The good, the bad and the tenant: Rental platforms renewing racial capitalism in the post-apartheid housing market

Abstract

This article examines how racial capitalism intersects with platform capitalism through the rise of rental platforms and corporate landlords in the post-apartheid housing market. Combining 18 months of fieldwork in Cape Town with the spatial analysis of sales and longitudinal census data, I demonstrate how rental platforms enabled the consolidation of the private rental sector and the emergence of corporate landlords through the classification of tenants centered upon credit scoring. To automate tenant screening solutions, rental platforms leveraged and extended the information dragnet knitted by credit bureaus. This dragnet of unprecedented depth and volume is built upon the infrastructures and devices that enabled the for-profit, racial classification of people, housing and neighborhoods during colonialism and apartheid, notably ID numbers. In the context of racialized indebtedness and housing inequalities engineered by racial property regimes, the use of platforms to sort the “good” from the “bad” tenant and manage rental portfolios shifts mechanisms of segregation and reproduces racialized patterns of capital accumulation across the post-apartheid city. The article argues that rental platforms extend the extractive logic of racial capitalism through two joint rentier mechanisms: the transformation of rental housing into a new asset class; the extraction and assetization of rental data.