Housing connects local geographies of home, community, and indebtedness to national and global geographies of mortgage funding, institutional investors, and interlinked crises. Housing, like other forms of real estate, provides a critical outlet for investments, a place where capital can be invested in—“fixed” and thereby locked into a place for a period of time. The absorption of capital by real estate is one of the defining characteristics of the current financed economic growth model.

The phrase “financialization of housing” suggests that housing is increasingly becoming more dependent on finance. It does not mean that housing is completely or only related to finance. The noun suffix “-action” denotes an action or process. The most basic definition of “financialization” would then be the process of becoming finance-like. A broader definition could be: “the increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements, and narratives, at various scales, resulting in a structural transformation of economies, firms (including financial institutions), states, and households.” This definition implies that financialization is made up of different processes, located at multiple scales.