Editor's Note: The work of UC Berkeley Social Sciences faculty helps shape California public policy. In this series, learn more about their research and projects and how they resonate with state policymakers and address solutions to the most pressing issues facing California, from food access to homelessness.
UC Berkeley Geography Professor Desiree Fields' research on the financialization of the housing market spans from the 2008 mortgage crisis to today's efforts by tech billionaires to create new cities "from scratch," informing California policymakers on topics such as tenant rights and rent stabilization.
Fields, who is also a faculty affiliate with UC Berkeley's Global Metropolitan Studies program and the Berkeley Economy and Society Initiative, is currently leading two research projects related to housing financialization, the process of housing being treated as a financial asset. The first project examines how accessible digital platforms are for ordinary people investing in real estate; and the second investigates capitalists' attempts to build new cities in rural areas as a way out of solving the problems (such as rising housing costs and homelessness, car dependence, and struggling public education systems) many cities now face.
UC Berkeley Social Sciences spoke with Professor Fields about her research and how it connects to broader conversations on California policy. This interview has been edited for clarity.
Can you talk about your research on the financialization of housing?
Desiree Fields: My research program addresses how Wall Street and Silicon Valley are jointly transforming the housing question in the 21st century. I began this work in the wake of the 2008 mortgage crisis, when the Right to the City alliance asked me to take part in a workshop about how the housing crisis was ongoing, despite headlines to the contrary. This provocation had two important consequences for my subsequent research. First, I began trying to understand how the link between residential real estate and finance was being re-aligned following the meltdown of global financial markets. For global urban finance, this moment of rupture served as a crucial opportunity to open new frontiers of investment.
What my work highlights is that post-2008 advances in digital technologies were the linchpin in what became a structural transformation in the U.S. housing market, namely the corporate consolidation of housing ownership by asset management companies. Second, I committed to producing knowledge that demystifies and concretizes the operations of digital-financial capitalism. In practice, this has entailed regularly publishing reports, blog posts and op-ed essays; consulting with journalists and policymakers; and participating in podcasts and activist convenings. This commitment has helped my research be part of conversations in both policy and organizing circles. It also serves as a way of pushing back against the idea that contemporary finance and technology are too complex for ordinary people to grasp, an idea that also helps shield powerful people and institutions from critique.
What are some of the key findings in your research?
Desiree Fields: My research has been important in demonstrating that the financialization of housing — that is, efforts to treat housing as a financial asset — increasingly extends beyond mortgaged homeownership and into rental housing markets. During my Ph.D. training, much of the (then emerging) literature on housing financialization focused exclusively on homeowners. But this literature failed to reflect my empirical observations. In addition to showing that financialization is transforming rental housing markets, my work has also expanded understanding of how these transformations are contested, including at the level of subjectivity.
Another contribution my work makes is highlighting how a wave of advances in digital technology in the post-2008 era deepened, diversified and expanded rental housing financialization globally. In the U.S., private equity investors leveraged networked digital technologies and cheap debt made possible by quantitative easing to acquire large numbers of foreclosed homes in Sun Belt metropolitan areas. The result was the emergence of single-family rental brands controlling the portfolios of thousands or tens of thousands of properties. I characterize this process in terms of the "automated landlord", a concept that has influenced how researchers in geography, planning, urban studies and beyond approach the intersection of technology and property.
Finally, although popular accounts often emphasize the novelty of developments like financialization and digital property technologies, my research shows these processes are not as "disruptive" of property relations as such accounts might lead us to believe. Property has been an object of scientific and technological progress since the colonial era. The United States has an extensive history of new techniques, instruments and processes changing how property is bought and sold, while nonetheless (often intentionally) reproducing racially divided markets. I argue that rather than a break with racialized wealth accumulation and dispossession, the operations of Wall Street and Silicon Valley in today's housing markets continue these relations.
What public policy challenges does the housing market transformation discussed in your research create for California?
Desiree Fields: An immediate and practical public policy challenge my work on rental housing financialization creates for California relates to how we think about tenant rights and protections. Our state is one of the very few in the country that does offer (some) rent stabilization and other protections that enhance housing security for renters. However, those policies do not extend to single-family homes, leaving a growing number of tenants with no protection from exorbitant rent increases, additional fees or nonrenewal of their leases. Proposition 33, a 2024 initiative that would have (among other things) made it easier for municipalities to expand rent control to single-family homes, failed to pass in the 2024 election.
Another challenge related to the growth of asset managers as landlords is their reliance on opaque corporate ownership structures such as limited liability corporations. Corporate landlords might own tens of thousands of properties, acquired and managed through dozens of entities. While skilled researchers can make use of a combination of public and proprietary data to pierce the corporate veil, this task is largely beyond the capacity and resources of ordinary people (and qualitative researchers like me!). The challenge of tracing corporate ownership structures back to their beneficial owners is an obstacle to better understanding their impact on housing markets, and, ultimately, to demanding accountability.
I should also point out that California public officials have made important contributions pushing back against the use of technology to unlawfully fix prices of rental housing. Last year, California Attorney General Rob Bonta was part of a multi-state lawsuit against RealPage, a rental revenue management software that offers algorithmic pricing technology to landlords. The company was subsequently sued by the Department of Justice for violating antitrust law.
Is there anything else you would like to highlight about your research or how it connects to CA public policy?
Desiree Fields: Currently, a group of tech billionaires is attempting to create a new city in Solano County. The project would convert 17,500 acres of arid rural land into an "affordable, walkable, and sustainable" city, nearly doubling Solano County's population in the process. The effort to build a city "from scratch" has already spent close to a billion dollars on acquiring land to demonstrate that venture capitalists and tech founders are better able to solve the state's housing crisis than planners and policymakers. Whatever the outcome of this iteration of Silicon Valley's urban experimentation, it is incumbent upon public policy to meaningfully intervene in the state's unsustainable housing costs, which are driving displacement, homelessness and political discontent.