The Housing Question under Capitalist Political Economies

Abstract

This short article is a reply to four commentaries that were written in response to our paper “Centering Housing in Political Economy”. Rather than discussing each of the commentaries separately, we have chosen to distil and discuss four themes that appear important both to the commentators and to us: theory and abstraction; land rent; mortgage securitization; and the role of the state. Our discussion of theory advances the claim that theories and frameworks that take not only the economics of housing but also its politics, history, geography and institutions seriously can in principle be commensurate under the critical realist ontology suggested by two of our commentators. Our discussion of securitization adds to the existing literature on the theorization of the spatial fix and the circuits of capital. Finally, in reconsidering the housing question in political economy, we argue that you cannot today come to grips with the laws of the latter without factoring in on the centrality of the former.

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