Legitimised violence: Strategies and discourses of property actors pushing housing hyper-commodification

Housing regimes have undergone dramatic transformations post-Global Financial Crisis, under combined processes of financialisation, assetisation and platformisation. Concomitantly, real estate and capital accumulation have come to dominate housing provision – a process that Madden and Marcuse have named ‘hyper-commodification’. This paper argues that housing hyper-commodification progresses through the practices of particular property actors who mobilise dehumanising discourses to construct an ‘other’ who can be pushed further than is currently socially acceptable. We hypothesise that these dehumanising discourses, and the practices that accompany them, are framed as legitimate interpretations of what the regulatory and policy landscape permits. To think through this relation between policies, discourses and practices, we combine two concepts from Deleuze & Guattari: the apparatus of capture and the idea of lawful violence. We argue that the violence inherent in housing commodification is considered legitimate because it serves to bind those who commit this form of violence to the state’s political-economic project. We explore these ideas at three stages of the housing provision chain – access to land, property development, and property management. We focus on Luxembourg, where both property ownership concentration and housing prices are high, resulting in a fragmented access to homeownership, an inaccessible private rented sector, and scarce public housing. We draw on the qualitative analysis of 60 semi-structured interviews, conducted with individual landowners (land access stage), property developers (development stage), and co-living operating companies (property management stage). We show how the discursive framing of each actor’s actions, their relation with privileged actors contra their construction of a dehumanised ‘other’ in the provision landscape –relatives vs ‘outsiders’ for landowners, investors vs marginal homeowners for property developers, permanent vs temporary residents for operating companies – opens a discursive space that some actors exploit to push the limits of commodification. We see these practices as forms of lawful violence that accrue economic value to those who pursue them, at the cost of further binding housing provision and its commodification to the state’s project of (trans)national gentrification through housing depoliticisation, accumulation through property, and entrepreneurial governance.