Subjectivities
Τhe fundamental place of property in people’s identities is not due to a supposed property-centred human nature, as liberal philosophers argue, but due to the centrality of contingent property relations in class, race and gender demarcation – let alone citizenship and statecraft – in liberal polities. Likewise, homeownership – or lack thereof – is a crucial mechanism of subjectivation in the national contexts under consideration. On the one hand, the home can reflect one’s self-identity, self-esteem and lifestyle. On the other hand, housing property ties individuals to the dynamics of capital, such as labour and debt, and is used to imbue subjects with individualist accumulation and investment mentalities.
This means that housing financialisation depends on and, in turn, promotes the creation of financialised subjectivities. In asset-based welfare systems, the model citizen is no longer the homo economicus but rather the proactive and self-responsible investor who is willing to make prudent entrepreneurial decisions and assume risk. Conversely, the ongoing destabilisation of homeownership and the increasingly exploitative nature of rent relations can give rise to political subjectivation that rejects or renegotiates the dominant property relations.
In Spain, the development of a middle-class identity was closely tied to the promotion of homeownership. Beginning in the 1960s under the technocratic phase of the Francoist dictatorship, this political project of building a ‘nation of homeowners’ was completed after the transition to democracy and the incorporation of Spain into the European market. Available credit and mortgages played a pivotal role, enabling widespread homeownership, reaching 80.1% of the population in 2007. However, this identity was disrupted post-2008 financial crisis, as rising unemployment led to a wave of foreclosures and evictions. Indebtedness and ‘mortgaged lives’, and not homeownership, became the main subjective trait of a large social group that had fallen off the ladder of property ownership and upward social mobility. The crisis gave rise to a post-homeownership landscape, representing the first decline of the homeowner subject in the last 70 years. This shift led to a rising population of tenants and their opposing figure: landlords. Concurrently, the period saw the dominance of financialisation in the rental market, casting tenants as ‘unwilling subjects of financialisation’. The recent establishment of tenants’ unions in Spain aims to foster a collective tenant identity while challenging the emerging group identity of landlords.
Historically, the Netherlands had a long tradition of tenancy across socioeconomic classes, delaying any stigmatisation or subjectivation specific to tenancy. This is also seen in rents. This changed with the framing of homeownership as a vehicle for upward social mobility for the white working class. Tenancy is increasingly perceived as a temporary pre-homeownership moment in life. Racial exclusion from certain neighbourhoods and homeownership after the liberation of the colonies turned place and property into a differentiating asset for white and non-white subjectivities. The difficulty of homeownership, recognized citizenship and exploitation of rental relations contributed to the rising squatters movement. The widespread practice and normalcy of squatting challenged the exploitative narrative of homeownership and instead emphasised the right to housing. Squatting became illegal in 2016, thereby removing an important tool to fight vacancy, question speculation and reclaim housing as a right while simultaneously pushing people in ever precarious housing conditions.
Owning property has been a foundational ideological principle of American society since the colonial powers first landed on the continent. The land that was stolen from the indigenous communities was transformed into a ‘frontier’, and those who laid claim to the land were transformed into ‘pioneers’. To this day, the pioneer is a central figure in American history. Land represents a zone of sovereignty where the owner is king and autonomy, even from the state, is imagined to exist through the industriousness of the occupant-owner. In this way, freedom – another powerful ideology in the United States – becomes intertwined with property ownership. Conversely, the foundational role of slavery in the building of wealth in the United States created a second subjectivity of the person who has no freedom, who is property and who has no right to own property. This foundational divide in American society has a lasting legacy in the distribution of property today, creating different subject relations to property ownership and, consequently, different degrees of incorporation into American society. For many racialised communities in the United States, property became a ‘lived experience of loss’. The proper homeowning citizen subject, while increasingly elusive for all, is a subject position that divides the nation along the lines of race and class in a way that fundamentally disrupts people’s sense of community, security and belonging.
Contrary to the strategy of northern European states, the Greek state did not take an active part in post-WWII reconstruction through public urban development schemes and housing policies. Rather, it fomented generalised homeownership through self-construction and familial self-initiative. Its motive was largely pedagogical, aiming to infuse new values and attitudes, such as individualism and self-reliance, in a population still scarred by the civil conflict. Indeed, the figure of the conservative family man amassing wealth through prudent saving and landed property – the noikokyraios (‘householder’) – became dominant along with the generalisation of homeownership after the 1950s, which, of course, excluded marginal and racialised populations. With the deregulation of banks and the incipient financialisation of the housing market in the 1990s, households turned to bank credit to maintain their living standards. This shift saw the figure of the prudent noikokyraios replaced by the neoliberal, entrepreneurial, risk-taking investor subject. Due to the 2010s debt crisis, public and private debt became unsustainable, and half of the indebted households were forced into arrears. Citizens were embroiled in a collective guilt trip, whereby the normative subject position was that of the reliable debtor who had no other way to redeem themselves than to pay back their private and public debts, even if this involved mass repossessions in favour of financial speculators and the end of the homeownership model. Thus, debt has become a mechanism of wealth extraction that also strategically intervenes in the realm of subjectivity, making individuals governable.
REFERENCES
Alexandri, G. & Janoschka, M. (2018). Who Loses and Who Wins in a Housing Crisis? Lessons From Spain and Greece for a Nuanced Understanding of Dispossession. Housing Policy Debate. 28(1), 117–134.
Coppock, S. (2013). The everyday geographies of financialisation: impacts, subjects and alternatives. Cambridge Journal of Regions, Economy and Society, 6(3), 479-500.
Dadusc, D. (2021). The micropolitics of border struggles: Migrants’ squats and inhabitance as alternatives to citizenship. In Resisting Citizenship (pp. 73-87). Routledge.
Fields, D. (2017). Unwilling subjects of financialization. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 41(4), 588-603.
García‐Lamarca, M., & Kaika, M. (2016). ‘Mortgaged lives’: the biopolitics of debt and housing financialisation. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, 41(3), 313-327.
Roy, A. (2017). Dis/possessive collectivism: Property and personhood at city’s end. Geoforum, 80, A1-A11.
