Peripheral housing rentierisation in Southern Europe: reflections from the Portuguese case

Abstract

Housing is increasingly treated as a source of capital gain and rent extraction rather than a source of shelter and security for the household. This is the outcome of financialised home ownership that has led to the concentration of real estate assets by the well-off while the lower socioeconomic strata have faced unaffordable house prices and rents. As is often the case with new research agendas, the analysis has thus far focused on the most advanced capitalist countries where these trends first emerged. This article aims to expand the analysis to the peripheral countries of the European Union focusing, in particular, on Portugal. It shows that in the periphery the accumulation of assets is increasingly driven by small-scale investors from core countries that contributes to widening the gap between housing prices and rents and the living wages of the resident population, deepening wealth inequality within and across countries. In so doing, it underlines the importance of bringing core-periphery relations into the analysis of housing rentierisation.