 Okay, hi Suzanne, I'm Tate Porewal and I'm going to be introducing you. I can see you there, all right. So welcome everyone, we've got probably an audience of about maybe 50 people here. And yeah, so I'd like to welcome you virtually to SOAS to the Development Study Seminar. We have more people coming in as well. And so today's Professor Suzanne Soderbergh from Queens University in Canada is going to be presenting and in line with the very real climate emergency that is all around us. We are having her present via Skype and actually the sound is actually quite good so I don't think that we're losing anything really here either. So Professor Soderbergh is a professor in the Department of Global Development Studies at Queens University in Kingston in Ontario. Her research interests are broad and varied and she's published quite extensively in the areas of finance, global governance, corporate power, debt, urban poverty and state theory. She's investigated these themes across many geographical spaces so Germany she's mentioned already coming across the global north and global south including Latin America, Southeast Asia, North America and Europe. And amongst her publications she's authored a number of books including two special issue editorships and several books including Corporate Power in Contemporary Capitalism in 2010 and Debt, Fair States and the Poverty Industry in 2014. And the research which I assume has funded what's gone into the publication of this book that she's going to be presenting on has been funded by the Social Science Humanities Research Council of Canada. So I'll welcome you Suzanne and if there's any technical issues we'll step in and let you know otherwise. I think we're all ready to go. Thank you so much and thank you Faisy for inviting me and thank you all of you for coming out. This is very surreal as you're my virgin audience skyping for a talk but I think that's the way of the future in our climate emergency. I should note that you can't really see but in the background we have a snowstorm and I just clicked the London Weather Network and I realized you have a balmy 11 degrees celsius there so maybe I should have just skipped the climate emergency in here in person. But that said, they're all very serious. I am talking to you today about some insights from my current book project Urban Displacements as you can see off in the book title. The book is still in progress but I am wrapping it up. I see the end of the tunnel and I hope to discuss some insights that you have in terms of the rental prices in London with me afterwards. So that would be very exciting to look at this. The project spanned between 2015 to 2019 in terms of extensive field work in Berlin, Dublin and Vienna. Interviews with all types of stakeholders if you will as well as primary documentation. So without further ado let me just tell you what I'm up to today. I want to start the lecture just talking about some analytical brains and definitional clarity around what I'm up to with displacements and then I'll turn to the three cases, Dublin, Vienna and Berlin and then I'll end with some reflections. Largely to give away the plot line. Maybe coming to grips with this concept of housing crisis that we keep hearing and trying to maybe understand the truth that itself needs to be deconstructed. That said, let's turn to the framing. I have a picture here which is representative of the housing situation of displacements that are occurring throughout Europe, North America, all over the world basically. And here we have a family living in a hotel in Dublin from the age of the parents not to be ages. I don't age as a daughter, these are not parents, these are I think grandparents and they're looking after their grandchildren largely because their children are working and the daycare facilities fees in Dublin are one of the highest in the world. I should note that the homeless, at least so-called emergency shelters and private spaces emergency shelters in hotels in Dublin as in Germany as well don't remain in these hotels or hospitals or pensions for a night. They stay there for about two years on average, living in one room with several children which is a horrific, horrific situation. So why am I looking at rental housing? Rental housing has been given a sort of short-trip the last decade or so largely because home ownership and it still is quite prevalent in many countries especially our Anglo-American countries but the rental tenure is expanding and it's expanding quickly largely because most people can't afford homes and in Toronto I know that we have somewhere between 50% now rental tenure it's growing, the numbers I checked in London right now are 40, 60, 60 in terms of home ownership but according to the UK government this sort of home ownership rental ratio is going to slip in a few years so that the dominant rental tenure in London will be rental In Dublin one of the case studies we've seen since 2004 rental switch from 2004 to now up to 40% rental and this is significant given that in Dublin the primary tenure was home ownership for quite some time and just to say that when I'm talking about rental housing I am talking about private rental sector and social slash public housing but what I'm really interested in rental housing is that it represents places in which the urban pool resides primarily predominantly in Europe and in North America and in which they are experiencing increasing displacement and growing numbers and here's just a snapshot if you feel with various statistics and I should say we have to take these with a grain of salt because in many of these places we don't have official collection of homelessness and certainly there is no official homeless statistic I know that it's collected in the UK it's collected in Ireland but not so much elsewhere in Europe but the other thing is statistics that are collected are based on raw sleep so visible homelessness where we know that the majority of homelessness occurs couch surfing, people living in cars, people living in hotels etc. so the invisible homelessness if you will is more predominant than the physical homelessness that you see on the street the raw sleepers but that said, look at even the numbers here we look at Ireland 145% since 2017 I mean the numbers here again are suspect we have 8,854 people living in emergency accommodations but today we know as of last year there are over 10,000 people right now in Europe in those type of dwellings in Germany there's a rise of 150% right now they're talking about numbers around 1,000,000 and half of those and we'll get to that later in the talk are refugees working to statistics and even Austria here which is known and we'll talk about this as well as the housing model of Europe as the world with its huge amount of social housing is registering 32% increase in raw sleepers if you will since 2016 and of course England there you go, you win the first place there and 69% increase in homelessness it's a huge problem even if these numbers need to be taken with a grain of salt it's big, explain the situation there's about three of them so let's look at them and share one is waiting for an equilibrium and here it's sort of a play of dominant debates in economics between supply and demand and if the states are involved in this economic framing if the states give the private sector builders, investors, etc more incentives such as low interest rate loans public land with long leases etc, tax rebates they will be incentivized then to build because they're the rational efficient actors to build sufficient amounts of houses to meet housing supply and we've been waiting for this equilibrium since the 1990s it has not occurred but that is one of the dominant and prevailing policy frameworks if you will that is producing in a way in it to a certain degree and also governing the sort of displacement that we're seeing the second key narrative which I have a lot of empathy for is one that is a if you will a pushback to the dominant economic framing of supply and demand which is coming more from the UN public talk people like Leilani Farah who is the UN special repertoire for housing rights uses this commodity human right duality and the argument goes as follows we have all these displacements because housing has become a financial asset that is speculated etc by these financial vultures that are coming in and raising the prices of rent too high that people can't afford and in order to rectify this we have to churn housing into a human right in order to protect it's very very important there's two problems with this one is for me at least my perspective is that housing has also been a commodity housing is always from a Marxian perspective housing under capitalism has always been a commodity it's always like labor power money has used value and exchange value or what I argue in the book houses are places of survival but also like the accumulation that has always been a piece historically there's always been displacements there's always been a tension politically around balancing that tension of places of survival and types of accumulation the other side of the argument that housing should be a human right very empathetic to this then however since 1966 we've had that sort of protection under the UN human rights of declaration and in fact many countries such as Mexico Germany have embraced housing as a human right in their constitution but we're still in this question is what the third set of debates scholarly are the financialization of rental housing and here we have some excellent contributions of very rigorous rich and pure one of the key leaders of these debates leading scholars is Manuel Albers who's discussed financialization as the dominant sort of financial strategy and technology and discourse that's used by states by by companies and by households themselves through the financialization process it's just sort of working also on human housing as a commodity argument we have these increasingly high rates that we cannot work and you know like all these explanations there's a critical truth my sort of beef with the financialization debates is not so much your argument put forth as I have to give a sort of snapshot but what they don't look at and there's a tendency in financialization and granted it's a very large it's a very, there's a lot of definitions about financialization but their main sort of blind spots are that they don't, they tend to put this more on consumption and exchange as opposed to looking at capitalism holistically so yes consumption and exchange but also production of goods and services right we've been in a financialized world but we're rare in clothes we're working on computers we're talking through computers that have been produced by human labor right and as human labor these low wage people so the most part are that are being displayed now we are trying to understand why and how they're being displayed so there's a sort of connection to the production of goods and services again service sector being huge in our world right now and yes there may be some high field, high wage workers involved in the service sectors but the majority of the service sector workers are stuck with inward poverty right low wage contracts, voluntary far time long term unemployment we know all of this right but in the discussion of financialization of rental housing labor power and the people you know people that are living in these rental units are kind of not popular and if we are to discuss in ways of being predators and renters again realm of exchange as opposed to looking at wider class structure of capitalist and labor power they don't theorize the power of money and they don't theorize the state very well and I think that these are really really important points of neglect that need to be brought into really understand the food causes and the reproduction of displacement so how do I correct this I have many chapters in the book where I went through this but since I only have a few minutes with you today I thought I would start with a picture maybe because a picture tells a thousand words doesn't it and in this case in 2017 it tells a story of 27 million patterns of stories and this one starts with Burberry basically burning a amount of commodity because it was in sense they could sell on the market right and this exit for surplus I think it's really important it's not new people talk about surplus but she marks this all the time but I think it's important to pull out to start understanding how the displacement is from a different sort of angle so instead of beginning with financial creation I begin with surplus and I try to think about surplus and it's connection to scarcity so you know you have surplus carbon that's why I am giving this conversation through we have surplus money right and the book was partly created partly created money in the form of credit backed by corporations not by the state until all their bets fall to the wayside and then we have our public money coming into back with love but you know like 600 trillion derivatives I'll take contracts and drift this surplus money at the same time we have surplus people we have those low wage low skilled workers in the sector that I'm talking about those are low wage those are surplus people and what's the terminology relative surplus population the underemployed and unemployed those are the people that are inhabiting being expelled from these rental units if you so I would suggest an alternative framing where we look at displacements explicitly and explicitly tied historically to the dynamics of capitalism and by capitalism I want to draw out three surpluses one is the surplus money right and how the surplus money circulates around not just by buying building goodness selling them and charging you know higher rent but also what happens inside the building in terms of tenants becoming more indebted through credit that's available to them right and the scarcity of low wages that are topped up by then other types of money which I'll talk about in a second between the state I think it draws our eyes to also surplus populations which are important right they're not just workers they're also our low wage tenants it's a connection between production exchange work to a theorization of displacement and social surplus social surplus is just a fancy word that marks the studios are surplus products another how David Harvey uses to designate money that the state appropriates for capitalists and then redistributes right in other words taxes for example right but then social surplus becomes interesting over the last several decades because the state is distributing spursing most of this money to you the wealthy right as Harvey and others have argued and I think by looking at how this way through these services will have more tangible sort of analytical and empirical sort of handful to look at the politics the social aspects and the economic aspect of this which I think I would say in the face so a visual of surplus if you will to bring us to London I don't know right now but it could also be London there's 30,000 homes right now that are empty in government 30,000 homes since the financial crisis this is a picture again it's not something that is out of the ordinary become completely normalized these are children that whose mother largely single parents right could not find place in emergency shelters in hostels and hotels and were forced to go public spaces and this is police station and they slept here for example running in the local newspaper for a week but again this is not something that's out of the ordinary right it's become normal which is part of the problem yes it is okay so let me tell you about the framework I look at displacements and there's a few different dimensions of the displacement one is a removal from place of security and stability and this is both a physical displacement like the children sleeping in the police station or the people living in the hotel but it's also an emotional and psychological displacement right when your rent increases and you have so much insecurity that you have to cut down on cost of transportation cost etc right so displacements are visible and invisible when I talked about homelessness we have the visible rough sleeper but the vast majority of homeless are invisible right their cuffs they're living in crowded spaces with families they're living in cars or insecure spaces of violence right invisible also relates to eviction right we have formal evictions which there's been some a lot of research on Desmond Matthews's book for example but he looks at normal evictions the vast majority of evictions are according to the experts in the field are invisible so these are informal eviction notices right that the state and the landlord put on the door of the tenant let's say you know go block very illegal these language and people leave right they displace themselves voluntarily out of fear, out of ignorance etc we know that displacement is a cycle right so you have over indebtedness right largely because you don't have enough wages you don't earn wages right over indebtedness that leads to evictions that leads to mental homelessness and we see the cycle of over and over again in these three urban spaces and we also know that displacement has racial, class, and gender dimensions right so these circles these titles and this was class and gender characteristics in terms of a definition of displacement is the following displacements is the outcome of class based facilitation and normalization of urban poverty and social marginalization on the one side and capital accumulation on the other side so one of the tensions I'm looking at in the book is underpinning this is what I call societal reproduction the reproduction of capital and labor are capitalist society right on one side and there you can have household reproduction etc societal reproduction sort of macro reproduction and credit accumulation if you know the global financial capital with the more surplus access that they like to refer to on the other those are the tectonic plates upon which displacement move so where do I look in terms of displacement I look at three cases the method Dublin or why Dublin Dublin is a foster child of liberal development in Europe and have one of the fastest growth rates before the crisis in 2007-2008 and has now registered some of the highest growth rate in Europe not the world to be it also has one of the highest now rental rates in Europe to date Vienna is chosen because it is the housing model of the world do we constantly hear this there is these in social social housing where about 60% of the population reside and both Vienna and the next case also have 85% rent to tenure which is interesting historical cap 85% until tenure well I look at Berlin because it's the economic powerhouse stronghold of the European Union but it's not a comparative study compared to studies unsurprisingly will show you differences I'm more interested in the similarities and how that similarity reveals about how we understand displacement in contemporary capitalism so in other words as the project started with rental housing and displacement I still realized that the project was more about trying to understand capitalism to the lens of displacement and to understand displacement I had to not just look and I can't talk about it today but also the European level macro framing of wage inflation competitive wage inflation prioritization of economic policy and social policies and even though it doesn't have a competency over housing that's very very important in understanding the national and group levels of intervention so let's start with Dublin we know that the Celtic Tiger from 1995 to 2007 created a lot of wealth we know now in hindsight that much of that wealth was created through credit-led accumulation of property speculation for some this is a lovely quote one of the housing activists in one of the public housing very few public housing units in Dublin sort of described the Celtic Tiger years to me we can see no Celtic Tiger created the poor segments the surplus population at that time of Dublin their conditions were very much so characterized by long-term unemployment involuntary part-time temporary and contract work and much of this was built within and this type of work rose by 165% during the same time as the Celtic Tiger so here we go back to that very very image of the surplus capitalism and you know the surplus capital alongside surplus work during that time we say people started really high on debt and in Dublin an interesting phenomenon was their version of paid day lending are called doorstep lenders and interesting there are no paid day lenders that I could find in Dublin or in Ireland but I found these doorstep lenders and these doorstep lenders are like your paid day lenders they knock on your door like selling in old-school churns American dinners and they target especially low mothers and Irish travelers who are victims of this part of that low wage workforce emerging as Celtic Tiger but even before that the Dublin City Council was aggressively privatizing social housing for the mid-1990s onwards and here I want to point to the mid-1990s a lot of times we talk about housing crisis post austerity in the last couple of years which is tough but we see it's visible fruits in the mid-1990s throughout all three cases so in this sort of post-crisis phase 2008-2018 under the ambit of austerity Irish state continues to cut social housing again by 70% and by 2008-2018 not surprisingly weightless for social housing increased rapidly with up to 50,000 people designed in Dublin and for years the people that are living in the hotels so many of the weightless are dependent households with children most of which almost two-thirds of which are headed by women and who experience evictions due to rental arrears so that brings us back then again to over indebtedness in that cycle of over indebtedness evictions and hopelessness so how is the city responding? they responded by essentially because they basically act most of the social housing their social housing the fact though is in the private rental sector and yes this has been worthwhile so Dublin City Council before 2017 I'll talk about what happens afterwards later, subsidizes landlords by paying them directly for rent so one person moves from the weightless into the private rental sector the displaced Dublin City Council comes to check every month for these private landlords so essentially the craziness of it all the Dublin City Council rebuilds this family as I mentioned on weightless in the same expensive and increasingly costly private rental tenure from which they were exposed right? and another housing activist in Dublin told me you know it's great so you have poor people in new houses then what? I mean you don't have the generation of income that you're looking at very very low social welfare protection etc because the social surplus is going towards the the wealthy for example right? and that's also not discussed instead of this exchange and consumption in discussion of rental housing so in 1918 Dublin City Council spent 118 million euros on shadow housing and shadow housing is essentially shelters such as hotels and hospitals they're not building public housing ok? they are not subsidized they're coming up with different types of ways of creating low income housing instead they're subsidizing private spaces temporary private spaces in the city shelter or as one shows that called I think rightfully so shadow housing to create this to deal with the disequilibrium we now have lots of housing which is to look at let's look at the city of Vienna move to the continent now maybe Vienna will give us some kind of what's going on so we know it's the most livable city due to its housing but also due to its very generous cultural funding state cultural funding with racial funding health model except it is a wonderful city to live in this apparently is brooded and they use this a lot they gave the Vienna City Council that their generous welfare system is still very much so taught and informed by its socialist days of red Vienna and it's commitment to social housing now I should just say a prelude that during red Vienna the social housing were not available to migrant workers they were excluded from social housing and very poor over-skilled workers Austrian were not allowed to access these social housing units even men and they had religious change but before I get to that part of the story let me just talk about two main cons of social housing in which 50% of the people in Vienna were excluded so the first component are 220,000 council flats that are owned by the city of Vienna and this accounts for about 25% taxes though these are beautiful buildings that are kept in a very very maintained very well maintained places of survival and the second are limited profit housing association and these are situations where you have to pay a down payment they're sort of cooperatives but you have to bring a happy down payment into play in order to be part of this housing cooperative and both of these social housing really offer low rent so for example I think in 2018 if you were living in Vienna you would pay something like I don't know 420 euro per month for your council flat and the limited housing association you would pay something like 420 euro 470 euro very cheap in comparison but for some there's exclusion so non-native Austrians if you want in the discussion period we can talk about what non-native German and non-native Austrians mean but non-native Austrians right now refer to EU citizens so mainly those who used to grew up made Serbia migrants, Turkey that which were invited in 1960s to the guest worker program were excluded from council housing until 2006 and this includes native Austrians are not allowed or excluded from generally from council housing and by prison come gap or a kitty come floor for the council housing and the housing associations and that is about 40,000 euro a year which puts the earners that are living the tenants that are living in these social housing the top 20% income scale in Vienna right so not only I'm gracially discriminated until 2006 but also in terms of costs in terms of income there's a hefty down payment requirement for housing associations that I mentioned which in itself the solution for the poor so Austrians entry into the European Union in 1995 coincided also with the restructuring of its rental housing right so the competition law was brought up by those that very much so want to see the destruction of social housing especially in Vienna and the liberalization of private rental housing and in a way they got what they wanted and also there were segments in the Vienna council that were very much so in favor of this liberalization as well in 1996 there was a moratorium on the construction of any new council flat so those 220,000 there were only 220,000 there hasn't been one council flat added to that since 1996 and what we have then where the limited profit housing associations are the only sort of segment social housing in Vienna that can expand and if you recall you need about 40,000 year income in order to maintain to be invited in or to be pruned to down payment to live in these housing associations so the other option then for people that can't afford the council flats or are on this huge waiting list are not allowed in these associations are the private rental sectors and that's where the majority of the low income households reside but at the same time since 1996 the Austrian government has been able to play around with I think more flexible private rental prices which means moving northwards so what are the profiles of this impeachment in Vienna migrants are three times more likely to be employed with native Austrians but migrants on the other hand same as in Germany those with a migrant background account for 44% of the total of Vienna's population and in fact in 2017 the third most popular name in Vienna was Mohammed which shows you a shifting demographic of what's going on in terms of Vienna single mothers and low skilled native Austrians are not and they're also vulnerable to displacement so in much of the literature they say that people the Scottish housing experts say that people that are entering the housing market after 1996 after the movement between council houses are now locked out of that type of lovely Vienna housing model and the number of people seeking housing services has increased over the new millennium as well and this also includes many of the people here the migrants, single mothers low skilled native Austrians etc however the majority of debtors are migrants and the state led debt counseling services which there's more present in each of the three urban centers that I researched in we're saying that whatever migrants arrive in Vienna and this is a long-term official that I spoke to since when ever people migrants arrive in Vienna it takes seven years until they end up in his office so he was saying the refugees that entered Vienna in 2015 by 2022 expect serious off-down people from Iraq to be sitting in his office as well and this is because what is just too high right in our surplus capital okay study then the best for last so Berlin is the powerhouse Germany but it's also known as the homeless capital it's also registered some of the highest overdebtedness rate in Germany and in Berlin in the 1990s as you can imagine it was going through a lot of financial turbulence it was dealing with the double family of high debt burdens due to reunification and it was dealing with like many cities the diffusion of housing from federal to the urban scale but Berlin was interesting in another way in 2001 it was where the largest banking crisis post-war Germany occurred and this building here is the building of the then Berlin BGP which was a large savings loan institution the Roman government owned 56% shares in this institution and used those revenues to find a lot of infrastructure projects that were needed for reunification and financial and specifically real estate deals with this BGP institution in 2001 the federal government the Berlin government at that point we will not bail you out and Berlin was now settled with this huge debt which is social and I have a quote here from Deschbegel which is a weekly magazine in Germany at that point in 2001 Deschbegel said and I quote this socialization of banking debt based on real estate speculation would cause social conflicts on an undrafted scale and they were correct in order to finance its debt Berlin sold 13 of its 19 municipal housing companies which basically provided social housing for Berliners the remaining six were then subject to an azerial logic the economic efficiency all this sort of rationalization what universities are going to do right now and essentially meant that they would then move away from keeping rental costs low to then moving from a heap of rent maximization there were several instances where these municipal housing companies over the last several years have registered higher rent rates in the private rental sector this alongside at the same time rising unemployment and underemployment in Berlin caused a lot of splacements and the austerity I mean 2001 Berlin has austerity in 2001 it began in 2008 so 2001 there were eight recent rental pigments coupled with precarious labor market which resulted in displacement high levels of over indebtedness in the form of rental arrears but also a key debt as well amongst other people results in evictions and hopelessness racialized migrant the Roma, Turks and Serbians both men and women are overrepresented in these cycles of displacement more than their native German capital parts and this is especially true of stigmatized boroughs such as Neukürn but also now Mütte where displacement is more widespread than other districts and in fact Neukürn a special stigmatization that the former finance minister which we probably all know from the last round of austerity referred to this borough as the slums of Berlin and this borough especially in Neukürn I should say are compared to 43% migrants that means people with migrant backgrounds and both Neukürn and Berlin 53.5% of children growing up in these boroughs are living in households that are dependent on social assistance and in fact the heart for social assistance for unemployment in Germany many of the people that are reliant on this are suffering from human poverty they're not unemployed they're in hope and just to give you a sort of concrete number of what 43.5% mean if you're living on a heart score in which single mother that means that they basically can allocate 4 euro per child per day for food that's not a lot of money this is one of the richest countries in the world remember that bank the BGV well the BGV now become the office for refugees and I just tell you in an interview with this new formed refugee office in 2017 and I thought the building looked familiar and it did it was the BGV they refurbished it and are now dealing with trying to manage displacements amongst refugees they've since moved but at that point they were in that building in 2016 it was the backdrop of all this displacement that I was talking about in 2015 55.1 the german mentality there precision and one refugee tapering off to 16.289 2016 which is still the largest number of euro received the largest amount of refugees than any other city in Europe these refugees have to confront internal displacements already occurring and have been occurring for various developed countries in terms of housing for these refugees there's three types of wealth available there's emergency shock there's community accommodation and there's rental housing now don't need to talk low chances of refugees accessing either social housing and the municipal housing company zero vacancy or the private rental sector whose prices are going through the roof but let's look at what they do now they have emergency shock these were I think all over the papers at news media in 2015 and we can see that german had no extra space or unwillingness to put houses they were surplus houses but they were placed in benedians and air container et cetera these type of cubicles and it was supposed to be for a short period of time but you know even to this day there are several versions of shelters still in operation in Berlin because there's not enough place to be situated to place these these emergency shelters were largely run by for-profit agencies NGOs and the digital news pictures received from a grassroots organization of bed bugs there were reports of violence against women and children it was just an awful awful place to be every time you entered one of the shelters you had to go through security screening showing passports and all kinds of identification the curfews that were limited from the type foods that were available it was just not a great place they had to be sealed now I should say even though they were for-profit many of them the german state subsidized these so the social surplus people in the state are subsidizing these emergency shelters now an advice of McKinsey and Company which the Berlin government paid a whackload of money to to help them with the refugee and the housing crisis they came up with this plan to create communal shelters and so on now they gave up on personal housing themselves knowing that that's not going to be an option so one of the options are these communal shelters and you use a picture of one and these are essentially like a two revenue so you have several families or individuals sharing communal kitchen, black spaces and living spaces so there's no there's not flat numbers of communal and they're not in any way appropriate for medium long term survival it's just not in these type of communal shelters and there have been reports of you know and they're very much so policed so you have to abide by the rules that are set in these shelters in terms of noise court right and you have to there's time curfews there's been reports of especially young refugee men that have been thrown out of these community shelters because they came too late for example right so they're very the other way can I just ask you to wind up in the next two, three minutes okay so temple home container homes is another another solution to the housing crisis the refugee housing crisis and here's a picture that I because no one was able to take them of temple homes 38 degrees Celsius last month there's no air conditioning no ventilation and yet here we have these homes all over the room okay I am going to wrap up very quickly against the reflection so I don't like to use the term refugee crisis we don't have a refugee crisis we have a housing crisis my reflections of all of this is to say let's decent housing prices the housing crisis how it's been since the 1990s it's been around for a long long time I mean you have a good life crisis that lasts shorter than this crises are not just ruptures and emergencies there's also new order rationality and capitalism which needs to be theorized there's loads of governance that I think we don't really capture with neoliberalism right there's discipline there's discipline in disappearing people and structural lives that underpin it all in the face of struggle there is all kinds of all kinds of deep politicization occurring and here's the most obvious housing crisis is completely normal every country in Europe has equivalent issues in terms of affordable housing in terms of affordability and in terms of housing and again they take this for policies that people will bring up supply and demand apolitical, apistorical framing and completely removes all kinds of questions of power and I just want to say I have examples from various cities in terms of displacements that disappear in Dublin they created their solutions you write temple homes, there's communal dwellings in Germany their solution is again not building public housing, social housing but building family hubs they have since 2017 but you're basically poor you have primarily single mothers and their children living there with social welfare case workers around the clock displaying them into becoming the deserving working poor they changed their type of women's assistance program to the housing assistance program 2017 in which the people on the wing were responsible individualization responsible to go and find their own rent rental accommodation private rental sector and apply to the Dublin City Council for rent and pay their landlord that rent the rents are 36% higher in Dublin than they were during the apex period of the Celtic Tiger and the type of rent the amount given by the Dublin City Council to these people is not sufficient and there's all kinds of people who talk about Berlin as well and all these erasers don't look at power politics with incalculism and so my last slide will be to suggest that we start disrupting by identifying and problem-touching the structural violence of the pinning displacement which is including the role of the state they're in features of displacement and we make visible the disappearances and re-politicize and re-politicize thank you thank you very much excellent, just one minute over our time that's very good, excellent I'm going to just get we can see you but you can't see us I can't see you now I just can't see you I don't want to touch anything so what I'm going to do we have the roving mics around that will pick up voice that's excellent would anyone like to ask a question or make a comment on anything I'm also interested in comments of your experiences in London in other parts of the UK so okay, we've got one right here Paul Hudson, thank you very much indeed for your talk the two aspects of it I was interested in, I'll just deal with the first aspect and perhaps after somebody else has asked a question sorry, can you hear me now I can hear you perfectly okay, thanks everybody else okay right referring to the homelessness in Germany I was a little bit surprised about that of course, when I worked in Germany that was in the early 1990s in the first few years of this century every town or region actually had what they call a living allowance for example Berlin and Munchen in fact they would be quite equivalent to the London allowance whereas in somewhere like the Hermeshaven which is in the middle of nowhere in fact it's near the North Sea in fact that also had a living allowance which might surprise me so has that actually disappeared before a lot of the publicly owned housing in fact was actually sold off to to, would that be the main cause in fact of the homelessness or not should we take another one or two while we're going round going round sorry, I just, usually there were two aspects so there was a homelessness in Germany around the 1990s but what was the second aspect sorry, I didn't yes, the other thing I wanted to ask you I don't know what has actually happened here in this country and I don't know whether it's a similar phenomenon but since Mrs. Thatcher who used to be the prime minister of this country whatever it was about 40 years ago she started selling off council houses now two years ago I heard that nearly 80% of all the social housing that had been sold off in Britain since Mrs. Thatcher's time 80% of that housing is now in the hands of just four property companies so you've got a cartel operating but I don't know when you have a similar situation in other parts of the world that's not a question okay should we take, we'll take three questions is that a case, is that okay, okay, sure one here okay, one there and then next I want to refer to what you said about the financial crisis in Germany in 2001 that led to the collapse of one of the major financial institutes there that why it wasn't proposed to them that to adopt the policy that was followed during the Great Depression in the 1930s when they had that Keynes theory of going to the construction industry to build houses and it would have like a cumulative positive effect on the overall economy as you go further so that's what's the house okay and one more, then you can take all three that's okay hey Suzanne, thank you for your talk I just was listening to this and thinking it strikes such a bell with me being from the Bay Area and hearing about homelessness what differences do you see between these European cities that social housing is approached and displacement is approached versus places in the Americas because in San Francisco there's also a huge housing shortage there aren't enough places for people and it's not just displacing the lower class but also the middle class and even the lower bourgeoisie in some places you cannot afford even a vacant lot for less than half a million dollars is that a similar dynamic in these socialized cities or is this completely separate entity from a different version of neoliberalism awesome okay so I'm going to start with the first one I need two aspects talking about homelessness in Germany I most of you know my research has always been based on the group of cells and US I my teacher in Germany is a PhD student I studied in Berlin and I always thought in the 1990s I always thought that Germany was so boring to study because it was such a wealthy athlete even before we're taking care of when I arrived in 2015 in Berlin the time that also the refugees were in Berlin I was shocked I went to interviews about social housing I wanted to see what was going on in social housing and I was shocked at poverty I was shocked at the hopelessness of social workers, of NGOs of the huge amounts of poverty from the state it was completely broke at that time of course their social services was withheld for other interests I went into a homeless shelter a 12 month open my German now I'm getting off but a homeless shelter all year round homeless shelters for women in a city with 3.5 million people guess how many beds this shelter had it was the only shelter for women for all year old shelter nine beds and this story just played itself out over and over and over again in the city abjet poverty but then there's also this sort of racialized pockets of poverty within Neukölln or Mitten 3% migrant 25% unemployed rates amongst migrants so to get to your question the 1990s they were okay looking at a larger sort of scale of the EU at that time we have 1995 the single European market opening freedom of goods services capital which also that labor laws and pressure on all types of regulation but then at that point too that Germany was starting to liberalize a lot of its finances which caused this GP crisis as well financialization debates don't capture the fact that the production of surplus capital surplus money emerges also on the backs of surplus people so if we take that frame and go back to Germany in the 1990s we also see an increase in low wage low wage service sector work is decreasing in Germany and the discrepancy among racial and gender lines is huge so that 15 years, 15 years continue we have in selling off of social housing in the 1990s Germany which I didn't know, I know that was shocked Germany sold off more social housing than that's ever yet in Munich faster and larger than that too then in mid 2000s we had the hearts for labor reforms, work fair state which took away all these social housing housing allowances that you talk about and that were there and you were right to point that out and what happens with Part 4 is that the federal job centers which operate at the urban level hand out social assistance and they will also hand out housing assistance but based on a very tight rental index which doesn't meet the needs of the rent people are renting right now but once you're too high so there's not enough money dispersed by the state through work fair to helping people and they can't have any jobs, the jobs are terrible there's a minimum wage in Germany but it's not in full and especially with such amounts of surplus population you pay what you want as an employer it's a great place to open up a business in terms of cartels absolutely I didn't get to the slide but Deutsche Bono holds 160,000 flats in Germany and right now there's a grassroots initiative to nationalize Deutsche Bono and we have those houses that were sold off to Deutsche Bono in 2001 to the public municipal housing companies I don't think it's going to get anywhere but I'd like to be pleasantly surprised but that's cartels not everywhere right so the majority of the landlords are not these financialized landlords they're modern landlords and a lot of them are politicians that own these houses so that's interesting as well and you can imagine you do have the cartelization of landlords as well in this but it's very nuanced and if I just may go on may I go on for one second in these sort of social housing complexes they call it in Neukölln where you have something like Grotbischka has 55,000 residents and it's just these blocks of housing landlords and social housing private landlords but some of the private landlords charge less rent than the public housing landlords some of the private landlords actually are better landlords in terms of maintenance than the public housing landlords so there's all kinds of complexities on the various sort of job of surplus calculation the second question of the GPE I would defer to absolutely that would be a great great solution but we are working within the dominant neoclassical paradigm of waiting for that equilibrium of supply and demand and how dare we sully the rationality of the market forces by intervening through state intervention plus I have to try to attention again to the EU the competition laws et cetera that were in place that anyone that would contact that could then displace the contestation to the EU and the EU would then sigh on top of the capital that this would not be the adequate way to move forward in terms of dealing with the solution and the third point if the European city absolutely happening everywhere in Toronto is a mess the Bay Area terrible right and you know I have to go back because we're reading Engel's housing question the other day he said but he said the poor have always the working poor and the lower working class have always been displayed but when the bourgeoisie started talking about housing in the 19th century I mean people are starting to pay attention it's starting to be very very politicized but I think within larger framing of this predominant equilibria of housing as a market enabling markets to work it rolls right back around 1953 it includes a little deep litus and we've only gone through so many decades of individualizing individualization, responsibility we're all under massive stress with debt which is incredibly individualizing again and sort of old mechanism of shamefulness that's really hard and this is a social power money that I talked about right it's really hard to bring a collectivity back into play to push again I'll end with the example of red Vienna even though they excluded and there's always exclusion red Vienna which created a really amazing project of these beautiful social housing units that Vienna should be very proud of right 220,000 of them which is still the same number but that kind of emerged through a socialist project actually the government flushed a revolutionary project at that time and created a social democratic compromise because labor was so strong at that point in time labor was strong and they pushed the government to tax luxury tax and it's a pain for those councilmen and that's what's sort of missing my whole thought to that there's no political there's no collectivity but there is I just think that a lot of time state focal point debates that I mentioned at the beginning of the the financialization from one of the housing the right versus the commodity sort of more progressive debates take our focus away from important questions that we need to be asking as well and how this is all impregnated so my final conclusion in the book is pretty dismal but I basically say that displacements offer a solution to the immediate crisis that's going on which you want to call it crisis in 1990 this is our normality it's going to continue and it's going to continue until it can happen but I don't see where that's going to happen right now given the power that the state has in terms of normalizing its social surplus to corporations we all thought the rising when you call it the socioeconomic divide income inequality completely none to them climate crisis but nothing's happening and we have to attribute that not just to the lack of politicization because we have it you guys are showing this our teachers here our school teachers are striking today this is huge huge pushback but there's something out there that's deep politicizing all of this pushback and disappearing and inviting us into socializing us into the surplus capitalism so I think this is a normalization and I think we're all part of this and this is the least tempered solution until I don't know I don't know if that's an answer to the question but I just charged my mind thinking it's been going on since the 1890s and it's just getting worse and worse and I'm looking at these policies just acting and acting and acting and pushing more into the private sector and it's like okay I guess they can buy them all oh well right sorry but it's yes it's a phenomenal global but it's been going on for a very long time just to ask people living in Mexico City or even a moment we can take one more round of questions one right here we're going to talk and I think I can totally relate to the crisis especially in London actually coming from abroad I think you have a very interesting population here like students where right to education apparently is a human right but that's inextricably linked to housing right like if you cannot live here also cannot do your education so I guess if housing then is not a human right but rather a commodity what about that middle ground you talked about how Deutsche Warner or something buys back property so sort of like so I guess it becomes a public area instead of a human right and then it made me think about the relation to Airbnb as well so the city is not for residents so housing apparently comes as a commodity to make money for example I don't know if there's a question by wanting to know your thoughts on this no absolutely conceptualized commodity housing as commodity under capitalism is used value of exchange value right but I'd say it's a place of survival and a site of accumulation and it's always been that way to become more of a place of survival like Red Vienna where there are material conditions in which the state, capitalist state and capital come to an agreement in order to say okay we will take part of that social surplus you can appropriate that money from us and distribute it for this purpose and we have that for decades under Keynesianism as the former person mentioned and you are absolutely right Airbnb these are all then next generation of how this sort of place of survival site of accumulation is happening but funny story, actually not funny tragedy actually tragic story is that people in Berlin for example the very few that actually had rental housing before all of this happened and can afford barely afford to maintain their rental are themselves entering to B&B relationships so they all sleep on a friend's couch in order to receive the income for their rent for that month so there's this again it's normal like okay we'll just move and ship and use this in our benefit as well but the status quo continues and deepens so going back to your question of the referendum in Berlin absolutely so people and what was interesting is this was triggered as well by the refugee crisis that made more visible the type of lack of housing for people so unfortunately one of the key actors I'm assuming I read some stories London was like this as well Vienna other cities in Europe were very much so grassroots organizations were the ones that go towards not the NGOs, grassroots organizations that just stood up and said let's get some houses for these refugees even if it's only temporary so people were housing refugees and homes for free there were people driving around saying I'll volunteer my car, just go pick them up get them away from that awful line up and the newborn babies blah blah blah and this raised a lot of political awareness amongst Berliners of this huge problem that the visible homelessness that was occurring right and so it took this sort of political push from the outside to sort of say well let's really do something not for these refugees going on, of course they did but it's really galvanized sort of other actors groups into a larger project so I think in November 2019 these groups created you know ten organizations NGOs, grassroots organizations created this referendum which is basically the nationalization of Deutsche Worm, which is this huge cartel in Germany and in the constitution in Berlin they have to pass so many signatures so I don't know they need 55,000 signatures to a certain date which they got then they need now to get second stage 77,000 et cetera there's problems with that though in the sense that not in the energy and the spirit of that I totally agree with it I'm looking at it by this macro of politics that are going to squash this initiative and one of them is the pushback of the legal structure the same legal structures that guarantee housing as a human right we have more rights for capitalism and this they're saying this is unconstitutional what you're doing the other line is we don't have the money to buy back these apartments we just don't have the money, we're broke under austerity we can't do this and there's a very real death rate in Germany imposed on city states on Lenda like Berlin let's say you can't go above this percentage imposed from the EU as well so they're using that legal mechanism to get away from moving forward with this but there's absolute pushback with this nationalization process now here's another thing that Berlin state has done in order to de-politicize this movement they've introduced another rental price cap I say another because they've introduced many but this one's pretty severe they freeze rent in the private rental sector not social housing which as we know some of the rents you can hire them in the private rental sector for five years affected January 1st this year 2025, they've frozen rent now landlords are pretty angry with this and have gone to the federal level and now it's being discussed as unconstitutional we'll see what the final verdict is but law is not neutral law is created like half of the state in the interest of capital not in the interest of people ordinary people so yes let's do this but neoliberalism just operates on this freedom of flow of people etc it's a highly legalized structure which has also limited the amount of political scope to challenge the status quo so again we have to bring the status and have to look at these legal structures and say you're not neutral let's bash these legal structures and rewrite them and actually in ways that are accessible and can be thought for then we can make housing truly a human right there's absolutely no question that we can't do that but we also have to have our analytical eyes on the focus of what we're also going to struggle against does that make sense? last two questions perhaps yes one there yeah okay hi thank you very much for the talk it's very interesting I'm curious about the agency of the displaced people themselves in this situation what are the forms of resistance that they can take or that they do take for example in my voluntary work with refugees in Serbia I've met people who are avoiding living in UNHCR refugee camps and instead they preferred squatting in different places around the town and I seen that a bit as a kind of political declaration that people prefer to live even in worse conditions without no access to food rations but without also this surveillance with the humanizing way of managing the refugee camps okay we'll take the other so two more questions after that so this might be a very general question I don't know but I was just wondering whether you in your research had also focused on how this impacted or possibly benefited the elites or like you know like whether you can link any of these policies or these initiatives that have been taken with detrimental effects for the housing as being like directly linked to the interests of I don't know like big financial actors or stuff like that okay and one more we're keeping it sharp today thanks so much Suzanne it's phasey that was a brilliant talk I just what it was more of a sort of comment and to sort of get your comments on this comments just the sort of the absurdity of the depth of the housing crisis and what people have to do I had the bizarre experience the other day of accompanying a friend to a property auction and there I mean you know lots and lots of rich people I mean houses are going for 300 million pounds and lots and lots of poor people where you know houses in outer London are going for three bedroom maze or three bedroom terrorist houses going for 100,000 pounds and things like that but you know the sheer kind of uncertainty of it the sort of crass being able to like bid on something that really is in reality a basic human right turned into a commodity to the greatest extent and people buying buying a land so that they can just get the ground rent from that so they're not even buying the actual property they're just getting they're buying the ability to collect rent so that I mean that's a kind of another sort of dimension but I mean it's as you say and I was very struck by what you said about red Vienna and this is exactly it right we just missed a Jeremy Corbyn government in this country last year where they promised to build a million a million affordable homes over 10 years I mean so really it is a political question because we now are we now are saddled with another well hopefully not five more years of the story government but I mean you know no exactly but you know we had that chance imagine the sort of kind of effect that it would have had on millions of families to be able to access that sort of you know it's not perfect but to move towards a social democratic dispensation where at least you can afford a home where you know people on £50,000, £60,000 a year still cannot afford a home you know in London or you know a decent kind of whatever two, three bedroom home to raise a family and whatever so this is the sort of I think depths that we are sinking to in a society where housing as a basic human right in reality has become a commodity to be sold on the market absolutely brilliant thank you those are three excellent I commodity is a place of survival at a site of accumulation and there are maximum debates they also said housing was really important because it's where we socially reproduce our workers right and that got me thinking of course we had to update it and gender and race and things like that have to be brought into the older Marxian debates but it was really interesting in the sense that they were also at that time discussing in the 50s, 70s home ownership right and that was the main 10-year field in the UK as well and it just got me to think again that's why I went back to sort of financialization financial capitalism and that we've got to start taking this apart I guess it's capitalism labour but what is it about I'm not the first one to say this but what is it about a type of capitalism though it's not been around since like several decades right this is what we have here it's not you know a temporary I'm not saying it's permanent but it's been around longer than Keynesian is our and what is it about a type of capitalism societal mode of production social reproduction of people that creates all this massive wealth and at the same time creates and you know Marx talks about the surplus population of which it keeps growing and growing and growing that it involves we don't have a middle class what is the upper middle class in terms of the upper middle class is the top class of the income earners there's no middle ground or vulnerability precarity right there's no social safety net so to speak of and that it's insane it really is and so then when I start looking at housing going you're taking away from rent is the only place of social reproduction the only thing that I can come up with is to say that the people the low wage people or so-called middle wage people I don't know if they exist that are living in these houses that are being displaced from these houses are disposable they're not important they're not important to capitalism the ones that are in the houses in Vienna the Austrians that earn the top 20% they are given housing as a human right and so what I'm seeing too is a lot of sorting fragmentation along gender lines in Vienna and Berlin definitely along racialized lines and so I'm seeing a lot sinister sort of understanding of capitalism and financialization can ever tell us right and the understanding of land as a commodity with the use value and exchange value is also really important to bring in line with that and it's unfortunate where Christopher could be here for the talk because of the strike which is important but he would have then extended on this conversation from the perspective of the land but does that make sense I mean it's just huge it's a sinister you know I don't like the disposability I've never liked that I you know the surplus population too the type of accumulation is interesting if you have the heterogeneous sort of dimensions to it etc right nuanced dynamic and it's all relative to what right but there is maybe we have to say that some of us many of us are disposable to those that are there right and in countries like the U.S. and somebody from the Bay Area you have like what calls talk about prison failure you make money through this situation where you stick them in prisons right and you wear household bodies right and the other question about benefiting is benefiting I mean that's an interesting aspect as well you know I talked about the poverty industry where we see that so refugees living in emergency shelters and communal shelters are paying the price for these rents through the federal job centers through social assistance or housing allowance if you know right they're paying these private landlords they're making a mint through tax payers money right in essence and there's no democratization of that social surplus apartment that's necessary for the right to the city if you will right this whole situation you know again it's very nuanced with the story in Neukurn with the 2015 a very wealthy Syrian dentist very racialized the migration commission office in Neukurn very racialized language but this Arab woman he called Arab woman who was a professional but lots of property she could in Neukurn she knew the refugees were coming in and she transformed these private buildings into dormitories and started charging her bed the price that the government would pay right and she demanded way too much the government only paid a certain amount and she wanted more and you know she started keeping the money and it's crazy but filled up the spaces with other people so there's money to be made in the poverty absolutely and finance is way front and center with this right and so capitalism are wonderful destruction I mean that's the strength of capitalism right but the other strength of financial capitalism is the power of money these concrete abstractions that can occur hardly to talk about without that right but underneath all that lovely virtual that we can't understand the effect of their power right is also the state giving them from the EU to the national the urban level all this legal infrastructure to maintain that power if you will right I don't know if that answers your questions but it's it sort of runs deeper than just evictions and homelessness right when we sort of situated against the larger dynamics of capitalism okay yeah that's great thank you thank you very much thank you for your presentation and also for handling all of the questions so well