The Crisis of Asset Homeownership: Remaking Landed Security in Neoliberal America

• In Event: Housing as an Asset

Abstract

The transformation of household life in contemporary America has been interpreted through the lens of “financialization,” or the “assetization” of homeownership. However, in important ways, the postwar home had long been “financialized”—reduced to exchange value rather than the sites of productive and commercial life that anchored older notions of landed independence. This paper proposes a historical typology of three regimes of “landed security,” and draws on empirical evidence to revise our understanding of the era of “financialized” homeownership. Drawing on two case studies in Los Angeles, I propose a fuller theory of what changed since the 1980s, involving the shifting foundations of homes as sources of economic security. I trace divergent and conflicting efforts starting to turn homes into liquid and short-term resources through the relaxation of zoning restrictions on commercial and rental uses of homes (enabling commercial incomes), and the deregulation of second mortgages (for home equity loans). In both cases, homeowners and regulators clashed over the desirability of protections that previously were the foundations of postwar asset homeownership. Meanwhile for policymakers, enabling “liquid homeownership” offered a third way between public policy and incentives for private initiative to address the multiple crises of the 1970s. I’ll argue the contested remaking of the economic affordances of homeownership along financial and commercial forms sheds light into the tripartite reconfiguration of state, markets, and households in the neoliberal era.

Author

• Luis Flores, UC Berkeley