Housing financialization, or the increased dominance of financial markets in the housing sector, has not stopped in the wake of the crisis. Rather, it has reinforced and rescaled itself, expanding into new market segments and urban territories. However, while academic scholarship has convincingly exposed the reconfiguration of financialization processes, it has paid surprisingly little attention to how these processes are also contested from within society and the economy. In response to this gap in the literature, I propose in this contribution a threefold research agenda, calling out for more research on (i) financial market reforms aimed at dismantling finance-led housing accumulation; (ii) policy focused on strengthening the public and affordable housing sector; and (iii) changing modes of urban governance and ‘anti-political’ social movements which can contest housing financialization locally. Taking into account these three fields of inquiry, I invite housing scholars to explore how – and if –de-financializing tendencies can become ecologically dominant in post-crisis urban housing markets.

Financialization, here defined as the ‘increasing dominance of financial actors, markets, practices, measurements and narratives at various scales’ (Aalbers, 2016), has become a leading concept for understanding major changes in contemporary urban housing markets. Whether with regard to the advent of mortgaged (and sometimes securitized) homeownership (Fernandez and Aalbers, 2016), the rise of institutional corporate landlords in the private rental sector (August and Walks, 2018; Charles, 2019), the (transnational) investment practices of ‘super-rich’ or middle-class investors (Fernandez et al., 2016; Rogers et al., 2015), the development practices by ‘financialized’ private property developers (Brill and Conte, 2020; Nethercote, 2020), or the rather aggressive expansion of housing finance to emerging markets in the Global South (Rolnik, 2019; Soederberg, 2015), financialization scholarship has demonstrated that urban housing systems have profoundly changed in recent decades.