Commodification of housing
Commodification of housing refers to the transformation of basic shelter, rental housing, and homeownership into an investment vehicle or speculative asset as opposed to a public good, human need, or the right to housing.
Financialization of housing
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Instead of outright purchasing in cash, homes and housing units are often purchased with 15 or 30-year mortgage loanss. These can be securitized and sold on a secondary mortgage market as packages of individual mortgages.{{Cite web |first=James |last=Royal |date=2025-04-03 |title=What Is The Secondary Mortgage Market? |url=https://www.bankrate.com/mortgages/secondary-mortgage-market/ |access-date=2025-06-02 |website=Bankrate |language=en-US}} The secondary mortgage market is considered to be the primary cause of the 2008 financial crisis as lenders made risky loans to subprime borrowers who defaulted on their mortgage payments.{{Cite book |last=Williams |first=Mark |url=https://books.google.com/books?id=HSkjB_PGp98C |title=Uncontrolled Risk |date=2010 |publisher=McGraw-Hill Education |isbn=978-0-07-163829-6}}
Globalization has led to foreign nationals buying land and housing in many countries, including non-European-Union nationals buying 27,000 properties in Spain in 2023{{Cite web |last=Basteiro |first=Daniel |title=Spain Pushes Ahead With Plan to Tax Non-EU Home Buyers 100% |url=https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/spain-pushes-ahead-with-plan-to-tax-non-eu-home-buyers-100/ar-AA1FkqEw?ocid=BingNewsVerp |website=Bloomberg}} and Chinese companies (both acquisitions and companies originating in China) buying hundreds of acres of US agricultural land.{{Cite web |date=2023-08-25 |title=Is China really buying up U.S. farmland? Here’s what we found |url=https://www.nbcnews.com/news/investigations/how-much-us-farmland-china-own-rcna99274 |access-date=2025-06-02 |website=NBC News |language=en}} Some countries have bans on foreign nationals purchasing land but not real estate.{{Cite web |last=Phillips |first=Morgan |title=New law would stop foreign adversaries from 'buying up our country' while Americans can't afford homes |url=https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/realestate/new-law-would-stop-foreign-adversaries-from-buying-up-our-country-while-americans-cant-afford-homes/ar-AA1FhH2l?ocid=BingNewsVerp |website=Fox News}}
= Rent =
The rental market has also been described as a form of commodification of housing. Margaret Jane Radin wrote that the framing of tenants' personhood as a "specific asset" invested in an apartment was a form of "universal commodification" in which, "all things and attributes that people value in themselves, in other people, and in their physical and social environment are conceived of and reasoned about as if they were objects of trade."{{Cite journal |last=Radin |first=Margaret |date=Winter 1988 |title=Rent Control and Incomplete Commodification: A Rejoinder |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/2265288?searchText=Rent+Control+and+Incomplete+Commodification+A+Rejoinder&searchUri=%2Faction%2FdoBasicSearch%3FQuery%3DRent%2BControl%2Band%2BIncomplete%2BCommodification%253A%2BA%2BRejoinder%26so%3Drel&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&refreqid=fastly-default%3A2ab36f1de6d1f9d713c36939840a0244&seq=1 |journal=Philosophy & Public Affairs |volume=17 |issue=1 |pages=80-81}}
Some areas have a significant number of tourists who rent housing units during their stays, contributing to gentrification. Landlords often can make a larger profit with a short-term rental than a full-time tenant. This shift from a home to hotel-adjacent model has been tied to the commodification of housing.{{Cite journal |last=Good |first=Robert |title=Tourist Commodification of Residential Vernacular Architecture in Venice: Livability and Conservation in an Historic District |journal=Traditional Dwellings and Settlements Review |volume=17 |issue=3 |pages=69–73|JSTOR=}}
Housing as a human right
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Some housing advocates have called for a "decommodification" of housing in response to the housing crisis.{{Cite web |title=Expanding the Affordable Housing Supply |url=https://endhomelessness.org/expanding-the-affordable-housing-supply/ |access-date=2025-06-02 |website=National Alliance to End Homelessness |language=en-US}} Some groups have tied rental housing vouchers to commodification{{Cite journal |last=Fenton |first=Alex |last2=Lupton |first2=Ruth |last3=Arrundale |first3=Rachel |last4=Tunstall |first4=Rebecca |date=2013-12-01 |title=Public housing, commodification, and rights to the city: The US and England compared |url=https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0264275112001813 |journal=Cities |volume=35 |pages=373–378 |doi=10.1016/j.cities.2012.10.004 |issn=0264-2751}} and have advocated for an expansion in public housing instead.{{Cite web |date=2024-08-21 |title=Negating Objections to Housing Decommodification through Strategic Tenant Movement Support for Comprehensive Economic and Social Rights (May–August 2024 P & R Journal) –PRRAC – Connecting Research to Advocacy |url=https://www.prrac.org/negating-objections-to-housing-decommodification-through-strategic-tenant-movement-support-for-comprehensive-economic-and-social-rights-april-august-2024-p-r-journal/ |access-date=2025-06-02 |language=en-US}}