The financialization of housing in Canada: intensifying contradictions of neoliberal accumulation

Abstract

With the financialization of housing, housing-based profits, asset-based welfare, and affordable housing inherently come into contradiction with each other. This paper examines how, under neoliberal policy, from 1996 to 2010, the financialization of housing drove and legitimated, simultaneously, the unequal accumulation of wealth in Canada. It then demonstrates how, from 2011 to 2017, contradictions stemming from the financialization of housing intensified continually as the Canadian state failed to manage them.