Maintenance devalued: the role of financialisation and assetisation in producing pathways to disrepair

The construction of social housing as a financial asset has transformed the governance and practice of social landlords. Yet there remains a lack of research on the consequences for tenants. This paper argues that financialisation, alongside related processes of assetisation and regulated deregulation, can contribute to housing maintenance becoming devalued, subsumed to competing priorities including organisational growth and financial performance. Moreover, the power exerted by financial actors can incentivise the withholding of maintenance expenditure on loss-making homes. The paper explores these dynamics within the English housing association (HA) sector. HA reliance upon debt finance and cross-subsidy from private housing has occurred alongside numerous cases of damp, mould and disrepair. The empirical findings of this paper illustrate that the need to maintain borrowing capacity reinforced trends in HA governance that undermined service standards and led to strategic disinvestment from loss-making estates. Such trends include minimal regulatory interference and HA cost-cutting to improve organisational profitability ratios and the viability of individual sites. The study advances the financialisation of social housing literature by demonstrating how a maintenance perspective can provide a bridge between finance and housing outcomes.