Public rental housing after the global financial crisis: the emergence of financialised municipal entrepreneurialism in London

The thesis critically analyses the evolution of financialisation in London since the global financial crisis (GFC) of 2008-2010. Focussing on the financialisation of both social and affordable housing and urban governance, this thesis explains how the GFC and its aftermath have created a context in which financialising processes at the urban scale are in fact deepening, and evolving, and identifies social housing as a key site of the process. The research is presented across three papers, and employs a relational case study in which London is studied at various scales and from various viewpoints, including via international comparison. The first paper analyses how in the market and political context created by the GFC, financialising actors, assisted by facilitative urban policy, have targeted the affordable rental tenure across various national settings and on a large scale since 2010. It reveals how this process has been driven by a new class of ‘global corporate landlords’ (GCLs) - multinational private equity funds and other financial firms – who are emerging as important actors in the housing systems of London and elsewhere. The second two papers analyse the emergence and role of housing financialisation and GCLs in London in relation to social and affordable housing, through an analysis of novel municipal approaches to housing policy. The papers identify nascent shifts in urban public policy which are starting to change the approaches, logics and capacity of local government in London, and are likely to become essential to our understanding of London’s urban governance in the near future. Drawing on case studies of two local authorities, alongside a London-wide Freedom of Information request, the thesis analyses these emergent modes of urban governance through a detailed examination of recent local housing policy and the political economic context which has catalysed it. It finds that, responding to an intensifying housing crisis and austerity‐imposed fiscal constraints, local authorities are devising entrepreneurial solutions to deliver more housing and replace funding lost to austerity. Among these ‘solutions’ can be found the early signs of the state‐executed financialisation of public housing in the UK with the use of speculative, council‐owned special purpose vehicles (SPVs) to replace existing public rental housing stock with mixed‐tenure developments. Driven by austerity, these developments sit in marked contrast to earlier modes of urban housing governance and social housing production, and appear to constitute a distinct mode of entrepreneurial governance in London: financialised municipal entrepreneurialism. The local state is no longer merely the enabler—limited to providing strategic oversight of the private sector—but financialises its practice in a reimagined commercialised interventionism, as property speculator, both to build new homes and generate ‘fiscal rents’ intended to replace the income streams lost to the austerity policies which have characterised the decade since the GFC.