Rent as a flexible housing-financial management mechanism in the digital age: new informality, market and public policy

• Grant number: 21/00391-6
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships in Brazil - Post-Doctoral
• Start date: August 01, 2021
• End date: February 05, 2023
• Field of knowledge: Applied Social Sciences - Urban and Regional Planning
• Principal Investigator: Raquel Rolnik
• Grantee: Isadora de Andrade Guerreiro
• Host Institution: Faculdade de Arquitetura e Urbanismo (FAU). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

During the 2010's, a transformation in housing began to be observed in Brazil: the housing deficit indicator that was growing the most was "excessive rent burden", indicating an increase in relevance of rental housing. This dynamic was accompanied by the worldwide trend - after the mortgage/financial crisis of 2008 - of transformation of residential markets with the emergence of transnational corporate landlords and other forms of centralized rent exploitation. Thanks to the support of digital technologies, a new phase of financialization emerges linked to the so-called shared economy, which allows the concentration of dispersed income through the management of capital flows generated in the provision of services, tensioning the limits of local regulations. In the housing field, the combination of these elements led to the appearance of new trends in low-income living, which articulate, based on tenancy forms, the persistence of the country's historic informality with new flexible arrangements, whether through the financial market or with the support of public policies. This project proposes to analyze this new scenario, focusing on articulation between the new and the old forms of rental housing present in the city of São Paulo Downtown area, as the territorial locus of research, a region where there is a link of three dynamics: 1. the informality in low-income territories, with concomitant presence of old and changing forms of rental housing; 2. new strategies and products in the real estate market, which have challenged the sector's regulations through the transformation of housing into service, supported by information technology; 3. a new generation of public policies, incorporating normative, productive and managerial flexibilities in the housing field through rent. (AU)