From proletarian to owners, from owners to investors: a reflection on the socio-spatial transformation of housing in Chile

Abstract

Housing matters not just as a guarantee of people’s fundamental rights, but also as a space for personal and affective development and for social insertion, along with access to different networks, opportunities, goods, and services that cities offer. In the last few years, a global access to housing crisis has been created, catapulted by the neoliberal logic that has converted the city into a space for speculation through the housing markets. In the Chilean case, the fingerprints of the dictatorship remain alive through the logic of converting the country from proletarians into owners through a vision of housing as a consumer good. Recently, this has been distorted by a new logic of understanding housing as a financial asset, thus converting these owners into investors. This study analyzes the socio-spatial location patterns in the social housing complexes built between 1974 and 2017 and the property developments with an investment approach built from 2010 to 2023. The results show the profound imprint these new owner and investor dynamics have left on the different Chilean cities, evidencing that housing is not just an investment asset par excellence, but also an element that consolidates socio-spatial inequalities.