Abstract
This paper combines the political economy of financialisation with feminist care ethics and sociocultural geographies of home. Together, these perspectives explain why and how real estate is converted into liquid financial assets, and expose the implications for embedded relationships. The argument is developed through a case study of UK care homes, with particular attention to the role of real estate investment trusts. Investors in care companies have sought to render their real estate assets more calculable and profitable, by standardising the assets themselves into hotel‐like spaces. In effect, the work of translating between liquid finance and particular homes is transferred – from investors to those creating relationships in hotel‐like spaces. Yet the fundamental illiquidity of residents, relationships, and “home” constrain and destabilise financialisation. The paper concludes by discussing the implications of “liquid home” for economic, urban, and welfare geographies, and recommends that policy pay more attention to the financing of spaces for care.
Highlights
The number of care homes owned by real estate investment trusts (REITs) rose by 80% from 2016 to 2019, housing tens of thousands of residents
The analysis considers in turn the financing, design, costs, exclusions, and risks of new care homes in the UK
Risks relating to high rents, extraction based on asset price inflation and excessive debts suggest a need for caution in drawing too strong a distinction between “purely speculative” private equity activities and the longer‐term investment of REITs (Wijburg et al, 2018)
Summary
The performativity of investor expectations is mediated by particular contexts (Svetlova, 2012), but is likely to be stronger where austerity and infrastructure funding deficits promote reliance on private investment (Halbert & Attuyer, 2016) Under such conditions, financial requirements have tended to exert a homogenising influence on the urban fabric, producing generic commercial property in city centres and redevelopment zones, and limiting local governments’ capacity to foster economic diversity, innovative designs, and non‐standard uses of space (Crosby & Henneberry, 2016; Guironnet et al, 2015). The paper asks how a standardised, financialised built environment interacts with ideas of home as a material foundation for relational selfhood, from the perspective of care ethics, which centre interdependence among emotional and embodied subjects
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