The economic crisis conditions of the 1970s fostered policies that emphasized free-market economics and the withdrawal of government from the provision of capital to localities. Amidst this transition, landlord abandonment of inner city real estate depleted housing stock and displaced poor and minority residents. After a long period of urban decline, landlord abandonment created the kind of conditions of underdevelopment that would make reinvestment in inner city locations possible and profitable. Inner city neighborhoods became an engine of economic growth for cities, and pivotal to the three decades of dramatic urban change and revalorization of cities that separate landlord abandonment from the current, ongoing mortgage foreclosure crisis. These seemingly distinct housing crises connect in that both are concentrated in low-income communities of color and have served as a means of extracting capital from these communities. The very incorporation of urban neighborhoods into circuits of capital presents challenges to political mobilization around foreclosure in that many previously oppositional urban social movements have become enmeshed in structures they previously resisted, e.g. real estate development.
Doctoral student Desiree Fields, under the supervision of Dr. Susan Saegert in the Center for Human Environments at the CUNY Graduate School University Center, will explore the reproduction of urban inequality, and political mobilization to prevent and mitigate the effects of inequality, exploring these concerns through landlord abandonment and mortgage foreclosure. A comparison of the footprint of foreclosure filings from 2006-2008 with that of abandoned buildings seized by the NYC Department of Finance and transferred to city ownership between 1976-1981 will create a map of spatial co-incidence of historic and contemporary urban crises. Discriminate analysis will clarify differences in trajectories of neighborhood change between areas that experienced one, both, or neither of these crises. Interviews with key informants and focus groups within and across generations of activists will provide insight on the evolution of political mobilization in responses to urban housing crises since the shift to a neoliberal mode of governance.
The results of this research will provide insight on how marginalized and vulnerable communities are multiply affected by crises rooted in urban land and housing, thus potentially enhancing policy efforts designed to stabilize neighborhoods. Moreover this research will contribute to literature on the geography of urban inequality, housing crises, and community organizing and development. Understanding how this inequality is reproduced thus requires an attention to the synergies and interactions between different phases of urban development as much as the ruptures that distinguish them.
for NSF Award #1002780 Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today’s global capitalism, even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This financialization alters the relationship between mortgage capital and urban space: as the U.S. foreclosure crisis has shown, today once-underserved markets suffer from problems of "overinclusion", with a flood of high-risk mortgage capital socially and economically destabilizing low- and moderate-income and minority communities. Much of the high-risk lending seen at the height of the mid-2000s real estate bubble was driven by Wall Street demand for mortgage debt to be packaged as securities and derivatives; these financial products were then integrated into global flows of capital. In this sense financialization creates new possibilities for extracting value from spatially fixed real estate, in ways that can work against the interests of local stability and wealth creation. Focusing on New York City, this dissertation addressed questions about how financialization operates in the rental market. More specifically the project studied how the entrance of new financial actors to the city’s affordable rental market relates to: earlier processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical debates about the contingent relationship between today’s urban context and landscapes inherited at the end of the 1970s, the constraints and possibilities for today’s community-based organizations and the consequences of finance’s permeation into everyday life. The research design revolved around a long temporal frame beginning with the 1970s urban crisis of property abandonment and continuing through the present, characterized by high-risk private equity investment in rent-stabilized buildings during the mid-2000s real estate boom. This project employed qualitative, archival and geographic methods. Geographic data was used to analyze relationships between property abandonment and private equity real estate investment. Archival data and interviews with veteran (n=11); mid-career (n=5); and emerging (n=9) nonprofit professionals provided insight on community responses to disinvestment and financialization. Focus groups (N=5) with tenants (n=27) addressed social and psychological consequences of financialization. Today’s financialization of housing shapes uneven geographies of power: finance can make itself felt in property, but is often beyond the reach of activists, community organizations and the city. Investors’ financial risks undermined tenants’ ontological security and social reproduction as the housing bubble collapsed and property maintenance suffered due to financial strain. Moreover the investments were concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods, adding to existing concerns about the quality and supply of affordable housing in these communities. New financial landlords can own more property in more places and can quickly change investment tactics based on global market conditions, without much regard for how changing tactics may reverberate on the ground in potentially distant local contexts. Even in a city like New York, with its long history of tenant and community activism, this transformation in the social relations of rent complicates efforts to exert social and political pressures on landlords and to restore the ontological status of home. It raises questions about how to bring landlords to accountability when they are removed from the local context, layers of actors and intermediaries complicate the question of ownership, and investment strategies are short term and their success not necessarily linked to maintaining property conditions. New York City’s 1970s abandonment crisis was constitutive of a political and organizational infrastructure of affordable housing professionals and community groups, who have been critical in documenting the entrance of new financial actors to the affordable rental market and organizing and advocating on behalf of tenants affected by predatory investments. Community organizations’ development of discursive, data-driven and spatial tactics speaks to the political possibilities of contemporary community practice to contest financialization. The ability for financial actors to operate in both spaces of capital and in urban space requires strategies of contestation that are capable of reaching financial territory, as well as a stronger role for local, state and federal government in re-regulating the financial sector. The findings of this research are relevant to efforts of community organizations to contest urban inequality, concerns about planning economically sustainable cities and policy approaches to affordable rental housing. This study contributes to research on geographies of financialization; in particular it responds to the need for critical attention to the socially and spatially uneven nature of processes associated with financialization of the domestic.
