to be built by 2020 (FHS, 2016) and an unprecedented proliferation of private and non-profit SRH providers
It identifies three key stages of this journey and unpacks the changes in legislative/policy frameworks, housing production/provision, finance and land supply that paved the way to financialisation
Critical in this process was the interplay among levels of government and, what we have described as a ‘soft re-centralisation’ of financialised SRH production
Summary
Since 2010, Italy has been witnessing a return to the production of social rented housing (SRH hereafter) with 2.4 million sqm planned to be built by 2020 (FHS, 2016) and an unprecedented proliferation of private and non-profit SRH providers. Extensive SRH production and the involvement of the non-profit sector are not typical of familistic welfare regimes and residualist housing systems such as the Italian one (Arbaci, 2019) Rather, it is a feature of universalist housing systems developed by social-democratic and corporatist welfare states (e.g., Scandinavian and Central European countries). We argue that this return to SRH production is not part of a system’s decommodification process but the result of the state-led marketisation of the sector and the subsequent penetration of capital from the financial markets This developed through a new financial infrastructure created by the national government called the ‘Integrated System of Funds’ (Sistema Integrato di Fondi, SIF hereafter). The SIF is a fund of ‘real-estate mutual investment funds’ (REIMFs hereafter) that characterises the ‘Italian way’ to housing financialisation
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