Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism

Since the 1970s, financial markets, institutions, and logic have come to govern an expanding share of economic life, reshaping how corporations are run, how households build wealth, and how cities are developed. Financialization—the growing primacy of financial motives and actors in the broader economy—has been especially consequential in housing, where homes have shifted from shelters into investment assets, entangling everyday welfare with the volatility of global capital flows. Researchers in this area examine how shareholder-value imperatives altered corporate governance and income distribution, how neoliberal policy frameworks enabled finance to displace public welfare provision, and how these dynamics compound inequality across class and geography. Central open questions concern whether asset-based welfare can substitute sustainably for redistributive policy, and how the concentration of housing ownership among institutional investors is reshaping urban development and access to affordable shelter.

Works

138,333

Total citations

900,406

Keywords

FinancializationShareholder ValueHousingCapital AccumulationNeoliberalismGlobal Finance