Elsevier

Political Geography

Volume 98, October 2022, 102654
Political Geography

The post-politicization of rental housing financialization: News media, elite storytelling and Australia's new build to rent market

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102654Get rights and content

Abstract

This article explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent housing (BTR) in Australia which helped depoliticize this new wave of rental housing financialization. It argues that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of financialized capitalism through which this consensus is ‘policed’. Specifically, reporting scripted the rise of institutional investors into Australia's rental sector in ways that disavowed properly political disagreements vis-à-vis BTR. Its analysis is informed by post-political theories, which converge around a shared concern with how political disagreement is disavowed and replaced with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of subjects. Post-foundational thinker Jacques Rancière's thinking on aesthetic regimes assists in exploring this consensus and its limits by foregrounding how regimes of representation delineate what can be said and argued (and different agents' authority to speak). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news media restricts the coordinates of public debate through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to understand and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class whose expansion is a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR's dual function as an asset class and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in this way. The aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public BTR debate represents a post-political strategy that assists in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia, albeit with limits.

Introduction

Geographic scholarship on the power of elite storytelling has been energized by a fascination with how stories have helped sustain and rehabilitate financialized capitalism (Engelen, 2015; Engelen et al., 2011). This work also recognizes that these stories are not magically ‘auto-legitimizing’ (Seabrooke, 2006: 40), notwithstanding the power of economic and political elites (Swyngedouw, 2011) but rather gain credibility and persuade, including by tapping into the ‘public sentiment’ or the ‘mood of the times’ (Engelen, 2015; Stanley, 2014). Stories told about housing, in particular, have long taken advantage of the politics of mass financialization, leveraging homeownership ideologies and the ‘constituencies of financialization’ (Crouch, 2009), comprising investor subjects who see themselves as personally responsible for their future welfare (Nethercote, 2019). But the financialization of rental housing requires different stories that must surely leverage different political dynamics, albeit relatively little is known of these important stories.

The financialization of rental housing represents a major frontier for capital accumulation. Broadly, financialization concerns ‘the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states and households’ (Aalbers, 2019: 544). Financialization, in the case of rental housing, has taken diverse forms, from the ‘financialized privatization’ of public and non-profit rental housing (Wijburg & Aalbers, 2017a, 2017b) to the speculative repossession of rent-stabilized tenements (Fields, 2015, 2017; Teresa, 2016), single-family homes (Beswick et al., 2016; Byrne, 2020; Byrne, 2020; Fields, 2015, 2018; Fields & Uffer, 2016; Fields et al., 2016; Garcia-Lamarca 2020; Immergluck & Law, 2014a, 2014b), and multifamily apartments (e.g. Canada: August & Walks, 2018; August, 2020). Alongside these speculative strategies, so-called ‘rental housing financialization 2.0’ involves relatively less risky, rent-backed accumulation strategies (Wijburg, 2020, Wijburg et al., 2018). Build to rent (BTR) typifies this latter strategy (see Nethercote, 2020; London: Brill & Durrant, 2021; London & Amsterdam: Brill & Özogul, 2021). BTR involves institutional landlords such as pension funds, private equity firms, hedge funds, real estate investment trusts (REITs)1 and publicly listed real estate firms who develop purpose-built rental accommodation for retention under single ownership and operation as rent-generating assets (Nethercote, 2020). Investors then leverage these BTR assets through new financial instruments, either by going public as real estate investment trusts (REITs), by issuing securitization, or both.

As this frontier advances, this article queries the stories told by financial elites about the financialization of rental housing. It centres on the nascent Australian BTR market, which has none of the maturity or scale of North America's multifamily sector nor does it rival the explosive growth of new UK or Irish BTR markets (Nethercote, 2020). And yet, appetite for Australian BTR investment is growing, with year-on-year market expansion since 2017 (CBRE, 2021a), several tenanted market-rate developments and some 40 BTR projects underway, to a total of some 15,000 units, across Melbourne, Sydney, the Gold Coast and Brisbane (CBRE, 2021a).2 This article explores local news media and financial media reporting over the four years to 2020, as this new housing tenure rose from near-obscurity to understand how expanding media coverage (digitally) represented and conceptualised this new Australian BTR market to public audiences. Its analysis examines dominant media representations of BTR, the underlying assumptions and terms of reference that delineate what can be said and argued about BTR, and BTR stakeholders' capacity to speak in these forums. The media is understood as an age-old, vital and evolving medium for the storytelling that unites elite coalitions (for overview: Ward, 2009, pp. 233–4; Logan & Molotch, 1987; Stone, 1989) and storytelling as a form of narrative sense-making is understood as a discursive technology of elite power, wherein stories are ‘the glue that holds elite coalitions together temporarily’ (Engelen, 2015, p. 1608; Engelen et al., 2011, pp. 12–32).

This analysis is informed by post-political theory, particularly Jacques Rancière’s (1999) ideas on aesthetic regimes (sense-making) and their interpretations (e.g. Dikeç, 2012a, 2012b), which I specify below. It explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent housing in Australia which helped depoliticize this latest wave of rental housing financialization. In particular, it investigates the practices, forms of visibility and conceptualisations involved in BTR media reporting, guided by Dikeç’s (2013: 29–30) heuristic for Rancièrian aesthetics, and it considers who constructs such representations, taking inspiration from Blakey (2021). Following Dikeç (2013: 37), this approach requires a ‘questioning of the sensible evidences put in place within such a [aesthetic] regime’: a questioning of what is legitimised (made to make sense) and delegitimised in the formation of common sense, wherein common sense refers to shared meaning and to ‘a faculty of judgement’.3 Rancièrian thinking is also sensitive to what and who lie beyond prevailing frames of reference, namely the (de)emphasised, ‘unheard’ and strategically ‘ignored’ (Dikeç, 2012a, p. 674; also; McGoey, 2012a). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news media, like any device that interferes with what we see and do not see, restricts the coordinates of public debate surrounding Australian BTR, including through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to understand, interpret and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class with expansion a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR's dual function as an asset and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in this way. This aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public debate about BTR represents a post-political strategy that may assist in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia through this latest wave of rent-extraction, albeit with limits as the conclusion elaborates. I argue that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of financialized capitalism through which a consensus is ‘policed’, as reporting scripts and legitimises the rise of institutional investors into Australia's rental sector in ways that disavow properly political disagreements vis-à-vis BTR.

This argument is mounted as follows. First, I situate Rancièrian thinking in post-political theory, as essential background for understanding public sense-making surrounding BTR or, in Rancièrian terms, the aesthetic regimes or the police distribution of the sensible. I then revisit storytelling surrounding the financialization of (rental) housing, as technologies of elite power within aesthetic regimes. Second, I consider contemporary media ecologies where such stories are told, underscoring how vested interest within and beyond the media encourage stories to be told in particular ways. These media insights are key since I will argue Australian news media outlets promulgated storylines about BTR that served the interests of BTR industry actors, including by circumscribing how BTR was characterized in reporting and the terms of references audiences were guided to use to evaluate BTR market expansion and government performance in response to this. Guided by Dikeç’s (2013) Rancièrian heuristics, remaining sections: detail the media's hand in making BTR available to the senses, as column inches dense with BTR industry exploits, research and spokespeople positioned BTR on the public radar; identify how BTR was made sensible through a dominant representation of BTR as an asset class rather than housing tenure; and show how this way of relating to BTR was made to seem sensible through technical economic storylines that cast BTR expansion as a matter of national economic interest.4 Within these narrow coordinates of debate, the legitimacy (and indeed desirability) of market expansion was presented as a given while, in the main, competing perspectives were neglected if not discounted as myriad complexities and inconsistencies surrounding local BTR expansion and its implications for Australian households, neighbourhoods and cities were strategically ignored. The analysis identifies a chorus of (prospective) BTR developers, investors, operators and real estate service companies (RESCs) who assume authority as credible BTR ‘experts’ to make BTR thinkable in this way. Overall, these representations and conceptualisations of BTR, as performances of technocratic consensus, reflect the elite hegemony that characterizes post-political tendencies. Traditional news media emerges complicit, as reporting serves to regulate which perspectives gained currency and which languished or become inadmissible. Depoliticizing BTR by restricting the coordinates of public debate on rental housing financialization in this way risks circumscribing public understandings of this new wave of urban rent-extraction and crowding out informed public debate based on expanded frames of reference. These are important insights for understanding how the financialization of housing is being realised and reproduced.

This Rancièrian aesthetic reading of BTR elite storytelling enhances understandings of the financialization of rental housing for geographical research, shedding needed light on Australia's under-examined BTR market emergence and local industry actors. It contributes to understandings of how institutional investors and other BTR industry actors, such as developers navigate the diversity of local/national settings in which they look to operate (see Brill & Özogul, 2021), including by establishing local news media as a key platform for the strategic depoliticization of their activities as these actors look to secure and expand into new markets.5 Identifying the media as a digitised discursive device in this way likewise provides another empirical case that corroborates the diverse ways financialization is being enabled through the digital (see Ash et al., 2018). In terms of theoretical contribution, the Rancièrian aesthetic analysis of this empirical case of post-political expression contributes to lively geographical debate on the post-political by corroborating its theoretical value at a time when aesthetic regimes are garnering mounting interest, including amongst political geographers (e.g., Bassett, 2014; Blakey, 2021; Dixon, 2009; Tolia-Kelly, 2019; Ghertner, 2010; Grayson, 2017), but where distorted iterations risk undermining these analytics perceived purchase for our field (Dikeç, 2017; Swyngedouw, 2017).

Section snippets

Rancièrian aesthetics and elite storytelling

Post-political theories converge around a shared concern about the disavowal of political disagreement and its replacement with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of subjects (Wilson and Swyngedouw (2014: 4). This depoliticization is variously theorised as ‘post-politics’, ‘post-democracy’ and ‘post-political’ (Crouch, 2020; Dikeç, 2005; Mouffe, 2005; Rancière, 1999; Swyngedouw, 2011; Wilson 2014),6

(Digital) news media, financialization and elite storytelling

Mass media is one arena where politics are inscribed or thwarted with the media both medium and agent in elite storytelling. This article proceeds on that basis, approaching the media as significant to the aesthetic regime that surrounds the financialization of rental housing. In the first instance, contemporary news media provides a vital medium/platform for communicating elite stories including on matters of finance (Aalbers & Engelen, 2015; Engelen, 2015; Froud et al., 2012; Velthuis, 2015).

Examining build to rent in the media

A Rancierian aesthetic approach helps explore how the nascent wave of rental housing financialization has been made ‘common sense’ in Australia. As noted, Rancière terms the (police) distribution of the sensible the ‘taken-for-granted configuration of perception and meaning … the conditions in which arguments can be made, recognized as such, and engaged’ (Ruez, 2013, p. 1129). This prompts a question, which Dikeç (2013: 31) formulates as follows: ‘what kinds of practices, forms of visibility

Representing BTR as an asset class: practices and visibility

Prior to 2017, BTR was barely on the public radar in Australia. It then hit the headlines, with optimistic pronouncements that BTR's ‘time has come’. These headlines were tempered with caution and some scepticism about the sector's local viability, at least initially. Investors were being discouraged, reporting told, by high land taxes, the inability to defer GST costs on construction materials, favourable tax settings for speculative property investment and homeownership, withholding tax set

Conceptualising BTR as a viable asset class

BTR was made to be seen as sensible through consistent claims about the under-exploited, national economic benefits of expanding this asset class and, by 2020, through repeated suggestions such expansion offered a salve for the pandemic-induced downturn and represented a prime opportunity for Australia to develop its REITs involving alternative asset class investments.

Repeated references to industry-calculated return on investment figures, offered alongside boosterish industry soundbites,

The post politics of build to rent

Reporting on BTR as a new housing tenure was limited, by contrast. Housing-centric representations did broaden somewhat public debate by conceptualising BTR as an aspirational housing tenure and highlighting BTR housing's features and benefits. Yet as this section argues, housing-centric representations did not fundamentally challenge the sense that was being made of BTR. Reporting mostly did not acknowledge or discuss—let alone challenge—the foundational assumption that the expansion of

Conclusion

This article identifies a post-political strategy around Australian rental housing financialization. It argues that as a nascent build to rent market emerged, traditional news media contributed to a process of post-politicization by circumscribing BTR debate within select coordinates, delimiting its frames of reference and broadcasting the voices those who assumed authority to speak. A Rancièrian aesthetic approach, guided by Dikeç’s (2013) heuristics, foregrounds how media reporting

Declaration of competing interest

None.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to the editor Filippo Menga and reviewers for their helpful feedback. This research was undertaken with funding from Australian Research Council DECRA Award (DE200100521).

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