The real estate sector and economic crisis

Abstract

The growing urbanization of the economy and the double concentration (economic and territorial) of the real estate and financial sectors within major metropolises provide the basis of the relation between real estate cycles, the economic crises brought on by bubbles on the real estate sector, the high degree of macroeconomic influence by the real estate sector, and the role of this sector as the mediator between the financial sector and the real economy. Before the latest financial crisis in 2008, financial institutions and transnational real estate investment funds found an efficient road to geographic diversification and mortgage risk distribution through financialization and securitizacion. Coincidentally, this was also the clearest pathway for the contagion of a crisis that was financially ubiquitous, although not socially or territorialy so. The subprime mortgages were granted to marginalized minorities in neighborhoods made up for the most part by Hispanics, African Americans, immigrants and lower-class populations: American social housing, having been financialized, infected the financial sector with real estate mortgage-backed securities, which ended up definancializing the international banking sector in a global crisis with dramatic social and political consequences.

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