Abstract

The article explores the Italian case of the Integrated System of real-estate investment funds, which was developed in 2010 by the State-controlled CDP to attract investments from the financial markets towards the production of social-rented housing. The literature on the financialisation of housing has rapidly grown since the outbreak of the 2007 global financial crisis. After an initial focus on mortgaged homeownership, the academic debate has shifted attention towards financialising dynamics affecting rental housing, as a frontier for financialisation. The present study aimed to advance this debate shedding light on the under-researched impact of the phenomenon on the non-profit actors involved in social-rented housing policy, interrogating how they were mobilised within financialised local governance structures to enable real-estate investment funds to extract financial value from new social-rented housing. Relying on a policy-instrument approach, the analysis brings to light the role of the mobilisation of both public/collective/non-profit assets and material and immaterial resources that the local welfare systems developed through time in enabling the viable penetration of global financial flows into the social-rented housing sector, thus unveiling how finance extends its accumulation-by-dispossession strategies to the sphere of welfare.