This article explores the trajectory of so-called guaranteed social housing in the Czech Republic as an example of penetrating financial instruments into the public policy realm. The project, promoted by the government’s Agency for Social Inclusion, was intended to encourage private landlords to rent their properties to people in need through commercial insurance against the risk of rent defaults. Using policy documents, media and interviews with governmental officers, the article describes the performative strength of financial instruments in the sphere traditionally occupied by the welfare state. In financialisation literature, the proliferation of financial instruments is often described as a one-way process in which these instruments colonise public domains. However, the empirical case discussed in the article shows that this process is much more complex and contingent, and financial instruments are not used as the best option but rather as a last resort in a situation marked by weak policies.
This paper argues that financialisation exacerbates gender inequity in the United States. During the Recession, wealth-stripping activities were targeted at single female homeowners prompting severe asset depletion among single women, people of color, and those who depend on them. Rather than protecting them from risk, their home equity and bodies absorbed the failures of capitalism within their network. The paper draws on a thematic analysis of interviews with 21 single female homeowners who experienced mortgage default. Rather than focusing on risk incidence, I take their relational pathways as the object of inquiry demonstrating how activities of gendered care work act as conduits and amplifiers of financialised risk that extends the responsibility for unpaid social provision throughout the lifespan. The analysis demonstrates how their status as homeowners positioned them in between market failures and the consequences of austerity thereby restructuring the function of home equity.
Historically, public and affordable housing has been provided by the state in close conjunction with local authorities, public housing developers, and other social housing providers. Yet, affordable rental homes are now increasingly being managed, produced, or acquired by private equity firms and other institutional investors. In this contribution, we argue that ‘financialised privatisation’ is a helpful concept for understanding these shifts in state-finance compromises within the post-crisis affordable housing sector. Drawing on the case of England, we first discuss the major mechanisms of financialised privatisation and examine how an increasingly polymorphous affordable housing sector has emerged with a focus on multi-tenure and mixed-income housing tenures. We then discuss the possible challenges of this transformation and conclude that it remains very much a question whether a privately funded housing system will emerge that provides genuinely affordable housing and reduces inequalities.