ABSTRACT
Housing in Latin America has been historically marked by processes of self-construction but also by policies of massive production of homeownership and popular territory upgrading and regularization, designed by financial and real estate industries in dialogue with the political mobilization of housing demands.
More recently, rent as a way to access housing has risen in the region, following the worldwide dynamics after the global crisis of 2008. This phenomenon is present in private residential markets—with the rise of corporate landlords and rental digital platforms—linking financial capital to self-entrepreneurship, a social form that is also mobilized in this process. These new social forms and models are also present in urban popular territories, articulating new illegalisms and informalities and expanding an informal real estate rental market, which is also fed by evictions.
Housing policies enhance those new markets, both corporate and “parallel”, by regulating and enforcing housing public-private partnerships and/or housing vouchers, which mobilizes the public budget to guarantee expected levels of capital return.
From above (private corporate markets) or from below (informal rental markets), private regimes of territorial control are implemented, connected with financial circuits, imposing extractive logics and provoking indebtedness and dispossession.
