We have been living in a society where debts, rather than rights, have been the major means for accessing basic social goods like housing, education, and health care. That social model was built around the assumption that while real incomes stagnated and the state did not directly provide many basic goods through universal entitlements, cheap credit would do the trick instead. High finance was inextricably intertwined with the privileges of citizenship. This was not a very good social model.
One of the key ideas around which my master's thesis turned was the idea of the "rescaling of political economy". I meant a number of things by this, but I think two are especially crucial. First, economic activity has been reorganized. Rather than being organized within the nation-state, it flows across territorial boundaries and agglomerates within cities and regions. Second, and relatedly, citizenship and political rights are also slipping out of their old national containers. (You wouldn't necessarily conclude this by looking at the erection of border fences and the tightening of immigration requirements in many places. But consider it another way - the fact that these policies exist is in itself an admission that nation-states are failing to contain citizenship.)
Quite often, as Gourevitch writes, the guarantees of citizenship are not being administered directly, by territorial states, but indirectly through interventions in financial markets. He discusses those specific interventions, and the problems with them, more thoroughly than I want to here. I want to talk about housing.
As part of the post-World War II political settlement, most governments committed to the idea that access to housing was a right that should accrue to all citizens. (This was written into that most technocratically utopian of documents, the UN Declaration of Universal Human Rights.) Most rich countries then proceeded to deliver housing directly to their citizens - in part by subsidizing private home-ownership (e.g. through low-interest mortgages from state-owned mortgage providers) and in part by constructing state housing. A bevy of laws and regulations were developed to increase access to housing. Low-income countries also deployed similar measures, but they were not as broadly successful. (As this failure coincided with the start of mass urbanization in much of the developing world, it would have far-reaching consequences.)
In short, in the post-WWII political economy, the right of citizens to housing was totally circumscribed within the nation-state. Compare that to the situation today.
In the US, at least, home ownership is the predominant means of housing people. (It is also at the center of a decade-long financial bubble and bust, and the predominant means of saving for retirement, but let's not go there right now.) Both parties have encouraged the expansion of home ownership, and the federal government subsidizes mortgage interest payments (through tax deductions) in order to make it more attractive to people.
Fundamentally, however, buying a home requires citizens to interact not with the state but with large banks. As part of the drive towards debt-financed citizenship, social housing has fallen by the wayside and federal mortgage lenders have been privatized (although not without the withdrawal of an implicit government guarantee). In order to get a mortgage, you have to have a good credit rating, which means building up a good "credit history" by steadily borrowing and repaying money on credit cards.
In other words, you don't truly have the right to housing - remember, a fundamental human right - anymore unless you have regularly transacted with banks (and indebted yourself to them). What a weird situation! There are, effectively, invisible cables stringing together the most local of affairs (finding a home) with complex, global financial markets. This is the rescaling of the political economy. It's happening within your home and there are protests going on about it in most major cities.
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