Introduction

anniversary of the Peterloo massacre in 2019, where:

“Council officials had contacted the event organisers about references to the city having been “bought” by the United Arab Emirates. The performance went ahead without the lines: “Our housing, our streets, our silence on human rights — you can’t keep selling if you’re already selling out.

The officials’ intervention revealed the city leadership’s sensitivity about the Gulf state. Peggy Manning, who helped to write the script, said it was “concerning” that Manchester’s municipal leaders were choosing “to self-censor or avoid commenting on human rights abuses taking place in the United Arab Emirates due to business partnerships.” (Collins, 2019:online)

Post-crisis financialisation radicality is demonstrated through tracing a particular financial actor who has already permeated the cultural landscape of Manchester, and has begun capitalising on contemporary Manchester’s booming urbanisation. Methodologically traced through the use of government legislation reports, reports authored by grassroots organisations, UK HMRC data, newspaper articles, Manchester City Council policy documents, and demographic data. These sources are used to reveal the numerous shells of operation that contribute to emergence of institutional investors generally, and specifically for this actor.

Global theories are introduced in the literature review, followed by the first chapter of the empirical section, introducing Manchester through the formation of the Manchester City Council. In the proceeding second empirical chapter, post-crisis national legislation is introduced and Manchester City Council’s movements toward institutional investment is charted. Finally then, a specific building is then investigated fully realising connection of global theories, enabling the reader to approach and critically analyse their own context for the identification of institutional investors.

The Course of Capitalism: The Right to (Buy) Housing

Financialisation of Housing

“The home becomes a fixed capital asset whose value resides in its expectation of generating more value in the future, depending on the oscillations of the (always seemed) rise of real-estate prices.” (Rolnik, 2019: 21)

Financialisation is a term originating in academia describing processes in which financial intermediation governs exchange. Housing financialisation as a political policy during the Thatcher era oversaw the dismantling of the UK’s welfare state through marketisation of public housing stocks and creation of new credit-based housing access programs (mortgages), reforming housing from a public good to an asset. (Rolnik, 2019) In addition, responsibility of new housing construction was shifted from government (local and national) to private (corporate) entities, realigning housing towards “supply rather than demand.” (Rolnik, 2019:20) This deregulatory style of governance integrated Fordist modes of production is named neoliberalism. (Rolnik, 2019) However, due the strategic application of neoliberalism to “specific institutional configurations, particular socio-political power constellations, and pre-existing spatial configurations” (Rolnik, 2019: 19), the effects reveal that the politics of finance are “an eminently unequal process.” (Rolnik, 2019:19) To summarise processes of Neoliberalisation; it must be comprehended as two processes in parallel, as the “partial destruction of what exists and of trend creation of new structures.” (Rolnik, 2019: 19 emphasis added)

Financial intermediation of housing was therefore achieved through trend creation through development of complex financial instruments seeking “to delink the actual value of that asset (house) from the contract that was to be used in the high-finance circuit. It meant developing a series of complex steps, numbering up to fifteen.” (Sassen, 2018:109) so, upon the sale of the contract, “the actual value of the home and the mortgage payments did not matter.” (Sassen, 2018:109) The envelopment of housing by finance formulated a “peculiar form of value storage” (Rolnik, 2019:17) where the use value of a home (e.g. as a residence) is superseded by its