Appropriating rent from greenfield affordable housing: developer practices in Johannesburg

2020 ◽  
Vol 52 (2) ◽  
pp. 337-361
Author(s):  
Siân Butcher

‘Affordable housing’ for Johannesburg’s growing middle class is a developmentalist imperative and potentially lucrative market. However, few greenfield developers have found this market profitable. Fundamental to those who have, is control over land and its development. This paper puts heterodox urban land rent theory to work vis-à-vis the logics and practices of these developers. I illustrate how greenfield affordable housing developers work to (re)produce differential and monopoly rents in this context. Differential rents rely on investing in cheap land produced through the city’s racialised geography, and controlling land’s development through vertical integration, dynamic negotiations with local government and development finance institutions, and steering money and people into developments. Monopoly rents rely on the power of developers to act together as a class to secure land, give the appearance of competition and lobby the state in their interests. This power is built through racialised control over land and long personal connections. It is also consolidated by the state’s own land development bureaucracy and preference for ‘mega’ developments and recognisable developers. Together, these developer strategies to accrue differential and monopoly rents demonstrate their active role in the everyday making of land and housing markets. They also demand extensions of heterodox urban land rent theory: first, a more articulated understanding of how class monopoly power over land is built through race, and second, a more contingent analysis of capital’s relations to other actors and institutions, especially the state.

2019 ◽  
pp. 113-123
Author(s):  
Alina Ivanenko

Hitler occupation of Ukraine became the most difficult challenge for the Ukrainian people as the "new order" leaders’ aim was to eliminate the population of captured territories, to prepare a living space for the "Aryan people" whom Hitler and his ascendants considered the Germans to be. The policy of the Nazi regime on the occupied territories, which were regarded as an object of exploitation, oppression and robbery, led to significant changes in the practice of everyday life of the civilian population. History becomes more anthropological and it encourages the study of everyday life in order to understand holistic picture of historical events. This picture had its own peculiarities in different regions of Ukraine. In the Soviet period the issues of everyday life in occupied areas were considered fragmentarily, with the main focus on the other images - the nationwide struggle against the invaders, the moral and political unity of the Ukrainian people, the leading role of the party in fighting back the occupiers, etc. In fact, modern national scientists had to study the problem of anthropological measurements of occupation from scratch. However, in recent decades in Ukraine there has appeared a lot of historical research, the subject of which is the anthropological defining of occupation. These studies are being considered in the given article. A particular subject of research and this publication as well is certain categories of population: women, minors and intelligentsia. The existence of these categories of people in occupation has certain features that researchers disclose from different, often opposite, points of view. At the present stage various aspects of the Ukrainian peasantry life during the years of Nazi occupation are investigated by O. Potylchak, O. Perekhrest, V. Revehuk, T. Nagayko and others. The works of T. Vronska, K. Kurylyshyn, L. Kovpak, O. Isaikin, M. Herasimov, V. Kononenko, A. Yankovska and others were dedicated to the everyday life issues in the years of the Second World War and in the first post-war decade. The material, household and social spheres in the post-occupation period in different regions of Ukraine were studied by S. Galchenko, M. Dedkov, I. Spudka. However, in most of these works, the strategies of town people’s survival in the liberated territories in 1943-1945 are briefly outlined. Some researchers (T. Zabolotna, T. Nahayko, O. Savitska, V. Yakovenko) emphasize the everyday life of individual cities. I. Vetrov researched the economic robbery of the national economy and the population of Ukraine by invaders. Some aspects of the social policy of occupiers are highlighted in the study of O. Potylchak. M. Shevchenko, V. Hedz conducted a study of "female" narrative sources. Nowadays there are two directions of coverage of children lives during the occupation. The first direction is represented by D. Slobodynsky, who assumes that the state of children during the Nazi occupation of Ukraine was unbearable. H. Holysh and L. Holysh consider that children and teens played a very active role in the struggle against the Nazis. The state of the intelligentsia during the occupation was studied by L. Bidocha, V. Hinda, O. Salata, T. Zabolotna. The researchers point to the reasons of cooperation of this segment of the population with the occupants, which in fact did not differ from the motives of other groups of society. The author comes to the conclusion that the Nazi occupation had a negative impact on the various spheres of life of the society at that time, which led to significant changes in the everyday life of the local population of Central Ukraine. At that period the majority of people tried to fulfill their existential needs, for example to preserve their own lives and protect their loved ones in particular. The author comes to the conclusion that the aspects of people’s life during the Nazi occupation, disclosed by the authors in modern historiography, constitute a far-incomplete picture of Ukrainians’ life during this period. There are issues that require a detailed study and analysis of researchers in order to imagine life and daily realities on the occupied territory and what problems they had to deal with in order to survive in those conditions. There is a considerable spectrum of problems associated with the occupational routine, which requires a detailed study and analysis of researchers and it allows to make a coherent picture of living conditions on the occupied territories of Ukraine.


China Report ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-23
Author(s):  
Yinghong Huang

In this article, land acquisition (LA) in India and China since the 1980s has been theorised as an ‘ideal’ model, namely, compulsory development, which highlights the extremely active role of the state and the compulsory measures it takes for LA in both countries in order to achieve its development goals. In both countries, the state acts as the land use planner, regulation maker in the land administration, as well as a major land developer and most influential player in the land market. At the same time, it extracts a high proportion of the benefits from land development projects, which is realised through compulsory LA despite the numerous flaws in the LA institutions. Compulsory development, as we term it, is a key feature in the political economy of LA in both countries. It provides an ideal model to understand and compare the phenomenon of LA in these two largest developing societies and to develop a systematic analysis of LA, and more broadly, of development in both countries. As the initial product in a larger research project, in this article we focus mainly on the theoretical model of this compulsory development, including its definition, characteristics and variations.


Urban Studies ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 57 (8) ◽  
pp. 1642-1659 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tingting Lu ◽  
Fangzhu Zhang ◽  
Fulong Wu

Housing commodification has led to the development of gated neighbourhoods in China. However, the types of gated neighbourhoods are very different from each other, and include ‘commodity housing’, affordable housing and resettlement housing. They might not be the same as the commonly known ‘gated communities’, which are characterised by both gating and private governance. Using three cases in the city of Wenzhou, we analyse the motivations for development, service provision and property management, and neighbourhood control. In commodity housing, the state is still visible and self-governance is limited, while the real estate developer leads land development and property management. In affordable housing, the state regulates the standards and the prices of services, while the developer is the provider of these services. In resettlement housing, the state uses a state-owned enterprise to relocate households, while the homeowners’ association and the service charges are ineffective. All these cases demonstrate the important and variegated role of the state and provide a more nuanced understanding of these gated neighbourhoods.


Author(s):  
Jon Schubert

This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals the tensions between what people see as the real functioning of society, and their perspectives on how society should work. However, the idea of kinship an oppositional discourse must be complicated through the exploration of the everyday practice of mobilising cunhas (personal connections) for one’s own purposes. Exploring these cunhas — based on intimate knowledge of Luandan family networks — allows us to trace the multiple linkages between state and society, combine in the analysis social strata commonly studied separately, and complicate any overly simplistic notions of nepotism and corruption.


2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (8) ◽  
pp. 3129 ◽  
Author(s):  
Raul Berto ◽  
Giovanni Cechet ◽  
Carlo Antonio Stival ◽  
Paolo Rosato

Social housing constitutes a partial response to the demand for affordable housing. In Europe, there are different forms of social housing, which are distinguishable based on whether they employ a universal or residual approach. The latter is employed by Italian initiatives for social residential construction, the financial instrument of which is the Investment Fund for Housing, a closed-end fund managed by CDP (Cassa Depositi e Prestiti) Investment, which provides public–private partnerships. The main obstacle to the supply of low-cost houses is the high cost of building areas or, in other words, the high urban land rent. The value of building areas is particularly high in urban areas and in widespread settlement areas, for instance, in Northeastern Italy. The main objective of this paper is to identify the trade-off between urban land rent and housing affordability in a social housing intervention in Pordenone (Northeastern Italy). Four different scenarios are developed, the variables of which are: Cost of the area (urban rent), cost of construction works (quality of the buildings), and household income distribution. The results show that achieving the economic and social objectives of a social housing investment simultaneously is not possible in any of the scenarios evaluated. To allow the social groups most in need to access affordable housing would require a reduction of approximately 30% of the estimated cost of a building area.


Urban Studies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (8) ◽  
pp. 1821-1835 ◽  
Author(s):  
Manuel B Aalbers ◽  
Anne Haila

Manuel B Aalbers and Anne Haila discuss their respective recent books, The Financialization of Housing: A Political Economy Approach (Aalbers, 2016) and Urban Land Rent: Singapore as a Property State (Haila, 2016). Their debate focuses on issues such as comparative research, a political economy approach to urban studies, and topics of interest such as land rent, financialisation, housing, property states, path dependency, regulation and the role of the state.


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