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Abstract
This paper provides an anthropological perspective on speculation in housing by using the idea of ‘social form’ as the analytical lens. Instead of seeing speculation as a matter of individual orientation to risk/profit, or as a statistical tendency in a market, the advantage of ‘social form’ is that it introduces the dynamic complex of relations in which actors’ decisions are made. The case examined here is the purchase of housing ‘off plan’ in contemporary Russia, which is a variation of the form found elsewhere in the world. Both developers and purchasers of real estate are engaged in speculation and the main tension in their relations derives from their mutual dependency while having different goals, rationalities and visions of the future. In the wider political-economic context, speculation in housing clashes with two differently organized social forms: the virally spreading protest associations of ruined purchasers and the regional power hierarchies of the business-cum-government world.
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No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1 Pignarre and Stengers (Citation2011), however, attempt to analyse speculative impulses through their theory of ‘capitalist sorcery’, arguing that the market exercises a spell on actors’ mind such that they are compelled to act in certain ways.
2 Jesse Norman (Citation2018, pp. 225–226) argues that asset markets, such as housing, have different economic characteristics from financial markets, making them intrinsically unstable and likely to lead to self-reinforcing cycles of boom and bust.
3 The distinction between external analytical and actors’ perspectives is of course a very old one in the social sciences, but the advantage of Candea et al.’s terms is that they helpfully avoid the problematic associations of other often-used words, such as ‘objective’ and ‘subjective’, notably by allowing that a third-party description cannot be ‘objective’ and will always be in some way evaluative or partial.
4 http://www.dengi-info.com/archive/article.php?aid=953 (accessed November 2015).
5 http://pitermoidom.ru/podvodnyie-kamni-ddu-2/ (accessed September 2015).
6 http://vladmama.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=1490&t=209568&start=20 (p. 2) (accessed September 2015).
7 http://realt.onliner.by/2014/01/28/dol-37 (accessed August 2015).
8 Agreement (dogovor) issued by the General Director of the limited company Renessans Aktiv, No. 599, on 1 August 2015.
9 Zolotoi Rog, 4 August 2015, pp 17–18.
10 Laws through which an unfinished development could be transferred to a new contractor were in preparation but still not enacted in 2016. In rare cases, dol’shchiki have got together and set up a company to finish the building themselves, but this demands funding, time and commitment that most people do not have (Torocheshnikova, Citation2016, pp. 4–5).
11 https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/обманутые-дольщики (accessed October 2015).
12 http://intermarkvarills.ru/services/ (accessed April 2016).
13 Zolotoi Rog, 11August 2015, p 10. However, property downturns have been reported recently in Moscow and other Russian cities.
14 http://realty.rbc.ru/articles/27/10/2014/562949992768846.shtml (accessed October 2015).
15 Mortgages are acquired in order to participate in shared construction, but the repayments remain due even if the building remains uncompleted. If an apartment is acquired they stretch out long afterwards, which many Russians resent.
16 http://www.zrpress.ru/business/vladivostok_04.12.2012_58133_vladivostok-poluchit-svoi-alye-parusa.html (accessed September 2015).
17 North Korean construction teams are often employed in the Russian far east. The workers are carefully kept apart from the Russian population, partly as a condition imposed by the North Korean government and partly because of the frequently oppressive and illegal hours and rates of pay.
18 Analysing the financial models used by Japanese finance managers, Miyazaki argues against any universal heuristic of hope and insists that hope in capitalism should be seen in its specifics, as ways of orienting particular knowledge practices in the context of neo-liberal reforms. He calls his Japanese managers’ obsessive pursuit of perfect predictability ‘dreams’, these being dreams that manifest themselves in a new subjectivity (e.g. the ‘strong’ ‘risk-taking’ individual) and in pursuit of numerical techniques (Miyazaki, Citation2006, p. 150).
19 Estimates of the number of ‘cheated dol’shchiki’ in Russia vary between 114,214 located in 69 regions of Russia in 2016 (Torocheshnikova, Citation2016) and ‘at least 150,000 people’ in 2017: http://fre.habitants.org/nouvelles/habitants_d_europe/all_over_russia_meetings_of_cheated_investors_were_held_on_july_25th (accessed October 2017).
20 Their newness can be seen from the fact that they have not established a named social type: in one town they are called a ‘society’ (obshchestvo), in another ‘association’ (assotsiatsiya), in another ‘movement’ (dvizhenie).
21 The people determined to get the developer bankrupted are opposed by others, who think pressure should be put on the company to complete the building.
22 Demonstrations are regularly broken up by the police: http://realty.newsru.com/article/14apr2011/odnodolshiki (accessed October 2015). To demonstrate legally people must register as approved ‘Cheated Dol’shchiki’ and without registration they may well be arrested. The authorities are adept at finding legalist reasons for non-registration, so the number of actual complainants far exceeds the official figures.
23 http://www.donnews.ru/Dolshchiki-vydvigayut-svoego-kandidata-v-gorodskuyu-Dumu_574 http://www.donnews.ru/Dolshchiki-pytayutsya-dokrichatsya-do-gubernatora_531 (accessed October 2015).
24 The World Assembly of Inhabitants (WSF) gathered in Tunis in March 2015. Its declaration denounced lack of housing and land speculation and called for the replacement of the neo-liberal capitalist system by collective ownership, alternative forms of management and recognition of the commons: https://fsm2015.org/en/article/2015/06/02/declaration-world-assembly-inhabitants (accessed October 2015). See Appadurai (Citation2013, pp. 115–129) for a discussion of housing and citizenship.
25 http://161.ru/forum/theme.php?id=346955&p=780#msg7986151 (accessed October 2015).
26 Some contributors to the forums object to this demand: “Why should our taxpayers’ money go to support those people? They themselves took their money into ‘the field of fools’ and dug a hole. […] They have already given away their money – they’ve SPENT IT. That’s the arithmetic, and from a businessman’s point of view it’s quite all right: profit above all, and if people are left on the street … that’s just the way things work out” http://www.donnews.ru/Dolshchiki-pytayutsya-dokrichatsya-do-gubernatora_531 (accessed October 2015).
27 DSS was simultaneously owed a far larger sum by various debtors, but was unable to retrieve these debts.
28 Kommersant’, Primorskii Krai, 11 August 2015, p 8.
29 Kommersant’, Primorskii Krai, 11 August 2015, p 8.
30 http://www.info.yarnet.ru/advokat/index.php?id=4 (accessed October 2015).
31 http://www.forbes.ru/milliardery/257057-pod-snos-pochemu-milliardery-stroiteli-rasteryali-svoe-bogatstvo (accessed October 2015).
32 http://www.forbes.ru/milliardery/282185-milliarder-aras-agalarov-ya-ne-umeyu-zarabatyvat-na-gosudarstvennykh-stroikakh?page=0,1 (accessed October 2015).
33 In September 2017 over 1,500 dol’shchiki in Chelyabinsk were in panic. They had bought (or were making mortgage payments for) apartments in the new district ‘Akadem Riverside’, but the developer Grinflait declared bankruptcy before completion. The regional government then offered financial support for a new firm Trest Magnitostroi to take over and to continue to sell the apartments – only for the inept work of the latter to be declared illegal. The half-built constructions are now due for demolition. http://pravdaurfo.ru/articles/157284-chelyabinskomu-akadem-riverside-ugrozhaet-snos (accessed October 2017).
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Caroline Humphrey
Caroline Humphrey is a Social Anthropologist who has worked in the USSR/Russia, Mongolia, Inner Mongolia, Nepal and India. Her research interests include socialist and post-socialist society, moral economy, the relation between history and anthropology, and the aesthetics of daily life. Until 2010, she was Sigrid Rausing Professor of Anthropology at the University of Cambridge and she is currently a Research Director at the university’s Mongolia and Inner Asia Studies Unit.