On financialization and state spatial fixes in Brazil. A geographical and historical interpretation of the housing program My House My Life

The paper presents a historical overview of the relations between housing, housing finance and capital markets in Brazil, while embedding it into an analysis of the recently launched housing program My House My Life (MCMV). Considering the absence of a consolidated market for mortgage finance and a public housing stock, Brazilian financialization doesn't fit standard narratives that have either prioritized US or European experience. Brazilian financialization has been truncated in the sense that it has always depended on the contradictory territorial intervention of a developmental state that has never reached out to lowest income groups. While MCMV has seen continuities in relation to the housing delivery and finance of the technocratic developmental state in terms of not matching low-income housing targets and priorities of national urban reform, it is argued that contradictions are not inscribed in space. More particularly, where proactive local governments have been able to make use of city statute instruments in order to articulate land delivery, the program has been able to produce affordable and well-located housing units. Finally, the inherent contradictions of financialization are not likely to lead to subprime crises, contagion and ex-post state rescue operations as occurred in the US and European context. Instead, endogenous state involvement in subsidized housing finance will increasingly face budgetary and monetary restrictions, leading to a relatively soft landing and gradual public withdrawal from lowincome housing finance. In that sense, MCMV might prove to become another innovation that fails to live up to expectations. © 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.