The post-politicization of rental housing financialization: News media, elite storytelling and Australia's new build to rent market

• Published in: Political geography 2022-10, Vol.98, p.102654, Article 102654
• Main Author: Nethercote, Megan
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Subjects: Australia; Build to rent; Financialization of rental housing; Media; Multifamily housing; Politics; Rancière
• ISSN: 0962-6298; 1873-5096
• DOI: 10.1016/j.polgeo.2022.102654

This article explores how a technocratic consensus was constructed around the emergence of build to rent housing (BTR) in Australia which helped depoliticize this new wave of rental housing financialization. It argues that (digital) news media—an age-old medium for elite storytelling—operates as a key discursive technology of financialized capitalism through which this consensus is ‘policed’. Specifically, reporting scripted the rise of institutional investors into Australia's rental sector in ways that disavowed properly political disagreements vis-à-vis BTR. Its analysis is informed by post-political theories, which converge around a shared concern with how political disagreement is disavowed and replaced with technocratic governance, consensus and a privileging of certain orders of subjects. Post-foundational thinker Jacques Rancière's thinking on aesthetic regimes assists in exploring this consensus and its limits by foregrounding how regimes of representation delineate what can be said and argued (and different agents' authority to speak). This Rancièrian aesthetic analysis identifies that news media restricts the coordinates of public debate through: (1) technical storylines that guide public audiences to understand and evaluate BTR foremost as an asset class whose expansion is a matter of national economic interest; (2) strategic silences that obscure associated complexities and tensions surrounding BTR's dual function as an asset class and as housing; and (3) endorsement of BTR industry actors as ‘experts’ with authority to make BTR thinkable in this way. The aesthetic regime that circumscribes Australian public BTR debate represents a post-political strategy that assists in non-trivial ways to re-inscribe the financializing project in Australia, albeit with limits.