Contesting housing commodification and financialization through bridging: Experiences from Mexico and Brazil

Struggles contesting financialization and its impacts

Individuals have opposed housing financialization by refusing to embrace or challenge its products (Fields, 2017b). In Morocco, families refused financial products and services promoting affordable housing to protect themselves from the perceived uncertainties ingrained in financialization processes (Kutz, 2018). Resistance to the financialization and gentrification of rental housing has happened through tenant organizing (Crosby, 2020). Community-based organizations responding to predatory private equity firms in New York advance critical housing narratives, emphasizing the potential of their tactics to contend with the financialization of affordable rental housing (Fields, 2015). Organizing efforts can help formulate alternative narratives to contest financialization processes (Leitner et al., 2007). In response to the surge in foreclosures in Spain following the global financial crisis, activists formed La Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH) in Barcelona, aiming to address mortgage legislation, prevent evictions of family homes, and repurpose vacant bank-owned properties as social housing (e.g., García-Lamarca, 2017a, 2017b; Martinez, 2019). PAH employed strategies like neighborhood assemblies, eviction blockades, house occupations, and debt negotiations, garnering media attention and civic support to highlight the housing crisis, halt evictions, and rehouse affected families (e.g., Díaz-Parra and Mena, 2015; García-Lamarca, 2017b; Gonick, 2016c).

Mobilization often generates multiple relationships, roles, and narratives beyond the dichotomy of resistance or co-optation and embraces productive mutability (Elwood, 2006), engaging with various strategies, from oppositional tactics to indirect and experimental methods of contestation (Gonick, 2016a; Leitner et al., 2007). Such efforts can take advantage of invited spaces of participation and citizenship, those legitimized by the state, and produce invented spaces of participation in which collective grassroots mobilizing confronts the status quo and builds alternative propositions to survive (Miraftab, 2006, 2009). The theorization of invited/invented spaces comes from Miraftab’s work on grassroots insurgent movements, specifically South Africa’s Western Cape Anti-Eviction Campaign. Their work leverages openings within hegemonic political systems to enact counter-hegemonic actions and, conversely, utilize counter-hegemonic strategies within formalized systems. In other words, insurgent movements move back and forth from spaces created or legitimatized by governments to collective action that directly confronts the same hegemonic systems and governments (Miraftab, 2009).

A critical aspect of contesting financialization is how movements: “contend with the dynamic of distance that allows financial actors to operate in urban space from afar and shield themselves from the on-the-ground consequences of their actions” (Fields, 2017a: 20). Such distances and invisibility obscure roles and responsibilities, limiting the formulation of objections and demands by mobilizing efforts (Clapp, 2014; Fields, 2015; Wyly et al., 2009). Therefore, a key feature of struggles against financialization is to break down such distances and disrupt the chains of financial intermediaries (Fields, 2017a). This work involves organizing and connecting multiple scales of action to address distances and make visible the agents, infrastructures, and processes of financialization and how they are directly linked to everyday precarity.

Histories of housing mobilization in Brazil and Mexico

Social movements directly contributed to Brazil’s democratization in the 1980s and the development of its 1988 constitution (Zhang, 2020). The new constitution included proposals for urban reform linked to the right to the city, housing rights, and the social function of property, many promoted by the Movimento Nacional de Reforma Urbana, ³ a movement made up of social movements, neighborhood associations, NGOs, professional organizations, and trade unions (Friendly, 2016). This movement pushed for a progressive legal system in Brazil that reframed rights and political struggles (Dagnino, 2005). The new constitution included new mechanisms of direct participation for civil society and social movements to engage directly with policymaking (e.g., Donaghy, 2013; Pimentel Walker and Friendly, 2021).

Housing movements in Brazil have taken advantage of participatory institutions and laws to advance their rights-based agendas, using direct action, confrontational, and resistance strategies, such as occupying empty land or buildings (Zhang, 2020). Contradictions and ambiguities within the Brazilian legal system also blur the lines between some legal and illegal actions (Holston, 1991), supporting housing movements’ justification to occupy and take possession of someone else’s property, generating a form of transgressive citizenship (Earle, 2017). The gaps between the rights promised by the progressive legal system and constitution and the rights delivered have constituted a space for rights-based groups to operate, putting forward new understandings of citizenship (Zhang, 2020). In attempting to oppose neoliberal governance, housing movements in Brazil have widened the breadth of legal and political institutions, opening new paths for future struggles (Krieger et al., 2021).

União Nacional por Moradia Popular (UNMP) is a national housing movement that began mobilizing in 1989. UNMP has state-based chapters engaged in housing mobilization and production in 16 states. Nationally, the movement has been historically involved with policy advocacy while simultaneously promoting training, peer-to-peer education, and leadership development at the municipal and state scales. Across all scales, UNMP advances autogestão as both a political principle and object of struggle to challenge market-based, financialized solutions to housing in favor of housing justice through collective and democratic decision-making and control. Autogestão involves an organized community in collective control of housing production or urban upgrading, including managing resources and construction process, and with public financing. ⁴ The theory and practice of autogestão directly challenge housing commodification and financialization due to its proposition of community control of the entire housing development process. Such a proposal entails control of public resources, land, urbanization, and housing and challenges the capitalist and financialized model of urban and housing development (Rodrigues, 2013).

In the Latin American context, Mexico embodies a unique case in terms of its democratic processes and civil society’s roles in promoting change (Hellman, 1994). Social mobilization and engagement played a crucial role in resisting neoliberal reforms and supporting political-institutional change in many Latin American democracies, including Brazil, Chile, Bolivia, Ecuador, Uruguay, Argentina, and Paraguay (Cardoso, 2009; Zibechi, 2010). In Mexico, conversely, the entrenchment of the neoliberal turn limited civil society’s efforts to mobilize outside electoral forms (e.g., Kurtz, 2004). New movements and groups emerged in the 1990s, but their mobilization capacities and impacts remained fragmented and limited (Holzner, 2007). Similarly, housing mobilizations have been restricted and only prevalent in certain regions, notably Mexico City (Reyes, 2018).

Urban renewal in the 1970s incentivized some communities to mobilize and halt projects that threatened to displace them. Yet, organizing around detrimental housing conditions was particularly successful after the 1985 earthquake. The collapse of 30,000 properties and the structural damage of almost 70,000 led authorities to plan for peripheral relocation efforts. Communities, however, organized to demand on-site reconstruction, succeeding in the construction and rehabilitation of 45,000 homes by 1988. In tandem, the Asamblea de Barrios5 was formed in 1987 to prevent unfair evictions and promote tenant protections and low-income housing production, effectively overseeing the construction and rehabilitation of 40,000 homes by 1996.

Along with other civic movements, the Asamblea also pushed to establish mayoral and local legislative elections in the 1990s. Parallel reforms culminated with the country’s capital gaining further autonomy and becoming a city-state with its own Constitution in 2017. The democratization of the local government and the election of a supportive government helped consolidate housing programs, norms, and institutions with input from civic organizations. Despite limited resources, local housing strategies in the 2000s set exceptional standards at the national level. Such institutionalization of housing demands was also facilitated by Asamblea leaders entering the political-electoral arena (Reyes, 2018, 2019).

Yet, the influence of these efforts has yet to reach the federal level, at which the financialization of housing policies took place. However, the implications of these processes on the ground eventually incentivized the formation of El Frente Mexiquense en Defensa para una Vivienda Digna (El Frente). ⁶ El Frente Mexiquense came together in 2008 after neighborhood association representatives contested construction and infrastructure deficiencies in their homes and neighborhoods (most notably water shortages and power outages) in Tecamac, Estado de Mexico. Residents first coalesced to purchase water pipes and diesel generators and to make front to multiple pressing issues, such as crime, by forming neighborhood watches. Yet, predatory mortgage lending eventually became one of their focal points, mobilizing through protests and lawsuits. Ecatepec and Cuautitlan Izcalli, residents of the state of Mexico, eventually joined the movement (Marosi, 2017).

Bridging proactive and reactive strategies

The changing political environment in Brazil has been significantly influential in shaping UNMP mobilization. El Frente, on the other hand, has had to consistently respond to a hostile financialized landscape of housing dispossession and its consequences for households. In both cases, movements have reacted to a changing (UNMP) or established status quo (El Frente) of commodification and financialization. Responding to the global financial crisis, Lula’s administration created the Minha Casa Minha Vida (MCMV) program in a negotiation with the construction industry to build one million housing units through the financialized private market supply with public subsidies for buyers. The MCMV program combined various housing production modalities for different income brackets. As it was first designed, private developers were the only possible agents of housing production through MCMV. Reacting to the initial model, in November 2008, UNMP, the Fórum Nacional de Reforma Urbana7 (FNRU), and other social movements carried out protests and occupations in several states demanding the inclusion of autogestão. These mobilizations sought to counter the initial design of MCMV, which resulted in the opening of spaces for negotiations with the federal administration.

Due to these mobilizing efforts, UNMP and other housing movements were invited to meet with representatives from the federal government with specific demands about the design of MCMV. Within these demands, UNMP requested that part of the one million housing units from MCMV be destined to autogestão, leading to the creation of the Entidades modality. ⁸ UNMP and other movements effectively pushed for communities, cooperatives, and housing movements to be actively involved in autogestão efforts within MCMV as a reaction to the initial policy proposal ⁹ (e.g., Mineiro and Rodrigues, 2012; Teixeira, 2018). This modality represented a disruption and an alternative to the initially proposed privatized and financialized housing production model. While the scale of Entidades was limited (e.g., Stiphany and Ward, 2019), its impact and possibilities for individuals, communities, and movements are essential to underscore as a win for UNMP and the coalition of housing movements that came together to demand its existence (de Jesus, 2016).

The housing policy and mobilization landscapes changed significantly in Brazil with President Dilma Rousseff’s 2016 coup and impeachment. Michel Temer capped public spending for 20 years to reduce government expenditures in social programs such as MCMV. Such cutting of funds significantly reduced MCMV’s new construction for groups 2 and 3 and suspended all spending for group 1 (the lowest-income group) and Entidades (Nascimento Neto and Salinas Arreortua, 2019). In this context, UNMP mobilization shifted reactively towards preserving MCMV, Entidades, and the right to housing in Brazil. The movement organized protests, occupations of public buildings, round tables, and public talks. UNMP denounced the policy’s shutdown and stoppage of existing contracts and construction of Entidades projects while highlighting the importance of expanding government-funded autogestão. This direction of mobilization against funding cuts and the dismantling of MCMV was maintained as Jair Bolsonaro was elected president in 2018. Bolsonaro continued to block new contracts for Group 1 and Entidades and reduced MCMV’s federal budget to the lowest level in its history. Early in 2019, at the beginning of Bolsonaro’s administration, UNMP organized protests in Brasília in defense of Entidades and grassroots housing production through autogestão.

Much of the work of UNMP during Bolsonaro’s government was, in fact, reactive to the deepening of housing financialization. Part of the movement’s historical and proactive work in advocating for the national institutionalization of autogestão as a law also became reactive due to the changing political landscape. In 2021, UNMP put forward a legislative proposal in the House of Representatives to create a law and legal framework for housing autogestão in Brazil (PL 4216/2021). Historically, the movement fought for such legislation, but it became more pressing during Bolsonaro’s government and the dismantling of Entidades and MCMV deep subsidies. Bolsonaro also introduced securitization schemes and changed the adjustment of housing debt to inflation within Brazil’s real estate financial system. These changes were likely to lead to a more profound phase of housing financialization in Brazil, potentially resulting in diminished household safeguards, increased household indebtedness, and heightened commodification (Reyes and Basile, 2022). UNMP’s trajectory demonstrates the need to react to changing political landscapes of financialization while bridging its historical proactive work of creating the material conditions for future alternatives, such as through the autogestão legislation.

Unlike Brazil, where the lowest-income residents’ group had access to deep subsidies and were protected from deep household indebtedness resulting from financialization, Mexico heavily depended on substantial household debt and subprime lending, leaving borrowers vulnerable to significant financial hazards, and turning households into financial instruments aimed at bolstering mortgage markets. Mexican households faced severe housing debts and, in many cases, an overall lack of infrastructure in housing developments, property depreciation, and housing abandonment (Reyes and Basile, 2022). These extreme realities of dispossession through housing financialization have informed El Frente’s overall work. The movement has centered on denouncing what they call a mega mortgage and real estate fraud through demonstrations, investigations documenting housing deficiencies, and providing legal advice for its members. They have denounced and launched lawsuits against real estate developers and public officials for various reasons. These include breaches and irregularities of contracts, non-compliance with construction regulations, the sale of homes before their completion and municipalization (for service and infrastructure provision), the absence of property insurance despite the payment of fees, the overvaluation of over half a million homes, the construction on communal land (ejidos) without full domain (in Estado de Mexico and Jalisco), among other anomalies. Since 2010, El Frente has mobilized and publicly protested multiple agents and institutions in reaction to such realities and their impacts. ¹⁰

Using housing deficiencies and home overvaluations as justification, Frente members refused to continue paying their mortgages in 2009, facing foreclosure proceedings shortly after. By emphasizing the constitutional right to adequate housing and the above complaints, the movement has won trials in favor of its members. They highlight critical legal wins such as the recognition of an absence of foreclosure legislation in the state of Mexico and Nuevo Leon, ¹¹ which aided thousands of households in avoiding eviction, and their win against financial/mortgage institutions that charged fees without providing insurance. Nonetheless, the state’s Supreme Court initially ruled in favor of financial institutions (most notably SOFOLES) to evict homebuyers through civil or commercial trials, which El Frente saw as procedural fraud. In 2010, the state’s attorney general refused to review over 40 civic cases by El Frente. Yet, the movement reacted with legal actions to halt foreclosures and evictions and continued to denounce and shed light on these issues publicly.

Overall, El Frente’s efforts are reactive to the material and socio-economic conditions that have allowed for the dispossession of its members caused by deep housing financialization. Despite their reactive nature, their mobilizations and narratives aim to advance the constitutional right to adequate housing and dismantle the political, economic, and judicial infrastructures of housing financialization in Mexico, chiefly through the courts. While lawsuits and protests have been their primary modes of action, some of El Frente’s members were elected to public office in 2018, bridging their previous reactive work and proactively addressing the holes in Mexico’s legal system by inserting themselves into decision-making processes to advance their demands and vision. Nonetheless, they have continued denouncing the current head of SHF and his links to the mortgage institution, Patrimonio, and other elected officials, urging the federal government to promote changes in these financialized processes of housing provision by eliminating intermediaries.

UNMP and El Frente bridge their work of reacting to immediate needs and threats to the proactive work of instituting possible alternatives through legislation or electing officials. Reacting is essential as it allows movements to continue supporting members’ social reproduction, as seen in the case of El Frente through the halting of evictions. UNMP initially reacted to the creation of the MCMV program, pushing for citizen control in housing production, ultimately leading to the inclusion of the Entidades modality, an alternative to commodified and financialized housing production. There are also significant differences between these cases. The realities of housing financialization in Brazil are much less extreme than in Mexico. Therefore, the current work of UNMP revolves predominantly around advancing an alternative to financialized housing production (except during Bolsonaro’s government).

On the other hand, El Frente’s reactive work responds to the extreme dispossession caused by housing financialization in Mexico while attempting to dismantle its infrastructures through protest and the courts. Both movements demonstrate the importance of bridging reactive responses to immediate threats with proactive strategies for long-term structural change. They highlight the necessity of multifaceted approaches in addressing housing financialization and promoting housing justice.

Bridging invented/invited spaces of action

In both cases, organizing efforts combine the use of co-constituted invented and invited spaces under developing political realities that are unstable and often changing. Invited spaces are those sanctioned and legitimized by government agencies and institutions. Invented spaces are created by grassroots organizing, defined by defiance of the existing structures that perpetuate dispossession. UNMP’s approach occupies spaces of action offered by the state while creating new organizing spaces. Invented spaces of action, such as protests and occupations, have allowed UNMP to share their visions and values while at the same time opening new invited spaces of participation and partially institutionalizing their demands, such as the creation of MCMV Entidades through mobilization and opening a space for formal negotiations with the federal government. On the other hand, much of the work of UNMP’s state-based units focuses on producing housing through autogestão and training leaders and groups in the theory and practice of autogestão. The active production of housing through autogestão at the local scale constitutes the creation of invited citizenship spaces of action that challenge the status quo of commodified and financialized housing development.

Jair Bolsonaro’s government (2019–2022) closed the existing invited spaces at the federal scale. Bolsonaro eradicated the Ministry of Cities, responsible for articulating urban policies such as the MCMV, and eliminated spaces of participation for social movements and civil society organizations at the federal government, even taking steps to privatize CAIXA (Longo, 2019). His government also instituted Casa Verde Amarela12 (CVA) in 2020, a new housing policy to replace MCMV. CVA eliminated housing production for the poorest households and eradicated the Entidades modality. The program privileged the market’s role in housing production, aiming to significantly further housing financialization through new securitization schemes and eliminating existing household protections (Reyes and Basile, 2022). The lack of federal funding for autogestão prevented local chapters from continuing to produce housing as a proactive strategy and invited space of action.

These changes affected the work of UNMP at multiple scales. The eradication of invited formal spaces of participation within the federal government led UNMP to focus on alternative mobilization approaches. UNMP used its website and social media platforms with texts, videos, and live discussions to continuously denounce and demonstrate resistance to Bolsonaro’s government cuts for housing, furthering the interests of the real estate market through CVA and denying the right to housing to people experiencing poverty in Brazil. In August of 2021, UNMP organized protests in 10 states in partnership with other social movements to contest Bolsonaro’s actions during the pandemic and the lack of a policy for housing low-income households. The closing of invited spaces of participation and the intent to further housing financialization policies led to the intensification of protests and invented spaces of action. Other possibilities of invited spaces opened through organizing and protest, such as proposing autogestão legislation through mobilization of allied political actors. Changing political realities, needs, and demands requires bridging invented and invited spaces of action, moving from one to another according to such necessities.

El Frente began with local and informal grassroots mobilizations and became a formal organization to institutionalize their demands using invented and invited spaces. Members refusing to pay their mortgages directly challenged the dispossessions created by housing financialization, constituting invented spaces of contention. Yet, such actions led the movement to invited spaces like the courts. In turn, lawsuits resulted in some institutionalization of demands, such as the recognition of an absence of foreclosure legislation in the state of Mexico and Nuevo Leon. This and other wins, such as against mortgage institutions that charged fees without providing insurance, aided thousands of households in avoiding eviction.

While legal action has yet to successfully achieve other outcomes, using invited spaces of citizenship, such as the courts, also helped El Frente gain media attention. Bridging invented and invited spaces of action, jumping from working outside formalized spaces to taking advantage of institutionalized opportunities, has been important for the movement to grow in scale, diversify its focus, and raise public awareness around what they call a permanent mortgage crisis for millions of Mexican households. The work of El Frente exemplifies how the use of invited and invented spaces of action inform each other in a co-constitutive manner, as well as the importance of bridging from one to the other. Nevertheless, the invited spaces of action used by El Frente have been predominantly the courts. Conversely, UNMP has employed similar strategies, utilizing both invented spaces, such as protests and occupations, and invited spaces offered by the state to advance their demands and challenge the status quo. Since Brazil’s democratization process, social movements, including UNMP, have been able to use the numerous spaces of participation created by the 1988 constitution at all scales of government (e.g., Pimentel Walker and Friendly, 2021). Under Jair Bolsonaro’s government, these invited spaces were eradicated, prompting UNMP to focus on alternative mobilization approaches and intensified protests to contest the deepening of financialization. Like bridging reactive/proactive strategies, bridging invented/invited spaces of action demonstrates how housing movements adapt to changing realities and create new counter-hegemonic spaces of action to further their agendas and propositions.

Bridging scales

Both UNMP and El Frente bridge scales of organizing to shape policies, demand accountability, promote legal actions, and illuminate the production of dispossession embedded in commodification and financialization processes. UNMP’s successes are partially attributed to its modes of organizing at multiple scales of action and policy and its connections to political allies, especially leftist political parties such as the Partido dos Trabalhadores ¹³ – PT (Tatagiba and Teixeira, 2016). Its multiple scales of organizing and alliances have allowed it to contain processes of financialization and its negative impacts to a certain degree. As opposed to housing financialization in Mexico, MCMV had substantial subsidies from the federal government, preventing beneficiaries from acquiring unpayable debts. Group 1 of MCMV, the lowest income group within the policy, had subsidies of 80%–96% of the total housing costs. Such subsidies were partially possible because of UNMP and other social movements’ historical proximity to the Partido dos Trabalhadores and Lula’s government, which protected households directly from the catastrophic consequences of debt (Tatagiba and Teixeira, 2016). Additionally, furthering institutionalized, government-funded autogestão through Entidades also put forward a model for de-financialization. UNMP mobilizing at the federal level has also given them considerable visibility and reach to denounce the elimination of federal funding towards housing for lower-income beneficiaries and Entidades, the dismantling of MCMV, and the advancement of financialization during Temer and Bolsonaro’s governments.

UNMP organizing and national advocacy is one component of its work. Still, their structure of interconnected state and local-based chapters means that their work at the federal level is informed by their work on the ground, bridging multiple scales of action. Local chapters develop partnerships with government agencies at various scales to build self-managed housing projects, where members collectively manage resources and the entire construction process, hire necessary technical assistance, and make decisions, providing control and autonomy for low-income families to be agents in building their homes. Leadership development, peer-to-peer education, and exchange are critical components of their work, highlighted often on social media platforms. Such proactive work sets the foundation for the movement’s future and materializes the proposals they seek to achieve, serving as evidence for their advocacy at the federal level. The Brazilian case shows the importance of multi-scale mobilization and the connections between scales to enact change locally while institutionalizing alternatives nationally and countering global trends like financialization.

The Mexican case demonstrates how the local dispossession resulting from financialization can bring people together to fight against such processes. El Frente started as a resident association and has since expanded to other localities, although fragmented and without national reach. To an extent, El Frente’s growth widened the range of issues denounced through the courts by the movement. Lawsuits have delayed or avoided evictions and removed fees from mortgage institutions. Yet, they have also had to move on to engage with other issues they confronted while contesting the negative implications of financialization, such as the political use of the Mexican criminal justice system.

At a local scale, the movement has continuously worked to protect households from eviction due to the pandemic and what they call a permanent mortgage crisis due to financialization. In 2011, a group of homebuyers who had been in communications with El Frente in the state of Veracruz also presented a lawsuit against the development company HOMEX, former municipal officials, SOFOLES, INFONAVIT, and FOVISSSTE ¹⁴ for the incomplete construction of sold homes and the lack of public lighting and garbage collection, sewage, drainage, and water services. At the state level, and as previously noted, El Frente highlighted the absence of foreclosure legislation in the state of Mexico and Nuevo Leon and helped thousands of households stay housed. In 2014, they also launched a state-wide investigation of a water infrastructure system that serviced over 6000 families, over double its capacity and authorization, leading to water shortages.

The movement has called for there not to be any more intermediaries within Mexico’s financialized housing infrastructure. They argue that eliminating intermediaries (such as SOFOLES) between SHF, a public bank, and homebuyers would promote lower and more competitive interest rates for prospective homeowners. ¹⁵ El Frente’s relationship with the current federal government has contributed to advancing other demands, such as progressive mortgage rates to further protect households and the halting of evictions from INFONAVIT-financed homes. El Frente also shed light on using federal resources during previous administrations to obscurely rescue SOFOLES by creating trusts that now manage mortgage portfolios and have launched foreclosure proceedings, which the movement opposes. Such mobilizing efforts helped raise public awareness around housing issues at multiple scales, bridging the work of supporting members while demanding change. Yet, the severe problems with the Mexican criminal justice system have made their lawsuit wins scarce. As outlined by Humbertus Perez, lawyer, president, and legal representative of El Frente, nine out of ten pre-trial investigations never reach court. The movement thus began to denounce the problematic non-exercise of criminal proceedings or prosecutions. Such a scale of housing mobilization was absent in the past in Mexico.

In sum, El Frente’s mobilizing and advocacy bridge neighborhood, state, and national scales by making the intermediaries within financialization processes visible and challenging the distances created within these structures to advocate for change. Similarly, their work across scales allows them to directly address the consequences of financialization while attempting to alter such processes. Like UNMP in Brazil, bridging scales have expanded El Frente’s mobilizing reach and visibility. Nevertheless, El Frente’s use of invited spaces revolves predominantly around the courts through legal action. On the other hand, UNMP has taken advantage of the progressive Brazilian legislation and its many institutionalized invited spaces of participation across scales.