10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5122
application/pdf
2239-625X
5122
2
en
urn:nbn:it:unica-29857
Irene Sabaté
Anuac
State action and the movements of finance during the Spanish housing crisis: Alleviating or amplifying the social impacts of financialization?
Text.Serial.Journal
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac
12
Thematic section: Anthropology, financial expansion and its relationalities
2023-12-31
2022-02-21
2023-12-31
2024-02-03
51-72
1
Irene Sabaté
2023/12/31
10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5122
51
Universitat de Barcelona, Spain
2239-625X
2
72
urn:nbn:it:unica-29857
State action and the movements of finance during the Spanish housing crisis: Alleviating or amplifying the social impacts of financialization?
https://ojs.unica.it/index.php/anuac/article/download/5122/5824
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                                         2023 | anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, DIceMbre 2023: 51-72




State action and the expansion of ﬁnance
during the Spanish housing crisis
Alleviating or amplifying the social impacts of financialization?
Irene Sabaté MurIel
Universitat de Barcelona




ABsTRAcT: This paper addresses the entanglements, complicities and collisions between
financialization processes and state action during the current housing crisis in Spain,
with a focus on Catalonia and the Barcelona area in the last decade. Departing from the
assumption that housing financialization has been a major driver of the crisis, state in-
terventions, including housing policies and legal regulations imposed on financial and
real estate markets and on landlord-tenant relations, will be interpreted as modulators
that may either alleviate or amplify the impacts of financial dynamics on people’s access
to adequate housing. Drawing on the cases of several legal reforms, we will illustrate
variegated attitudes towards financial extraction adopted by different state agencies. It
will be thus shown how, in the rare cases where the state has tried to alleviate the social
harms derived from financial extraction, reforms have been superficial, have arrived late,
and have failed to reverse the structural drivers of the crisis. We will thus try to shed some
light into the nature of state action in the face of housing financialization, contending
that states should not be understood as outsides with respect to finance, as, to the con-
trary, they are part of finance’s very conditions of possibility.

KeYWORDs: fInancIalIZatIon; State; houSInG crISIS; houSInG polIcY; fInancIal reGulatIon; SpaIn




2023 | anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, DIceMbre 2023: 51-72
ISSN: 2239-625X – DOI: 10.7340/anuac2239-625X-5122.
52                                                           Irene Sabaté Muriel

   This article will address the entanglements, complicities, and collisions
between housing financialization processes and different instances of state
action. How has the Spanish state – comprising different functions and agen-
cies – interacted with the advances and withdrawals of finance during the last
decade and a half, in the context of a housing crisis? More specifically, has the
state contributed to alleviate the social impacts of financialization as regards
the right to housing, or, to the contrary, has it amplified them?
   Our inquiry in this particular arena should contribute to answer more ab-
stract questions that are being currently discussed in the literature on the
role of the state as regards financialization: Should states be understood as
outsides with respect to finance, or, to the contrary, are they part of finance’s
very conditions of possibility, as several authors (Lapavitsas 2014; Aalbers
2019) have argued? Can we speak about a “financialization of public policy”,
understood as the privileging of the financial industry’s interests in the policy
domain (Aalbers 2017: 3), as a factor of the housing crisis occurred in our area
of study? How has the housing crisis been addressed through lawmaking and
regulation, understood as a “core state function” (Mikus 2019: 13), and to what
extent has the financialization of housing been promoted or limited along this
process? Does the regulatory failure (Kalaitzake 2015) after the financial crash
evince the political protection of the financial industry? In answering these
questions, we will be inspired by Lagna’s suggestion to “abandon the sterile
state-market dichotomy to focus on the social relations constructing state and
market institutions as part and parcel of a comprehensive whole that is hu-
man reality” (2016:10). We will thus avoid dichotomous accounts and depart
from the stance that a state-finance nexus exists, where the state acts both as
a subject and an object of financialization (Mikus 2019).
   The complex interactions between the workings of the financial industry,
different instances of state action, and the resistances and coping strategies
of the citizenry, sometimes giving way to collective action and politization,
will be explored under this light. Evidence from the experiences of the Span-
ish and Catalan housing crisis in the last decade and a half will be provided to
illustrate three different kinds of entanglements of financial operations and
state action: a) laissez-faire and state intervention arriving late to mitigate
the effects of the crisis; b) the blatant promotion of the financial industry’s
interests in the rental market by the state; and c) ineffective enforcement of
rights-based legislation promoted through popular legislative initiatives; plus
judiciary counter-reforms aimed at deactivating such legislation. But, before



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State action and the expansion of finance                                             53

that, a brief account of how the Spanish housing crisis is rooted in financial
processes will be provided in the next section.

The Spanish housing crisis and its financial roots
   The housing crisis experienced in Spain in the last decade has consisted
of several overlapping waves. First, a spate of repossessions affected many
mortgagors following the 2007 crash1, forcing them out of their homes and
leaving them liable for the outstanding debt after the foreclosure (Colau, Ale-
many 2012). Then, from 2014 on, a rent bubble led to a predominance of rental
evictions over those caused by repossessions. Although the official figures of
rental evictions only include judiciary ones, due to rent non-payment, the to-
tal amount of displaced tenants would be much increased if also so-called
invisible evictions2, those due to the sudden increase of rents or to landlords’
refusal to renew leases, were added (Anzano 2018).
   Besides all this, since March 2020, because of the Covid-19 pandemic and
the economic crisis that it entailed, many dwellers found themselves under
the threat of eviction (Ill-Raga, González, Sabaté 2020). This was so despite
the moratorium enacted by the Spanish government for both mortgagors and
tenants in hardship, with
    very restrictive eligibility criteria. For example, applicants needed to prove
that their situation was a result of the pandemic. People with long trajectories
of housing dispossession and residential exclusion, such as those forced to
squat or to sub-rent a room in a shared flat, rarely found relief under those ex-
traordinary measures, as it could be observed in Barcelona in September 2020,
when courts re-opened after the lockdown and evictions multiplied despite
the alleged moratorium. In this way, a pre-existing, unsolved housing crisis
was chronified and aggravated for many, and became a structural condition
entailing a systematic transgression of the right to proper housing (Observa-
tori DESC 2020).
   In this article, we will depart from the premise that there is an intimate
relation between the housing crisis we have just described, and an underlying
process of housing financialization. Several elements point at this relation-
ship, that can be summarised as follows. First, the transformation of Spanish
cities in the last decades has been guided by neoliberal policies fostering an in-


1. More than 800,000 home repossessions were initiated between 2007 and the first quarter
   of 2020 (Source: Consejo General del Poder Judicial 2020).
2. Known as “no-fault” or “no-cause evictions” in Anglo-Saxon contexts.


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54                                                                      Irene Sabaté Muriel

creasing penetration of financial logics in the arenas of urban planning (Vives,
Rullán 2014; Coq-Huelva 2013) and housing provision (Palomera 2014). In the
latter sense, housing has been treated as a financial asset and as a store of
value (Aalbers 2008). This was so, first, through mortgage lending linked to
securitization, and through the repossession of housing units that acted as
collateral in such loans. Then, institutional investments in rental housing,
often packed in big stocks and coming from the previous wave of reposses-
sions (Janoschka et al. 2019; García Lamarca 2020) became the predominant
financial strategy thanks to a state-led “policy package” (Gil, Martínez 2022).
In all these processes, financial actors played a central role, be them banks,
whose thriving mortgage business supported both construction activity and
housing purchases during the housing bubble (1997‑2007) and then benefit-
ed from bailouts and public subsidies (Gabarre 2019); be them private equity
and venture capital funds, whose irruption in the Spanish rental market, often
with speculative strategies, went hand in hand with a growing concentration
of housing stocks in the hands of big corporate landlords (Janoschka et al.
2019; García Lamarca 2020; Méndez 2021).
   Having established this correlation between housing financialization and
the housing crisis, and in order to examine the role of the state in enabling,
shaping or holding back financial fluxes, we will draw on several kinds of em-
pirical material: qualitative data collected during ethnographic fieldwork on
the repossessions crisis between 2012 and 2015, observations made during
the author’s participation as an activist in the creation of the Catalan tenants
union Sindicat de Llogateres (2017‑18), and a retrospective analysis of second-
ary sources on the selected case studies (including legislation, press articles,
and social movements materials). The evidence provided will contribute to
go beyond the particularity of our case study, and to advance towards more
far-reaching accounts of the entanglements of financial dynamics and state
action3, taking into account the factors and practices that have enabled the
pervasive financialization of housing in European peripheries (Tulumello,
Dagkouli-Kyriakoglou 2021). While the financial roots of the housing crisis

3. Our efforts here will not exhaust the possibilities of a qualitative exploration of state
   action. Notably, more accurate knowledge is needed about the particular mechanisms
   that lead to the promulgation of laws and policies, what Mikus (2019: 25) has called the
   “backstage processes of their making”, including consultations and negotiations among
   different actors who are influential on this arena. What we offer here is rather an analysis
   of the visible outcomes of regulation and policy making, their impacts on people’s living
   conditions, and the claims and alternative proposals that have emerged from an organised
   citizenry.


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State action and the expansion of finance                                         55

have had global impacts and ramifications, it has found a particularly acute
expression in certain countries, and Spain can be considered among them due
to a panoply of circumstances including its dependent position vis à vis in-
ternational capital flows and financial regulations due to its semi-peripheral
location (Sabaté 2021), its familist welfare regime intertwined with a housing
system that privileges owner occupation and commodified housing (Allen et
al. 2024), and the robust historical and ideological foundations of its “society
of homeowners” (López, Rodríguez 2010).
   Although the geographical framework of several instances of state action
remains nation-wide, a particular focus will be put on Catalonia and, more
particularly, on the metropolitan area of Barcelona, where the housing crisis
has hit hard, and where the social mobilisations against it have been partic-
ularly prominent. Our account will include several legislative campaigns of
housing rights movements – particularly of the anti-repossessions platform
PAH (Colau, Alemany 2012; Mir et al. 2013; França 2017) and the tenants union
Sindicat de Llogateres (Anzano 2018; Palomera 2018) –, who have claimed for,
suggested, and in some cases forced state intervention, often with limited ef-
fects, but in a very significant manner for our purpose in this article: shedding
light into the articulation between financialization and state action. What fol-
lows is therefore a sample of instances of state interventions – or the lack
thereof – intended to illustrate our argument.

Instances of state action in the field of housing
   State actions and interventions in the field of housing may modulate – ei-
ther alleviate or amplify – the impacts of financial dynamics on the access
to adequate housing by the population, thus aggravating or mitigating the
housing crisis. Such interventions may consist of legal regulations imposed
on financial and real estate markets and on landlord-tenant relations, as well
as on housing policies implemented in both public and private sectors. But, as
it will be shown, they may also take the form of inaction, or of partial, ineffec-
tive, or even counterproductive action in some cases.
   This section will focus on several legislative and regulatory changes occurred
in Spain in the last decade. Unpacking the different layers and institutions of
the state involved in each case, such changes will be classified in three cat-
egories that roughly follow a chronological sequence: from the insufficient
post-2008 responses to the mortgage crisis, to deregulation that enabled a
transfer of financial extraction to the rental market, to the obstruction of the



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56                                                                    Irene Sabaté Muriel

enforcement of rights-based legislation fiercely fought for by housing justice
movements. At each stage, we will provide empirical evidence on the inter-
play between legislative and regulatory changes affecting financial activities,
and the grassroots experiences and strategies of inhabitants dealing with the
housing crisis, sometimes resulting in collective and political claims, before
turning back to our theoretical concern in the conclusion.

The aftermath of the GFC: from laissez-faire to late state intervention
   It can be the case that, at certain moments of macroeconomic cycles where
financial accumulation is having a distinct impact on the living conditions of
the population, as it happened during the Spanish housing bubble and fol-
lowing the economic crash of 2008, political authorities adopt a laissez-faire
approach, both because of the previous implementation of neoliberal reforms,
and of the lack of incentives or pressures to intervene in the economy. We can
interpret in this way the several years it took the Spanish government to react
in front of, first, predatory lending in the years of apparent prosperity prior
to 2008 (Nasarre 2011; Zunzunegui 2013; Sabaté 2020), and second, of the
increase of mortgage default rates and the repossessions crisis that started
to show serious signs already in 20084. The first, very timid attempts to inter-
vene arrived as late as in 2012 (Di Feliciantonio, Aalbers 2017), when already
more than 320,000 households had lost their homes to banks5, and many of
them remained indebted afterwards. The housing crisis had already attained a
very acute moment and was affecting the most precarious sectors of the pop-
ulation, importantly migrants from the global South, who found themselves
in a legal void where only the creditors’ claims were acknowledged. Many of
them joined the emergent housing rights movements (Gutiérrez-Garza 2020;
Suárez 2017), but the immense effort they invested in their struggle would not
always be fruitful.
   We met Máximo, a migrant from Ecuador, and his wife in the spring of
2012 at a local PAH assembly. They had obtained their mortgage in the early
2000s from a well-known Catalan savings bank, through the mediation of a
mortgage broker who focused in not-so-solvent customers. As it was recur-
rent those days among migrants, they had been granted the loan based on
so-called cross guarantees with an acquaintance, someone they had met in


4. The repossessions figure had more than doubled in one year, from 25,943 in 2007 to 58,686
   in 2008 [Source: Consejo General del Poder Judicial].
5. Source: Consejo General del Poder Judicial.


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State action and the expansion of finance                                                 57

the hospital where their eldest son was born, and with whom they would lose
contact afterwards. Then, with the advent of the crisis, Máximo and his wife
lost their jobs, except for some informal domestic part-time work that she
continued to do. They could not to face their mortgage repayments, and, once
in default, found themselves unable to force a negotiation with their creditor.
In the absence of any protective legislation, their lack of bargaining power left
them at the mercy of the bank’s abuse of discretion. At first sight, not much
could be done, except, thanks to their condition as migrants, going back to
their country of origin in an attempt at fleeing their debt. Despite that, for
some months Máximo fiercely fought within the PAH assembly and pioneered
the extension of the movement from Barcelona to his city, located also within
Barcelona’s metropolitan area. After camping in front of the bank branch for
several days and appearing in the local press, he attained some of his goals,
such as the suppression of the guarantor’s liability and the assignment in pay-
ment, that is to say, the cancellation of the whole debt after handing back
the apartment’s keys to the creditor. But he remained homeless, indebted for
other consumption loans and unemployed, with no prospects of recovery from
a long-standing period of hardship. He continued to claim for an alternative
shelter for some months, while he kept organising and giving advice to other
mortgagors at risk of default. But eventually, in the summer of 2012 and about
to have a third child, the family decided to go back to Ecuador, where one of
Máximo’s siblings could offer him a job.
   The legal reforms that arrived that same year were too late to provide a solu-
tion for this Ecuadorian his family. In March and November 2012, two decrees
were passed6. The first one contained a “good practice protocol” for banks,
recommending them to provide debt relief for debtors who found themselves
under the exclusion threshold, and the second established a moratorium of
evictions for the same profile of customers. To be eligible, they had to match
very narrow criteria, such as adopting a “good faith debtors” attitude, proving
that they were in “real need” (Sabaté 2022), and having tried to obtain a debt
restructuration before applying for debt relief. As a result, as we could observe
time after time at PAH assemblies that year, almost no one could benefit from
those measures. In addition, as the recommendations were not binding, their
implementation entirely depended on the bank’s will, always on an individ-
ual basis, and, even when the bank would open that door, the bureaucratic
labyrinth that awaited debtors (Aziz 2016) was far from easy to cross. The

6. Real Decreto-ley 6/2012, de 9 de marzo, and Real Decreto-ley 27/2012, de 15 de noviembre.


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58                                                                    Irene Sabaté Muriel

conservative government had succeeded in intervening late enough, and in a
sufficiently innocuous manner, in order not to harm the interests of the bank-
ing industry, who was in turn provided with a procedure to wipe off defaulted
loans and toxic assets from their balances. It would not be until much later,
in early 2015, that the first personal bankruptcy law (the Second Opportunity
or Over-Indebtedness Act7) was passed in the Spanish Parliament, filling what
had been a legislative gap that, during the worst years of the mortgage crisis,
had left debtors to the mercy of a Mortgage Act that went back to 1946.

Forging a rent bubble: the promotion of financial interests in the rental market
by the state
   In some cases, the extent to which lobbies and economic interests may di-
rectly motivate legislation to ease or even promote financialization processes
becomes blatant. Perhaps the most conspicuous example of this in relation to
the Spanish housing crisis is the legislation passed in the 2012‑13 period, which
secured the transition to a new financialization cycle in the face of the burst of
the housing and mortgage bubbles, and the resulting decline of mortgage se-
curitization (García Lamarca 2020; Gil, Martínez 2022). With the reform of the
regulation of the rental market in 20138, the duration of leases was shortened
from 5 to 3 years, and the yearly rent increases needed no longer to be limited
to any public indexes, among other measures. These novelties dramatically
fragilized the security of tenancy (Módenes 2019) and fostered rent price in-
creases irrespective of people’s income and purchase power. But its effects are
better to be understood in combination with other pieces of legislation that
had been passed in previous years, that allowed the creation of REITs in 20099,
and then granted them unprecedented tax exemptions in 2012. This combi-
nation provided a most lucrative channel for speculative investments in the
rental housing market (González Guzmán 2018; Janoschka et al. 2019; García
Lamarca 2020). To complete what some critics and activists have dubbed “a
perfect storm”, the potential obstacles to landlords’ profit extraction entailed
by tenants’ inability to pay rent were also foreseen and addressed with anoth-
er legal reform, that of the Criminal Prosecution Act, that speeded up judiciary
processes and allowed judges to serve “open date” eviction notices, with no


7. Real Decreto-ley 1/2015, de 27 de febrero.
8. Ley 29/1994, de 24 de noviembre, de Arrendamientos Urbanos, modified on 5/6/2013.
9. Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) are vehicles for investment in real estate markets.
   They are called SOCIMIs in Spain (González Guzmán 2018; García Lamarca 2020).


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State action and the expansion of finance                                                  59

specification of the date, to prevent the eviction blockades that often delayed
the process.
   In all, this mutation of housing financialization was not unique to the Span-
ish context, but it also happened in other countries such as the UK, the US or
Germany (Fields, Uffer 2016). But, in Spain, international investors enjoyed
the considerable advantages entailed by the peripheral position of the Span-
ish economy within the EU – closely related to the weak regulations in place,
as well as the already mentioned tax exemptions –, alongside the availability
of large stocks of repossessed housing that were in banks’ hands and were
considered as toxic assets at that time10. As a result, international funds rap-
idly appeared and purchased big amounts of housing units at bargain prices,
thus contributing to a process of extroverted financialization. This trend has
been reinforced by the sale of large public housing stocks to foreign capital,
as it happened in 2013 with the privatisation of Madrid’s public housing com-
pany in favour of Blackstone (Janoschka et al. 2019) and, more recently, with
the handover of large housing stocks that were in the hands of the SAREB11 to
real estate management firms controlled by international investment funds.
   The impacts of the strategies for financial extraction entailed by the irrup-
tion of these international funds and institutional investors in the Spanish
rental housing market was unveiled to the public some years later, as rent
prices rose12 and there started to be some public debate on the so-called in-
visible evictions provoked by rent increases that de facto expelled tenants
who had duly paid their rent up to then, but who could not afford the new
price imposed by their landlord, either within a same lease period, or between
two leases. That was the predominant problem observed at the first open as-
semblies organised by the Sindicat de Llogateres, the tenants union that was
created in Barcelona in 2017, rapidly attracting the attention of the media and
the public. At that time, people who approached the union were mainly urban
dwellers belonging to the working and middle classes that were suffering a


10. Some of them had already been transferred to the state-created asset management com-
    pany SAREB, who would later engage in privatizations (Gabarre 2019) rather than seizing
    the opportunity to increase the meagre public housing stock.
11. The so-called “bad bank” that had absorbed the toxic assets of Spanish banks as part of a
    governmental, EU-promoted recapitalisation plan (see Gabarre 2019 for further details).
12. The average rent in Catalonia increased from € 539,00 in 2014 to € 735,00 in 2019, while
    in the city of Barcelona it went from € 688,00 to € 978,00 in the same period. Despite the
    pandemic in 2020, rent prices have not decreased, with an average of € 745,00 in Catalonia
    and 979€ in Barcelona during the third trimester of the year (most recent data available)
    [Source: Catalan Government, Secretaria d’Hàbitat Urbà i Territori].


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60                                                                       Irene Sabaté Muriel

considerable precarisation, to a great extent due to the disproportion between
their income and their living expenses, among which rent stood out13. A pio-
neer example of this novel phenomenon, and of the resistances that could be
deployed by tenants in front of it, was the case of a building located in Sant
Joan Despí, a town in Barcelona’s metropolitan area14. Some of the 150 tenant
households living there started to receive notice of rent increases as their
3-year leases came to an end in 2018. The building had been sold by its bank-
rupt developer to a newly created company, that was in turn bought by a British
subsidiary of investment bank Goldman Sachs15. The landlord’s interests were
represented by a property administrator based in Barcelona. The tenants were
mostly working-class young couples with little children, families that had been
formed when the access to homeownership was barred for them, and therefore
had decided to rent and take root in the neighbourhood. Some of the increas-
es imposed as a condition to renew leases entailed 100% of the current rent
prices. Tenants seemed to have no other option than accepting the landlord’s
demands or leaving their homes. However, given the generalised rent bubble
situation and the lack of rental housing in the area to relocate 150 households,
they rather decided, in an unprecedented move, to organise themselves. To
do so, they resorted to the new-born tenants union, and sought and obtained
support from a long-established local neighbourhood association and from
all political parties at the city council. They organised assemblies, hang ban-
ners from their windows and started to pressure the landlord’s representative
to force the opening of negotiations. Only with a few exceptions, those with
finishing leases stayed in their homes and resisted for three months, while
rejecting the new conditions until an acceptable result was obtained from ne-
gotiations on a collective basis. This result consisted in 20% increases for all,
to be applied in a staggered manner. For leases finishing in 2019 and 2020 the
battle remained open, but the accomplishment in the face of a transnation-
al-scale landlord for the 94 most urgent cases, who could now afford to stay
in their homes, was unprecedented at that time. Collective bargaining, and
even the prefiguration of a rent strike as some tenants with finished leases re-

13. This is particularly so for low-income tenants, as 46% of them devoted more than 40% of
    their income to housing expenses in 2019 according to OECD data for Spain. It was also
    a main concern for young people, as 23% of this population in the city of Barcelona was
    overburdened by housing expenses in 2018‑19 [Source: IERMB and Idescat, Estadístiques
    metropolitanes sobre condicions de vida 2018‑2019].
14. More details about this case at https://sindicatdellogateres.org/victoria-a-sant-joan-despi/
15. By the time of the conflict, the president of that new company was the CEO of Goldman
    Sachs in Spain.


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State action and the expansion of finance                                                    61

mained in their flats during the negotiation period, were important landmarks
of this struggle against the mechanisms of financial extraction.
   Parallel to these no-fault evictions derived from the deregulation of rent
increases and the resulting rent price bubble, evictions due to rent non-pay-
ment were also on the rise. In the PAH assemblies, such cases were replacing
those derived from mortgage default and repossessions. In all, it became evi-
dent that, as the spate of mortgage default and home repossessions started to
fade out slowly, after forcing hundreds of thousands of families out of home-
ownership and often leaving them with an outstanding debt, tenants, be them
previously repossessed homeowners or not, were becoming the new victims of
housing financialization, and this was happening with the complicity of public
authorities and legislators who had devised a strategy to bail out the banking
sector and to reshuffle the real estate business, to a great extent by attracting
foreign investments coming from the global financial industry, thanks to a
legal framework that was tailor-made for that kind of actors.

Obstructing rights-based legislation: ineffective law enforcement and judiciary
counter-reforms
   To obtain a complete description of the state’s role in the Spanish housing
crisis and in the face of the interests of housing finance, it should be acknowl-
edged that some legislation has been passed in recent years to alleviate the
social suffering entailed by that crisis. This new legislation, however, has been
rarely the outcome of institutional initiatives and arrangements. To the con-
trary, it has taken hold thanks to popular pressure, either as a result of “popular
legislative initiatives” (ILPs) led by social movements, or of activists’ lobby-
ing strategies addressed at legislators and public institutions, coupled with
communication campaigns aimed at attracting public awareness and support.
Two conspicuous examples of such processes taking place in Catalonia will be
briefly described here.
   Our first case study goes back to July 2015, when, after seven years of crisis
that had struck many households in the form of mortgage default and repos-
sessions among other circumstances, a coalition of social movements, with
the PAH among them16, managed to collect more than 140,000 signatures that
allowed them to submit a legislative text to the Catalan Parliament17. That


16. Together with the Observatori dels Drets Econòmics, Socials i Culturals and the Aliança con-
    tra la Pobresa Energètica.
17. The whole process is described at the initiative’s website: https://ilphabitatge.cat/es/


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62                                                          Irene Sabaté Muriel

text intended to cancel mortgage debts for households in hardship, ban evic-
tions of defaulting mortgagors and of tenants in arrears with no alternative
housing, make financial institutions and big landlords responsible for the pro-
vision of affordable rents, temporarily convert vacant housing stocks owned
by funds and banks into public housing, and guarantee the supply of elec-
tricity, water and gas for households unable to pay their bills. In all, the law
project was aimed at forcing powerful economic actors -such as banks, funds,
big landlords and energy companies- to take responsibility for the harms that
the housing and economic crisis was causing to the Catalan population. The
24/2015 Act was passed with the support of most parliamentary groups, except
for the right-wing Popular Party (PP), who would devise a judiciary strategy to
reverse the changes introduced. In 2019, a new Decree (17/2019) was passed
by the Catalan Government to extend the social protections against the hous-
ing crisis already included in the 24/2015 text.
   Let us now turn to our second example of legislative change: in September
2020, the Catalan tenants union Sindicat de Llogateres, with the support of
more than 4,000 civil society organisations and after much discursive effort to
counteract the hegemony of neoliberal dogmas about market self-regulation,
succeeded in having four Catalan parliamentary parties – a majority within
the house – vote for a rent control law. The 11/2020 Act constituted an un-
precedented measure aimed at alleviating the unaffordability of rents amid a
rent bubble and the economic hardship brought about by the Covid-19 health
crisis. Again, this first rent control legislation endangered landlords’ aspira-
tion at unlimited rent extraction and constituted an unprecedented attack at
the strong economic interests at play on the rental market. As in the previous
case, already at the end of the parliamentary voting, the Popular Party an-
nounced that they would appeal to the Constitutional Court against what they
considered as a threat to private property.
   As it can be noted in these two examples, some recent legislation has con-
siderable potential in guaranteeing the right to proper housing, something
that happens invariably at the expense of financial profit. However, in both
cases, governments and authorities (at several administrative levels) have
shown a lack of determination to effectively enforce the law, to punish those
responsible of breaching it, or to provide the budget needed for its imple-
mentation. Besides, as a result of disputes among territories, often involving
electioneering strategies put in place by political parties, such laws have of-
ten been questioned by representatives of the real estate business, both in



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State action and the expansion of finance                                         63

the arena of public debates, and in the grassroots practices of those who rep-
resent their interests. Misleading information about the law’s validity and
entailings is disseminated through a variety of mechanisms, the social media
and the mainstream press among them. We could observe the effects of that
misinformation and defamation strategies, for instance, as Daniel and Inés, a
tenant couple who had lived in their rented dwelling for the last eight years
and who now wished to stay put, were negotiating a new lease with the real es-
tate agent who represented their landlord. According to the new rent control
measures, they were entitled to have their rent frozen. In the conversations
entertained around that event, the agent conceded that, but expressed her
view that the rent freeze they were benefiting from would not last very long,
as “there were serious doubts about its constitutionality”. Also, the lack of
supervision and control by public authorities, and therefore the impunity of
landlords despite the sanctions provided by the law for those breaching it, can
be illustrated by the case of Ariadna and Federico, another tenant household.
During the negotiation of the rent for their new apartment, they had to bear
the hostility of an agent who became infuriated as the tenants-to-be invoked
the law. Then she called them back to announce in a condescending way that
the landlady had agreed to their proposal, despite they had “played with fire”,
implying that, as a result of them mentioning their legal rights, they had been
about to be discarded and replaced by other candidates who would be more
prone to accept illegal lease conditions. These examples reflect no doubt the
pronounced asymmetry between the two parts in a lease agreement, as well
as the reduced reach of rights-based regulations on that kind of contractual
relationship, in the framework of a strong dominance of financial and real es-
tate powers that is not only reflected in hegemonic discourses, but also shapes
the grassroots practices of people acting simultaneously as gatekeepers of the
access to housing, and as guardians of elite’s financial interests.
   But, beyond these micro practices on the rental market, as it has already
been mentioned, the most effective way to block from the root legislative
changes have been the systematic appeals made to the Constitutional Court to
have such laws suspended, either partially or wholly, with several arguments
at hand. That is what happened to the 24/2015 Act, that could not be enforced
for almost three years (2016‑2019) due to an appeal made by the Spanish gov-
ernment in Madrid (the PP being in power at that time), while a sentence was
awaited. The suspension would cease in 2019 after the socio-democrat party
PSOE forced a government change. Afterwards, the 17/2019 Decree that had



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64                                                                    Irene Sabaté Muriel

extended the law was suspended with a formal argument18. In turn, an ap-
peal against the Catalan rent control legislation resulted in a Constitutional
Court sentence invalidating the law in March 2022, after being in force for
18 months. All these events have been triggered by the conservative political
party (PP) that is part of the opposition in Catalonia, and who typically advo-
cates for free market mechanisms on the financial and real estate arenas. For
them, state action should be reduced to the provision of social housing (with-
out relaxing budgetary austerity), while safeguarding private property and
freedom of enterprise as absolute priorities. Their discourse takes advantage
of the high rates of homeownership in Spain, a predominance that guarantees
considerable social support to the prioritization of private property rights in
the Spanish “homeowners society” (López, Rodríguez 2010). A discourse, how-
ever, that conceals the fact that the derogation of housing rights legislation
benefits in the first place financial and corporate actors, and not so much the
small landlords and owner-occupiers from whom such political moves obtain
political legitimacy (Cardona 2022).

Conclusion
   One of the ways in which financialization has been conceptualised (Van der
Zwan 2014) is as the penetration of financial logics in social and everyday life
(Martin 2002; Langley 2008), directly affecting the arena of consumption and
the exercise of rights (Gago, Mezzadra 2015) as well as social reproduction
(Santos et al. 2018). The case of the financialization of housing in Spain is par-
ticularly telling in this sense, as it goes hand in hand with a sustained housing
crisis that has been affecting and disrupting all these aspects for more than a
decade. Despite these experiences have not been exclusive to that country, the
Spanish housing crisis displays certain specificities derived from its semi-pe-
ripherality, the advanced state of housing commodification combined with a
familist housing regime (Alle et al. 2024), the deliberate policies that have
contributed to the ideological and historical construction of the preference
for home ownership (López, Rodríguez 2010), and, as we have shown in this
article, the direct involvement of different state agencies in the promotion of
financial interests and operations, which has encountered vigorous resistanc-
es and counter-initiatives on the part of left-wing housing rights movements,
only partially paralleled by anti-financialization struggles in neighbour coun-

18. According to the Court, the text should have taken the form of a law rather than a decree
    passed by the Catalan government.


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State action and the expansion of finance                                         65

tries (Saaristo, Silva 2023). Unlike other contexts where the state itself has
countered financialization trends (Shen et al. 2023), in the Spanish case this
has seldom happened in the absence of social movements’ initiatives and
street-level pressures.
   An understanding of financialization as financial value extraction – as op-
posed to the extraction of natural resources, energy, knowledge or human
labour – and therefore as a particular manifestation of extractive operations
(Mezzadra, Neilson 2017) highlights the incorporation to financial dynamics
of previously non-financialized economies, such as the domestic economies
of homeowners that borrowed subprime mortgages, or those of tenants who
witnessed the irruption of an investment fund as their new landlord. This con-
firms what Gago and Mezzadra have described as the “continuous expansion
of the financial valorisation frontier through the ‘colonisation’ of social terri-
tories alien to their command” (2015: 45), furthering forms of dispossession
and exploitation “that directly target social cooperation and force subjects to
confront the risks and uncertainty of economic volatility” (Mezzadra, Neilson
2017: 13). Housing, household economies and certain layers of the state that
are usually thought of as independent from profit motives (such as those in
charge of welfare provision or social protection) can be seen as the outsides
that are being incorporated to financial dynamics, although in some cases
this does not happen without resistance (Mikus 2019). But these advances of
finance, and the occasional setbacks it encounters, should not be attributed
solely to impersonal market mechanisms. Rather, the agencies behind them
should be further investigated, and this article has tried to make a contribu-
tion in this sense by exploring the role of the state in this regard.
   Even if hegemonic neoliberal discourses publicly condemn state inter-
vention in the economy, and advocate for deregulation, privatisation and
liberalisation, financialization goes hand in hand with neoliberalization.
As Aalbers (2019) has pointed out, state action is a precondition for hous-
ing financialization, as the state “is no bystander in the financialization of
the economy, firms, households, and of the state itself”, but it “has active-
ly promoted financialization” (2019: 11). In a previous text, Aalbers (2017:
8‑9) noted that new kinds of financial markets have been created and pro-
moted by governments under the influence of the financial capital lobby. The
strategies to do so combined commodification and privatization processes
with deregulation measures. In a similar vein, Lapavitsas (2014) contends
that “neoliberalism is not truly hostile to the state”, but it intends to “take



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66                                                                   Irene Sabaté Muriel

over the state and use it to apply neoliberal policies” that have been crucial
to foster financialization (2014: 7). And, as the cases presented in this article
have shown, the strategy to do so consists on “altering the regulatory and
supervisory framework of finance” (2014: 9)19, not only in the sense of lifting
regulations – of interest rates, of the kinds of activities banks were allowed
to engage in, and of international capital flows –, but also by introducing “a
profusion of systematic state intervention to sustain financialization”, thus
adopting a “regulatory and interventionist attitude” that seems to be at odds
with common-sense assumptions of the nature of neoliberal states (2014: 11).
   In this article, the focus has been put on the role of the Spanish state in
fostering or curbing the financialization of housing, in the context of the cur-
rent housing crisis, and the responses to it. Drawing on the cases of several
legal and policy reforms, and their effects on housing rights and conditions,
we have illustrated how the state – at its several administrative levels – has
oscillated among different attitudes towards financial extraction. These atti-
tudes may determine an inclination to intervene the economy in some sense,
ranging from the blatant promotion of the interests of real-estate and banking
lobbies, to some degree of interference with financial accumulation projects
in the aim of protecting housing rights. This interference, however, has tended
to be timid, probably, as Tsingou (2014) notes, because reforms have been de-
signed by the same “policy community” who is to blame for the crisis, and who
is part of transnational networks (or “clubs”) promoting the interests of the
financial industry, which entails the exclusion of potentially dissident voic-
es and reinforces the hegemony of “conservative and technocratic regulatory
bodies” (Kalaitzake 2015) on which financiers have kept a strong influence.
Similarly to what Trampusch (2019) has shown for the financialization of sov-
ereign debt management, also in the case of the financialization of housing
legislation and policy making has been framed by orthodox economists, and
politicians and civil servants have been lobbied by finance.
   Besides all this, non-interventionist attitudes, that at first sight might
match better neoliberal orthodoxy, are in fact located in a force field where
financial actors depart from a privileged position, which determines that the
alleged impartiality of laissez-faire politics, rather than being innocuous, re-
sults in the perpetuation of pre-existing privileges, and in the legitimation


19. Alongside monetary policies also mentioned by Lapavitsas as another cornerstone of the
    state’s promotion of financialization, but that have not been the object of our inquiry
    here.


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State action and the expansion of finance                                          67

of outcomes favourable to them – and very adverse to the victims of housing
crises – as the natural or unavoidable products of market dynamics. We have
also shown how, in the rare cases where the state has acted to impede or al-
leviate financial extraction in the housing arena and the social harms derived
from it, reforms have arrived late, often as a result of public pressure, and their
fragility has limited them to the status of partial and ephemeral disruptions in
the advance of the frontier of financialization. As a result, such reforms have
failed to reverse the drivers of the housing crisis, its chronification for a signif-
icant part of the population, and its likeable replication in the future.
   Nevertheless, accounts of the collaboration of the state with financial-
ization processes should not be simplistic, as such collaboration, already
identified long ago as a class alliance by Marxist economists (Mattioli 2020: 5)
and more recently by anthropologists (Graeber 2014: 75), does not occur in a
monolithic way, but through a variety of mechanisms, as Kalaitzake (2018) has
shown through his analysis of the relations between the financial sector and
central banks. A complex account of the matter should therefore reflect the
contingency and contradictions of state regulation and oversight of finance
(Aalbers 2009), and even of the direct involvement of the state -understood
not as a monolithic agent but as compounded of multiple layers and distinct
agencies – in the housing-finance nexus (Yeşilbağ 2020). By describing the
complexities of several empirical cases of state (in)action, our aim has been to
illustrate the contradictory and nonlinear way in which this occurs; indeed, in
our examples, “state institutions at different scales and with different respon-
sibilities have often acted in diametrically opposing ways” (Aalbers 2019: 11).
In addition, we have identified as well the importance of lobbies and the dif-
ficulties to counter financialization trends, for “in a financialized political
environment it will be difficult (but not necessarily impossible) to get any-
thing done that runs counter to the expected benefits of the most powerful
group” (Aalbers 2019: 12). The efforts of two Spanish social movements, the
PAH and the Sindicat de Llogateres, emerged in two distinct moments of the
housing crisis, can be understood as attempts at countering the successive
actions of lobbies in the financial and real estate fields. With all this in mind,
legal reforms and housing policies can be interpreted as contributing either
to the advance of finance, to the perpetuation of its internal consistency, or to
the partial resolution of its contradictions giving way to mutations and rein-
ventions in new social and political scenarios.




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68                                                                 Irene Sabaté Muriel

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72                                                                       Irene Sabaté MurIel


  Irene Sabaté MurIel is a Researcher in Social Anthropology and an Associate Pro-
  fessor at the Universitat de Barcelona. Her research interests include moral and
  political economy, reciprocity and provisioning, work and social reproduction,
  housing, debt and credit relations, and financialization. She serves as a Board
  member at the Observatori dels Drets Econòmics, Socials, Culturals i Ambientals
  (ODESCA). She is currently co-PI of a project, funded by the Spanish Ministry of
  Science, entitled “Tensions between the right to housing and private ownership in
  rental relations. A socio-legal approach”, on discrimination in the rental market
  and on squatting practices in Catalonia.
  irenesabate@ub.edu




This work is licensed under the Creative Commons © Irene Sabaté Muriel
State action and the expansion of finance.
2023 | anuac. Vol. 12, n° 2, DIceMbre 2023: 51-72.
