Hyper-commodified housing products and the triple crisis: Situating the emergence of short-term, shared and digitised rental housing

This paper investigates the post-GFC hyper-commodification of rental housing – i.e., the extreme influence of economic and real estate accumulation in housing provision as defined by Madden and Marcuse. In this context, we investigate the emergence of ‘hyper-commodified housing products’ (HCHPs) with a focus on high-density shared housing, co-living and short-term rentals. These products interest various actors in unaffordable urban housing markets characterised by declining access to homeownership and a shortage of affordable rental housing. We explain this common interest by the relation of HCHPs to what we see as a triple crisis of: consensual governance driven by economic competitiveness (state), housing provision profitability (capital), and politicisation of the issue of access to secure and affordable housing (labor). Focusing on Luxembourg, we show how HCHPs are (i) opportunistically developed by market actors to maximise profitability in the face of the pricing out of traditional buy-to-let investors, (ii) actively supported by the state to maintain economic competitiveness without introducing disruptive structural housing market reforms, (iii) framed as depoliticised housing solutions for workers. We draw on this example to develop a dynamic analytical framework that situates the (hyper-)commodification of housing as enabled by entrepreneurial modes of governance supporting private accumulation strategies as well as discursive frames that depoliticise the housing question through a foregrounding of worker productivity. We conclude with research avenues this framework may provide to advance work on how new rental housing products emerge as responses to the structural, global housing crisis while eventually fuelling housing exclusion and inequality patterns.