Housing market financialization, neoliberalism and everyday retrenchment of social housing

Abstract

Social housing policy in Ireland has evolved over several decades into a significantly marketized tenure which relies on, supports and expands the private housing market. In this paper we argue that it does so in ways that contribute to the financialization of housing by embedding housing in volatile financial market cycles. Although the majority of the literature on financialization, both in Ireland and internationally, has tended to focus on home ownership and mortgage markets, we argue that the retrenchment of social housing and the shift towards subsidized private rental accommodation have been key features of the process of financialization and of Ireland’s experience of boom and bust. The neoliberal turn in social housing policy, however, did not take shape in the form of either a coherent ideological project or a coherent suite of policy measures, but rather through the kind of piecemeal, ad hoc and typically ‘pragmatic’ processes identified by Kitchin et al. It is by examining the unfolding of these ad hoc processes that we identify both the neoliberalization of social housing policy and the interfaces between this process and that of financialization, particularly by highlighting how the former has enabled and facilitated the latter.