Gold is not a Metaphor: Financialization, extraction, and limits of “housing” in struggles for dwelling justice in the settler colony

This paper seeks to bring a wider and more explicit theorization of extraction into conversation with literature around the financialization and assetization of housing. These literatures have made important contributions to understanding how both owner-occupied homes and rental properties have increasingly been converted into assets that funnel wealth upwards through flows of mortgage securitization instruments and/or the extraction of rents. While there are points of conceptual divergence across and within theories of financialization and assetization, both emphasize the centrality of “housing” to wider contemporary dynamics of inequality and injustice. For example, Adkins et al., argue that rentier relations now “infuse social life as a whole”, such that peoples positions vis-à-vis property asset inflation in general, and housing asset inflation in particular, has displaced labour and employment as the central force driving the widening chasm of 21st century inequality (2020 p. 5 & 63). Likewise, Aalbers argues that housing is a “central aspect of financialization”, evidenced in the increasing interdependence between housing and finance in general (2016, pp. 2-3). However, the critical epistemology of these works tends to be spatially and temporally bounded in consequential ways. Spatially, these literatures centre housing as a built form – a series of discrete physical structures fixed in space. This understanding hides the people-centred infrastructures of care that sustain life within and beyond housing, and precludes engagement with evictions of Indigenous peoples from land/water/territory as longstanding processes of un-homing. Temporally, housing financialization as extraction is also conceived as a relatively new process with origins in sub-prime lending and associated crises. The insufficient problematization of land and labour mean that historical and on-going displacements and evictions of Indigenous peoples that make settler colonial urban societies possible as well as the forms of care and labour that vivify relations of dwelling, are invisibilized within these influential literatures. Reflecting on these dynamics demands further critical reflection on how important and necessary demands for housing justice may nevertheless unintentionally support – or at least fail to contest – “moves to innocence” of the settler colonial state (Tuck & Yang, 2012; Porter & Kelly, 2022). The paper argues that wider and deeper engagement between studies of housing financialization/assetization and techniques of literal extraction such as legal erasure and removal from land can help think through the tensions inherent in struggles for “dwelling justice” in settler colonial contexts such as Canada. Such contexts must be acknowledged to be “set inside an already violent relationship of un-homing that creates the very conditions for others to make home” (Porter & Kelly, 2022, p. 1). Conceptually and practically, infrastructures of extraction connect spaces, histories, and peoples often considered separately – such as cities and hinterlands, and the distinct but related dynamics of post- and settler colonial displacements and migrations. Likewise, moving beyond the grammar of “housing” and towards diverse epistemologies of “dwelling”, “home”, and “care” contests the fetishization of housing as a fungible object – like gold – in ways that can also help to orient ethical and political imaginaries towards unsettled futures.