How are Wall Street and Silicon Valley transforming property, place, and economic subjectivity in the 21st century?

Collage by Manon Vergerio

I am a critical economic geographer and urban scholar. My research, teaching, and public scholarship investigate property, finance, and technology with a focus on how they reproduce social and spatial hierarchies in the United States. At its core, my work is about how these processes of economic and technological change unevenly restructure urban space and the social relations of land and housing.

I am currently working on two projects that extend my longstanding research on housing financialization and what I term the “automated landlord’. Building on my earlier work on finance and subjectivity, the first project examines digital platforms that facilitate real estate investment by ordinary people. Such platforms are a key site where financial subjectivities and individual capital become algorithmically networked to wider capitalist dynamics, within and beyond housing markets.  Whereas investment platforms frame themselves in terms of democratization, ordinary investors are pursuing financial agency in an environment of automation, stratification of users, and shifting digital and financial architectures. Seeking financial freedom, users construct their sense of proper financial subjectivity, struggling with and constrained by the platform’s own terms.

The second project investigates how digital capitalists are increasingly attempting urban-scale experiments that seek to build entire cities ‘from scratch’ in rural landscapes as a way out of existing urban problems.  Where my recent work has focused on how technology is being mobilized to reconfigure property relations and housing markets, this project is concerned with how capital accumulated by digital capitalists is being mobilized to transform space at the scale of the settlement. This research interrogates the political economic experiments that are part of such efforts to profoundly rearrange space, and explores the conflicting visions of value, productivity, and nature involved in the blank slate urbanism of digital capitalists.

Selected publications

  • Speculative Urban Worldmaking: Meeting Financial Violence with a Politics of Collective Care

    This article brings Black feminist thought to bear on the urban geography of racialised financial violence. Our analysis focuses on the Moms 4 Housing movement. Starting when five Black mothers occupied a vacant, corporate investor-owned house in West Oakland, Moms 4 Housing claimed ownership based on relations of care while refusing the institution of private property. We frame the work of Moms 4 Housing as speculative urban worldmaking—a form of collective care and a praxis of providing an alternative present that imagines and advocates for urban futures beyond financialisation's abstract racial violence.

  • Racialized Geographies of Housing Financialization

    Financial violence is racial violence:. As such, geographies of housing financialization spatialize hierarchies of death-dealing racial difference. However, research concerned with housing financialization rarely addresses the inextricable relationship between racism and capitalism. Racial division and subordination have always been necessary to producing value in real estate; financialization reproduces racial capitalism by reconfiguring racism from racialized bodies into automated systems. We further argue that rather than reducing racially subordinated communities to experiences of oppression and domination, we must bring collective resistance for emancipatory social change into the analytic frame.

  • Toward a Critical Housing Studies Research Agenda on Platform Real Estate.

    This article offers a conceptual vocabulary for critical housing scholarship on the digitization of the residential real estate industry. Platform logic highlights questions of power and politics potentially obscured by platforms’ convenience and ease of use. Digital labor underlines changing relationships among incumbent real estate professionals, investors and property owners, and tenants and residents. Financialization focuses on how digital platforms participate in the contemporary political economy of housing. We conclude with a critical research agenda for platform real estate.

  • Walking the Financialized City: Confronting Capitalist Urbanization through Mobile Popular Education

    How do communities understand the abstract process of housing financialization? In this paper we argue for walking tours as mobile, public education about the capitalist urbanization process, especially as the financialization of housing accelerates. Through walking the city of Manchester we show this type of learning may improve public literacy concerning how housing in central areas is being shaped by new types of real estate finance. We argue the walking tour offers new types of possibility in necessary learning and subsequent action to address capitalist urbanization.

  • Automated Landlord: Digital Technologies and Post-crisis Financial Accumulation

    This article centers the role of digital technologies in extending financial accumulation into new sectors of the US housing market in the post-2008 era. I argue that digital innovations coming to prominence since the 2008 crisis were the linchpin enabling large investors to acquire foreclosed single-family homes, convert them to rental housing, and roll out a new asset class based on bundled rent checks. Because technological transformations actively participate in financial accumulation strategies, I contend digital technologies also comprise a crucial terrain of struggles over housing’s place in contemporary capitalism.

  • Constructing a New Asset Class: Property-led Financial Accumulation after the Crisis

    This article is concerned with new modes of property-led financial accumulation emerging in the wake of the 2008 financial crisis. I trace the creation of an asset class derived from securitizing the rental income of foreclosed homes turned rental properties. I emphasize the role of historical and geographic contingencies, the work of state and capital market actors, and the importance of calculative practices. The single-family rental asset class affirms the fundamental role for housing in the ideology of capital, and speaks to new entanglements of financial actors and home life as financial accumulation is adjusted to the post-crisis context.

  • Unwilling Subjects of Financialization

    This article advances debates about housing financialization by focusing on rental housing as a frontier for financialization, an increasingly relevant dynamic since the global financial crisis. Through tracing the connections between how rental housing has been constituted as a new site for private equity investment globally, the local conditions facilitating this process in New York and how it reshaped everyday life for tenants, I theorize tenants as unwilling subjects of financialization. This research highlights how financialization meets with dissent, and a process that is not monolithic and inevitable, but characterized by resistance from without and contradiction from within.