FUDA Speaker Series - Aretousa Bloom

Financializing Social Housing - Asset Managers, Private Equity and the Temporal Politics of Income Strips in London

Since the Global Financial Crisis asset managers, private equity firms, and other institutional investors have assumed a growing role in the ownership and production of housing and infrastructure. In this talk, Aretousa Bloom will present research conducted with Joe Penny, Associate Professor at the UCL Urban Laboratory. The research examines how social housing in London is being transformed into a financial asset through ‘income strip’ leases - long-term contractual arrangements between institutional investors and local authorities. Drawing on insights from urban political economy, sociology, and anthropology, the talk will explore how value and risk are distributed and negotiated in these financial arrangements, and how income strips produce particular hierarchies of obligation and indebtedness. While institutional investment into social housing is narrated as part of the ‘responsible’ or ‘ethical’ turn in finance, promising to fill the ‘housing gap’ and secure returns for workers’ retirement savings, Aretousa shows how income strips deepen long-standing logics of extraction and control in social housing, eroding security of tenure while entangling state and tenants in new forms of financial obligation.

Speaker Information

Aretousa Bloom is Fellow in Urban Geography at the London School of Economics and Political Science. Her research is on housing financialization, state transformation, and urban climate politics.

About FUDA

The Financialisation of Urban Development and its Alternatives (FUDA) research cluster, based at the Bartlett School of Planning, critically examines the impacts of financialisation on people and places. It explores how financialisation shapes the development and regeneration of contemporary urban built environments, and the potential for alternative models for imagining and managing urban change. The FUDA Speaker Series invites leading scholars working on these issues to share their latest research.

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