Homes with Value

Mortgage Finance and the Reconfiguration of Home Value in Urban Mexico

Dados Bibliográficos

ID2263208
AutoresGeorgia Hartman (The University of California Institute for Mexico and the United States (UCMEXUS) The University of California, Riverside)
Ano2021
Volume33
Fascículo1
Páginas17-39
Data de publicação2021-04-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoCity & Society (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0893-0465 • E-ISSN: 1548-744X
EditoraWiley (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1111/ciso.12389
OpenAlexW3154966675
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas1
Referências citadas28

Mexico is in the midst of a major urban transformation. State-subsidized mortgage credit has facilitated the emergence of an affordable housing market and transformed the urban periphery into vast tracts of tiny concrete 'social interest' housing developments. Easily available credit has allowed millions of Mexican workers to pursue the cultural and moral imperative to possess 'patrimonio' by becoming homeowners. Patrimonio can be understood as a kind of inalienable possession tied to gendered notions of the family, inheritance, and economic security. Yet ballooning mortgage debts associated with these homes inverts the promise of patrimonio, turning the home into a source of economic instability and insecurity. I argue that this paradoxical situation derives from the convergence of different logics for understanding a home's value-as patrimonio, as social good, and as financialized commodity. The mortgage contract reconfigures the patrimonial desires of homeowners into a vehicle for marco-economic growth and a source of private profits. Drawing on twenty-two months of ethnographic field research in Mexico City and Cancún, I highlight frictions in the meanings of home as a cultural imperative, social good, and financial commodity that arise in the context of its mobilization as marketized commodity in contemporary urban Mexico

Housing Market and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Urban and Rural Development Challenges