Seminar 10.15-12.00 with Cloé St-Hilaire: Financialization and the digital divide in Canadian rental housing: three data vignettes (room: NIC0826)
Abstract: From Vancouver to Montreal, tenants are confronted with rentier pressures amid a financializing housing landscape. Financial landlords, such as asset managers, real estate investment trusts, and pension funds, have become the country’s largest landlords. The expansion of their rental portfolios has been enabled by digital technologies known as “proptech”. The financial-proptech ecosystem is built on synergies between these two groups of actors. On the one hand, proptech firms target financial landlords because of their scale. On the other hand, financial landlords adopt and invest in proptech to create efficiencies and gain market advantage. Meanwhile, tenants increasingly navigate renting through digital intermediaries that collect increasing amounts of data about them. This presentation offers a critical account of the geographies of digitized financialization in Canada through three data vignettes. The first vignette presents the various data assemblages used to measure the reach and impacts of financial landlords, from Toronto’s high-rises to Halifax’s mobile home communities. Through numerous data-based strategies, this vignette shows how financialized logics work to undermine affordability and capitalize on precarious tenure conditions across asset classes. The second vignette delves into the imaginaries of proptech adoption in rental housing, including portrayals of renting as a curated lifestyle and an efficient investment. Through an analysis of proptech adoption in Canada’s four largest cities, this vignette assesses the materiality of proptech’s imaginaries, its contradictions, and its effects on tenants. The third vignette offers a theoretical reflection on the continuing datafication of the rental sector, arguing that this rentier landscape creates not only economic and social implications, but also epistemic ones. I use the concept of epistemic engulfment to depict this uneven terrain of knowledge production. Overall, this presentation offers a critical analysis of digitization and financialization in Canada, centered around data. I conclude by highlighting key grassroots initiatives that have tackled rentiers in housing.
Cloé St-Hilaire is a PhD Candidate in Planning at the University of Waterloo, where she holds a Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarship. Cloé’s research interests centre around housing justice, financialization, digital technologies, big data methods, and critical planning. She is a member of the Housing and Urban Justice Project at the Institute for Housing and Urban Research at Uppsala University.
14.00 City walk with Allt åt alla (meeting place: Arbetets ära, Möllevångstorget)
Together with the grassroots organization Allt åt alla and Jennie Gustafsson, we will visit the landscapes of financial landlords in Malmö. We start by exploring the neighborhood of Möllevången where Heimstaden (Sweden’s largest financial landlord) has acquired housing the last decades. This former working-class area has undergone deep structural changes, while still being the centre for activism. We will then continue to Rosengård, where another type of financial landlord, the public-private housing company Rosengård Fastigheter, bought a large part of the public housing stock in 2016. If time allows, we will continue our walk to Herrgården, where Victoriahem (Sweden’s second largest financial landlord) begun investing in multifamily rental housing in 2012. The city walk will combine shorter talks, and smaller group walks when adequate.
If you are interested in participating, please send an email to jennie.gustafsson@mau.se (to arrange pick-up of guests to the seminar room and to appreciate the number of participants).