Who Builds Our Homes? the Power of Homebuilders in the Urban Landscapes in Brazil and the United States

This paper analyses the transformations in the ownership structure of homebuilders in Brazil, and their relation to the financialization of the housing policy.

The analyses of the ownership structure of homebuilders, as well as their year-to-year transformations over the last ten years, allowed the identification of the investment flows that entered that sector: public funds, private equity funds, and Initial Public Offerings. The results of our research indicate that these flows contributed to the increase in concentration and centralization of capital in the sector in Brazil. The flow of capital – affected by financial logic – has driven transformations in homebuilders’ territorial and market strategies, in the building sites, and also in their products. In short, in architecture and urban forms.

At the same time, the ideology of homeownership and of the ‘market economy solutions’ were mobilized against other alternatives developed in different fights for the right to the city.

The increase of real estate companies' financial scale represents the increased asymmetry in the power to impose their requirements upon the city, as opposed to residents' power to democratically define the spatial organization of their lives.

The study compares the transformations that occurred in Brazil with those that took place in the United States. The concentration and centralization of capital in the American housing sector – with massive growth in open capital homebuilders – is also a recent process, fed by the housing bubble that exploded in the financial crises of 2007-08. This work discusses the similarities and differences of the impact of financial globalization in such different social structures, as are the Brazilian and the American systems.

This paper is based on research on the theme done during our masters and PHD in the fields of Urbanism, Sociology and Economics.