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Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects CUNY Graduate Center
2013
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Desiree Justina Fields
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
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FROM PROPERTY ABANDONMENT TO PREDATORY EQUITY:
WRITINGS ON FINANCIALIZATION AND URBAN SPACE IN NEW YORK CITY
by
DESIREE JUSTINA FIELDS
A dissertation submitted to the Graduate Faculty in Psychology in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy,
The City University of New York
2013
ii
©2013
DESIREE JUSTINA FIELDS
All Rights Reserved
iii
This manuscript has been read and accepted
for the Graduate Faculty in Environmental Psychology
in satisfaction of the dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy
Dr. Susan Saegert
____________ _________________________
Date Chair of Examining Committee
Dr. Maureen O’Connor
____________ _________________________
Date Executive Officer
Dr. Manuel Aalbers
Dr. David Harvey
Dr. Tarry Hum
Dr. Kathe Newman
___________________________
Supervisory Committee
THE CITY UNIVERSITY OF NEW YORK
iv
Abstract
FROM PROPERTY ABANDONMENT TO PREDATORY EQUITY:
WRITINGS ON FINANCIALIZATION AND URBAN SPACE IN NEW YORK CITY
by
Desiree Justina Fields
Adviser: Professor Susan Saegert
Financial markets, actors and imperatives are increasingly central to today’s global capitalism,
even in areas of the economy traditionally distinct from finance, such as real estate. This
financialization changes the role of mortgage capital in urban space from building place-bound
wealth to facilitating the extraction of value from place. This dissertation addresses questions
about how financialization operates in the rental market, specifically its relation to: earlier
processes of urban disinvestment, ongoing social and political struggles around urban space, the
meaning of home and social reproduction. These questions correspond to broader theoretical
debates about the contingent relationship between today’s urban context and landscapes inherited
at the end of the 1970s, the constraints and possibilities for today’s community-based
organizations and the consequences of finance’s permeation into everyday life.
Using qualitative, archival and geographic methods, the research design revolves around a long
temporal frame beginning with the 1970s urban crisis of property abandonment and continuing
through the present. Geographic data was used to analyze relationships between property
abandonment and private equity real estate investment. Archival data and interviews with
veteran (n=11); mid-career (n=5); and emerging (n=9) nonprofit professionals provided insight
v
on community responses to disinvestment and financialization. Focus groups (N=5) with tenants
(n=27) addressed social and psychological consequences of financialization.
Today’s financialization of housing shapes uneven geographies of power: finance can make itself
felt in property, but is often beyond the reach of community organizations and the city.
Concentrated in low-income, minority neighborhoods, investors’ financial risks undermined
tenants’ ontological security and social reproduction. Community organizations’ development of
discursive, data-driven and spatial tactics speaks to the political possibilities of contemporary
community practice to contest financialization. The findings are relevant to efforts of community
organizations to contest urban inequality, concerns about planning economically sustainable
cities and policy approaches to affordable rental housing. This study contributes to research on
geographies of financialization; in particular it responds to the need for critical attention to the
socially and spatially uneven nature of processes associated with financialization of the
domestic.
vi
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I would like to acknowledge the support I have received during this project. First, this project has
benefited enormously from the input of my committee members, particularly my mentor, Susan
Saegert who has provided indispensable encouragement and critical feedback throughout all
stages of this project and my doctoral training as a whole. I only hope that I can contribute to the
intellectual development of future scholars with the spirit, generosity, dignity and respect Susan
Saegert has extended to mine. To Kathe Newman, I thank you for the fortitude you showed as I
worked through countless iterations of my dissertation proposal, for welcoming me to your
academic family while encouraging me to think beyond its borders, and for asking the hard
questions that have pushed the limits of my work. I have been fortunate for the contributions
Manuel Aalbers brought to the project, especially his generosity as a career mentor and the
attention paid to both the small details and the theoretical big picture that have improved the
overall quality of the project. I am grateful to Tarry Hum for the patience and care with which
she read this work and offered crucial suggestions for making it stronger. Finally I extend my
appreciation to David Harvey for his own scholarship, which has provided many of the
theoretical underpinnings of my own work, and for encouraging me to further explore questions
of value in financialization.
In addition to my committee, I have many friends and loved ones to thank. First, to
Kimberly Libman, one of the most creative minds I have ever known—everyone should be so
lucky to have such a fantastic intellectual partner in crime, and I look forward to sharing many
more conversations with you about theory, ethics and methods (over glorious meals, of course).
Arlo and Christa Quint have been dear and steadfast friends, and this process would have been
less punctuated by laughter and comfort had you not been a part of it. To my parents, Douglas
vii
Fields and Laura Fields, I thank you for raising me to be an independent thinker, for your
continued support and absolute certainty that I would succeed in this process, and for taking the
time to learn about what I have been up to all this time. I certainly would not have made it this
far without both of you. William Yackulic made a life with me in New York and has enriched
my mind and heart with conversation, art, music and love. At times you have been surer than I
about my work--I thank you for not letting me give up, and for all you have contributed to this
process, which would have been infinitely more difficult and less rewarding without your
partnership. Finally, I thank the city of New York for being its self, and letting me be my best
self.
Statement of funding support: I gratefully acknowledge the Geography and Spatial Science
program of the National Science Foundation for the Doctoral Dissertation Research
Improvement grant (Award #1002780) that provided critical financial support for this research
from 2010-2012.
viii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT iv
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vi
LIST OF TABLES xi
LIST OF FIGURES xii
INTRODUCTION 1
Research design and methods 3
Data 5
Dissertation structure 9
WRITING 1: From property abandonment to predatory equity: A genealogy of 14
housing policy and community practice in New York City, 1976-2012
Introduction 17
Background 22
‘Examining and situating the realized’ 28
Fiscal discipline and the landlord of last resort 28
Spaces of abandonment 32
Temporality of responses to abandonment 36
Spatial resonances 72
Conclusions 76
Appendix 1.1 83
Appendix 1.2 84
ix
WRITING 2: The lived experience of predatory equity: Financialization and 94
the meaning of home
Introduction 96
Background 99
Research Context 107
Findings 111
Living conditions 111
Meaning of Home 115
Social reproduction 116
Tenants and politicization 120
Conclusions 124
WRITING 3: Contesting the financialization of urban space: Community 136
organizations and the struggle to preserve affordable rental housing in New
York City
Introduction 138
Background 140
Methods 152
Findings 154
Constructing a critical narrative 154
Strategic positivism 159
Reworking spaces of finance 162
Conclusions 167
Description:access to mortgage capital to build wealth and gain more stability and resident control in low- income and . Trusts, or REITs) in real estate through properties or mortgages, whereas the financialization of properties, frequently buying out the smaller, more local owners that characterize the U.S.
