Managing fictitious capital

The legal geography of investment and political struggle in rental housing in New York City

Dados Bibliográficos

ID4140140
AutoresBenjamin F Teresa (0000-0002-5118-9865, The Graduate Center of the City University of New York, New York, NY, USA, autor correspondente)
Ano2016
Volume48
Fascículo3
Páginas465-484
Data de publicação2016-03-01
Peer ReviewedSim
Open AccessSim
TipoARTICLE
PeriódicoEnvironment and Planning A Economy and Space (JOURNAL)
Identificadores do periódicoISSN: 0308-518X • E-ISSN: 1472-3409
EditoraSAGE Publications Inc (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1177/0308518x15598322
OpenAlexW2257846541
IdiomaEN
Citações recebidas61
Referências citadas41

Since 2001 investors have purchased rent-regulated housing in New York City with heightened expectation for financial performance, placing pressure on tenants and communities through increasing rents, harassment, eviction, and when financial targets are not met, physical deterioration of buildings. At the heart of this investment strategy is fictitious capital, the extension of credit based on assumptions about future events. This paper shows that beyond assessments about the "truth" or rationality of the expectations underlying fictitious capital, the management of value as a problem is at stake. When the expectations underlying fictitious capital are not realized, a network of actors engage in a set of legal-financial practices to manage the value of rent-regulated multifamily buildings, including banking regulation and its exception, mortgage securitization and special servicing, distressed debt markets, rent stabilization, and foreclosure law. The breakdown of the assumptions of fictitious capital reveals new challenges and opportunities for tenant activism and policy to intervene in preserving rent-regulated housing. The paper focuses on how this financialization of housing not only serves as a moment for the increasing role of financial actors and imperatives, but also how it drives tenant activism and policy to engage legal-financial practices to redefine the tenant-landlord relationship and to tie financial expectations more closely to the material reality of tenants and communities

Business · Debt · Economic rent · Economics · Financial capital · Financialization · Landlord · Market economy · Political capital · Political science · Politics · Renting · Securitization · Housing Market and Economics · Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism · Law · Urban Planning and Governance · Finance