Unpacking the complex role of the state in housing financialization, comparing Athens and Barcelona

Academic discourses on housing financialization view the state as playing a pivotal facilitation role, primarily through establishing institutional arrangements conducive to global financial interests. Drawing on a Poulantzian-inspired reading of capital and the state as a social relation, this paper evidences a more complex and dialectical state-investor nexus in housing financialization, shaped by contingent and path-dependent dynamics. By juxtaposing Athens and Barcelona – two cities profoundly impacted by the global financial crisis (GFC) and socio-spatially reshaped by consequential debt management politics – we identify a variety of state interventions that pertain to different kinds of structural or strategic selectivities across spatial scales that both facilitate and constrain the financialization of housing at different points in time. In Athens, the central state initially protected local financial interests from debt securitization and indebted households from home repossessions, while simultaneously preparing the ground for future financialization that has recently taken off amid economic recovery and a major touristification drive. In Barcelona, the central state’s restructuring of the banking system and its facilitation of mass mortgage repossessions that enabled international investors to decisively enter the city’s housing market, generated powerful urban social movements at the regional and city scale that won new local policies for affordable housing provision. In both cities, financial actors were able to recalibrate their investment strategies in fluctuating institutional and market settings. We conclude that the trajectory of housing financialization and state-investor relations is far more variegated and open to alternative pathways than generally understood, reinforcing the need for more nuanced understandings of the path-dependency of the process.