The Political Economy of Rental Housing in Spain: The Dialectics of Exploitation(s) and Regulations

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses how the exploitation of tenants in Spain is boosting income for banks, hedge funds and pension funds. It does so by tracing the origins of the money invested in a Tres Cantos housing project in Madrid. The paper makes the following claims: First, the exploitation taking place in households -referred in this paper as secondary- is increasingly related to worker exploitation, and thus this particular type of exploitation is increasingly relevant to the dynamics of capital accumulation. Second, the key role of secondary exploitation of tenants in the revenue-making strategies of pension funds, hedge funds and banks is augmented and mediated by a myriad of regulations being implemented at the national and supranational scales. Theoretically, the paper contests the Marxian claim that household exploitation is ‘secondary’ to the exploitation taking place in the production process.

KEYWORDS:

• Rental housing
• exploitation
• pension funds
• hedge funds
• Spain

Acknowledgement

I would like to thank very much Brett Christophers, Peter Jakobsen and two anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments on earlier drafts of the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes on contributor

Ismael Yrigoy hold a Phd in Geography from the University of the Balearic Islands (2015). Ismael Yrigoy currently working as a postdoctoral researcher at the Department of Social and Economic Geography at Uppsala University and at the Department of Geography at University of Santiago de Compostela.

Additional information

Funding

This article was funded by the research projects Housing and international mobility in the island cities: The emergence of new forms of urban inequality [grant number RTI2018-093296-B-C22] and Overtourism in Spanish coastal destinations: Tourism degrowth strategies [grant number RTI2018-094844-B-C31] both funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities and FEDER funds.