ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the existing accounts of the financialization of housing and proposes that a perspective of futurity is shared implicitly in these accounts. It then formulates a framework of hope – “hope mechanism” – to help trace the discursive components (subject, goal, and temporal mapping) in people’s imagination toward the future. At last, it outlines the characteristics of one specific mechanism, which I called House Buying. In the context of Hong Kong, this mechanism connects homeownership with hope under the dominance of the discourse of the market. It consists of three components that guide people’s imagination toward the future: a self-reliant subject acting through the market; a narrative of life goals that homeownership was characterized as a middle-class way of living and good investment decision; a temporal mapping of the future based on the social route of a “housing ladder” from public rental, subsidized homeownership to private homeownership, and a social plane with a relatively open opportunity structure.
