Urbanities,
Vol. 4
·
No 1
·
May 2014
© 2014
Urbanities
4
residents own shares and the right to live in their apartments, not the actual apartment itself,
whether it is low-income or market-rate. LECs provide an alternative form of homeownership,
especially for those who could never afford private ownership, and may also provide a hedge
against gentrification (Saegert et al. 2003).
Access to affordable housing, especially by low-income minority households, has been a
persistent problem in the United States, but as the global economy entered a prolonged period of
economic decline in 2008, the outlook became particularly ominous. The number of households
paying over half their income for housing rose to 19.4 million in 2009. At least 7.8 million
foreclosure proceedings have begun since 2007, with 3.5 million foreclosures finished between
2008-2010 and another 2.2 million loans in the pipeline (State of the Nation’s Housing 2011).
Although all groups have been hurt by the housing crisis, low-income and communities of colour
are disproportionately affected for three main reasons: more sub-prime and other predatory
lending practices occur among African-Americans and Latinos; they have a higher
unemployment rate than non-Hispanic whites; and the overall net worth of minority groups is
much lower than whites, leaving them with fewer resources to counter their losses in the housing
market (State of the Nation’s Housing 2009).
Yet even before the foreclosure crisis, many critics questioned the relentless promotion of
homeownership as the best solution for all households (Herbert and Belsky 2006; Rohe and
Watson 2007). LECs can act as a potential buffer against the effects of the housing crisis and
recession, since, as de-commoditized housing is removed from the cycle of private ownership and
profit, (Achtenberg and Marcuse 1986; DeFilippis 2004), they have a fixed value.
In many ways, the slippery nature of ownership characterizes the neoliberal logic of late-
capitalism. Financial decisions about abstract and complex financial instruments like derivatives
are predicated on a general uncertainty and ambiguity about ownership and market
responsibilities. The global capital system is overly determined by such slippages and
ambiguities. To some extent, the economic crisis of 2008 was predicated on this fact — a
disconnect of social/educational capital from the workings of unfettered finance capital — all
complicated by race, ethnicity, class and gender that over-determine how people experience the
pains and possibilities of a capricious marketplace (see Comaroff and Comaroff 2001; LiPuma
and Lee 2004). This volatility of value, in which material items like homes and pensions were
thought to be worth a certain amount, turned out to be based on ‘fictions of finance’ (Maurer
2006:18). The fixity of value people relied on did not exist.
By engaging the two ostensibly separate fields of finance and identity, I offer evidence of a
new way of conceptualizing value, arguing for the links between the valuations of property and
the valuations of people. How can new understandings of ‘value’ change ways of thinking about
ownership itself, about the states of possessive individualism/collectivism?
Graeber (2001) outlines investments into the multiple conceptualizations of value, linking
values to action. He believes the objects people consider most important are those that represent
social relations and processes of the material world. The fiscal crisis eviscerated the ideal of the
