The State and Financialised Urban Production

ensuring continuity of flow, “a primary condition of capital’s existence.” (Harvey, 2014:59) The State shapes the direction and force of capital flow through “the socio-legal regulatory infrastructure that allows it.” (Halbert and Attuyer, 2016:1351) Urbanisation, as the “design, construction, exploitation and ownership of the urban built environment” (Halbert and Attuyer, 2016:1347) becomes financialised when processes are designed for “interactions with, and anticipations of” (Halbert and Attuyer, 2016:1350) financial actors. “The co-constitutive relationship between finance and urban space” (Beswick et al., 2016:322) directed by the State, obeys financial logics hence perpetual motion is materially translated through the development of novel asset classes and pursuit of “new financial and investment strategies”. (Beswick et al., 2016:322)

Novel Institutional Investors in Post-Crisis Housing Markets

In the US, single family homes have “long been a significant part of the rental market” (Goodman and Kaul, 2017 cited in Fields, 2019: 2) but the landlord-investor relation was small scale with “fragmented ownership patterns” (Fields, 2019:2) hence resistant to securitization, but as the sub-prime mortgage crisis regurgitated:

“Large supplies of discounted property, constrained mortgage credit, and increased rental demand [...] [this] presented an opportunity for private-equity-backed investors to assemble large, geographically dispersed portfolios and issue securitizations backed by rental income flows.” (Mills et al., 2017 cited in Fields, 2019:2)

The sheer volume of supply available post-crisis was not restricted to the US, as the emergence of ‘Global Landlords’, a.k.a., Institutional Investors, is traced by Beswick et al., who identify key characteristics of financial actors emerging post-crisis “drawn from “the initial findings of an ongoing international research project investigating the growing transnationalisation of housing systems.” (Beswick et al., 2016: 322) Gathering international data for identification and problematization of these institutional investors leads Beswick et al., towards a three point formula, which is summarised as follows; (1) The opaque-ness of these non-publicly listed companies which, when combined with “light-touch regulation” , (Beswick et al., 2015:324) make these firms less accountable “to both investors and people on the ground, such as