Dallas Rogers

The Politics of Foreign Investment in Australian Housing: Chinese Investors, Translocal Sales Agents and Local Resistance

This article analyses the cultural, housing and intergovernmental politics of individual foreign investment in Australian real estate. The first section provides a brief history of Australias housing system and shows the historical trend toward housing affordability ‘problems’ in Sydney and Melbourne. This review interrogates the claim Chinese investors compounded Australias housing affordability problem after the global financial crisis. The second more substantive section draws on interview, real estate website and media data to demonstrate how the Australian housing system and Chinese and Australian actors enabled Chinese investment in Australian real estate. The third section demonstrates how a minority of Australian residents and some journalists are contesting Chinese foreign investment in Australian real estate. This study shows how contemporary global real estate relations complicate the politics of Asian real estate investment in Anglo-sphere countries.

Inhabitance, place-making and the right to the city: public housing redevelopment in Sydney

This article brings Lefebvres Right to the City thesis into conversation with Baumans notion of the flawed consumer to account for the neoliberal colonisation of public tenant organising in urban redevelopment. Drawing on a case study of public housing redevelopment from Sydney, Australia, we show that neoliberal community building and the emergence of professional community builders obviate the self-organising efforts of tenants. In this case tenants’ rights were attenuated when the housing authority invited private capital to not only rebuild the physical fabric but also remake the social relations around public tenancy within the trope of consumerism. We argue for a revival of tenant self-organising as a collective political project that might counteract the individualisation of tenants’ rights under neoliberal community building regimes. Such a political project needs to be extended beyond the boundaries of the local neighbourhood or ‘housing estate’ to expose the strategies at work in public housing redevelopment projects. Drawing on Right to the City we argue that inhabitance should confer the right to participate in place-making. We conclude that tenant self-organising is one way that tenants imagine, collectively construct and inhabit lived space; it is a process of meaning- and place-making amongst a community with a shared experience of contemporary urban transformation.

The globalisation of real estate: the politics and practice of foreign real estate investment

Foreign investment in residential real estate – especially by new middle-class and super-rich investors – is re-emerging as a key political issue in academic, policy and public debates. On the one hand, global real estate has become an asset class for foreign individual and institutional investors seeking to diversify their investment portfolios. On the other, a suite of intergenerational migration and education plans may also be motivating foreign investors. Government and public responses to the latest manifestation of global real estate investment have taken different forms. These range from pro-foreign investment, primarily justified on geopolitical economic grounds, to anti-foreign investment for reasons such as mitigating public dissent and protecting the local housing market. Within this changing global context, the six articles in this special issue on the globalisation of real estate present a diverse range of empirical case studies from Canada, Hong Kong, Singapore, Russia, Australia and Korea. This editorial highlights four methodological challenges that the articles collectively highlight; they are (1) investor cohorts and property types, (2) regulatory settings, (3) geopolitics and (4) spatial differences and temporal trajectories.

Global city aspirations, graduated citizenship and public housing: analysing the consumer citizenships of neoliberalism

Global city discourses rearticulate the relationships between the state, urban space and the global economy. At the local level, global city reconfigurations stamp the mark of a global economic order onto local citizenship practices. Public housing is a legacy of specific national (welfare) states where citizenship rights arose from territorially bound constitutional discourses, and is incompatible in its current form with the consumer-based rights and responsibilities of a global economic order. At the same time, property markets in high-value areas of cities like Sydney, Australia, see not only increasing presence of international investment but fundamental changes in planning and governance processes in order to facilitate it. Global market-oriented discourses of urban governance promote consumer “performances of citizenship” and a graduated approach to the distribution of rights, including the right to housing. In this article we explore what is new about neoliberal approaches to public and social housing policy, and how public tenants respond to and negotiate it. In Australia tenants’ right to participate in local-level democracy, and in housing management, must be reconsidered in light of the broader discourses of consumer citizenship that are now enforced on tenants as a set of “responsibilities” to the market and state.

The Sydney Metropolitan Strategy as a Zoning Technology: Analyzing the Spatial and Temporal Dimensions of Obsolescence

This paper provides two discrete contributions to urban and spatial theory. The first demonstrates that within discourse analysis conceptions of time and space have analytical utility for investigations into the framings of social and urban policy. The second moves analyses of urban obsolescence beyond Marxism to demonstrate that Foucauldian theory can provide revealing insights about the stewardship of discourses of urban obsolescence through texts and visual images created by different social actors. On the basis of these two contributions I demonstrate how the Sydney metropolitan planning authority has deployed specific spatial and temporal ‘zoning technologies’ to demarcate and evaluate sections of the city. The discourses of obsolescence that have emerged in Sydney are clearly informed by market-centric ideology and discursively constructed, not in the presence of an anemic state and a rational market, but as a technology of power that is deployed by the state and serves the interests of powerful market actors. I conclude that this discursive process is leading to the demise of Sydneys public housing estates.

Education, real estate, immigration: brokerage assemblages and Asian mobilities

ABSTRACT Mobilities of people and capital from Asia to Australia now encompass policies and practices that link immigration, citizenship, international education and real estate investment in complex and entangled ways. These mobilities are mediated by ‘brokerage assemblages’ that cut across state, non-state, human and non-human actors and processes. This article’s primary contribution is to establish how assemblage thinking can be productive for understanding how such complex and interconnected mobilities are mediated. It then illustrates the potential of this approach with a preliminary empirical analysis of a selection of online content that forms part of the brokerage assemblages that link, facilitate and create education, immigration and real estate mobilities from Asia to Australia, primarily from China. We focus on online materials that circulate through three key platforms: (1) a major online investor portal based in Hong Kong and Shanghai that targets transnational investors and brokers (2) a smaller Australian-based property portal utilised by Australian real estate brokers and (3) one mainstream and one industry specific Australian media outlet. We use assemblage thinking to show how forms of information are coded and recoded across different platforms not only to represent, but also to constitute, the links between education, real estate and migration mobilities.

Public perceptions of foreign and Chinese real estate investment: intercultural relations in Global Sydney

ABSTRACT Moving foreign human and financial capital through landed property is not a new phenomenon in Sydney. It is a recurring geopolitical strategy that is replete with intercultural tension and deep colonial roots. In contemporary Australia, there is an assumption in public policy and media rhetoric that there is a high level of public concern about foreign investment. However, there is little empirical data that examines public perceptions. In this study, we are interested in whether the dominant voices in this debate represent broad public views about this issue. We sought to fill this gap by conducting a survey of almost 900 Sydney residents, looking at their perceptions of foreign and Chinese investment. We find high levels of public concern and discontent about foreign investment amongst Sydneysiders, with Chinese investors being a key target of this discontent. In the context of high housing prices in Sydney, there were widely held concerns about housing affordability. Survey respondents had a sophisticated understanding of what influences house prices, but with an overemphasis on the role of foreign investment. There is a general lack of support for policy that encourages foreign investment, and a lack of confidence in how the government is regulating foreign investment. Half of our participants reported that they would not welcome Chinese foreign investment in their suburb.

Research, Practice, and the Space Between: Care of the Self Within Neoliberalized Institutions

This article challenges the neoliberal discourse of “instrumental rationality” that is encroaching on theories of qualitative research, critical reflection, and subjectivity. I return to Foucault’s historical ontology of the self and the ancient Athenian precept care of the self to show that critical reflection and rationality have never been mutually exclusive. I put the care of the self metaphor to empirical use by examining the practical and ethical issues that emerged when I transitioned from a state-sponsored frontline employee working with public housing tenants, to a university researcher investigating public housing tenant participation in a state-sponsored urban redevelopment project. The focus is on my experiences as a practitioner-researcher working within two neoliberalized institutions, while also constructing a performative research ethic to mount a challenge against the politics of neoliberal “evidence” in the space between.

The Poetics of Cartography and Habitation: Home as a Repository of Memories

Abstract This article brings Proust and Bachelard into conversation about inhabiting the home and the role that remembrance, memory and the imagination might play in producing knowledge about the world. Proust and Bachelard both suggest that once a material object, such as a house, has been seized upon by the imagination by those who inhabit the dwelling, it no longer makes sense to assess the space-of-home using “objective” or “mathematical” modalities. Proust’s novel has particular relevance in suggesting how we might think about how the material objects of the home serve as the repository for memories. The aim is to investigate the tension between the experience of urban space and its representations to make cognizant and explicit the use of mathematically informed signs. I suggest that the material features of the urban landscape and home itself hold memories that should be viewed as significant artifacts that constitute how we understand the world. I argue that the formation of the self is constituted through our relations with both imaginary and material objects. This position challenges a concept of the home whereby habitation and imagination are constructed as subordinate to the mathematical measurements of the material world.

Becoming a Super-Rich Foreign Real Estate Investor: Globalising Real Estate Data, Publications and Events

This chapter investigates the global real estate industry, which is developing around the new wave of Asian foreign real estate investment in Anglo-sphere countries. The global real estate industry is up-scaling the local real estate practices of the twentieth century into the global sphere. These new transnational brokering agents promote foreign real estate as a place to park excess capital, a way to obtain educational security for children studying at foreign institutions, and as a way to ‘purchase citizenship’ through a new suite of foreign investment visa regimes. These brokering agents are coaching foreign investors into the ways of becoming a super-rich foreign real estate investor.