The rise of rental as a form of access to housing has been observed throughout Latin America as part of a global dynamic that took place after the 2008 global crisis. Global corporate landlords and new management models related to the "shared economy" capable of connecting financial capital to digital platforms and concentrate dispersed income flows are emerging in private residential market benefiting from great regulatory. Meanwhile, rental is also on the rise in ‘urban popular territories’, expanding a lucrative ‘popular real estate market’, fueled by new illegalities, evictions and public policies of subsidized rental. We observe, also, the emergence of a new generation of public policies, focused on promoting social rental housing, especially through public-private partnerships that connect popular housing markets with finance, with an important impact on the restructuring of popular territories and the redefinition of housing as a service. Based on a review of literature and official documents and business prospectuses, interviews, and fieldwork in popular territories, especially in Chile and Brazil, we argue that rental housing may be the new frontier that connects finance and real estate, with the ability to reach the popular world, instrumentalizing and generalizing illegalities.

The financialization of housing has been observed throughout the world in a vast array of literature. However, as Aalbers (2017) points out, in the analysis of the phenomenon it is necessary to articulate the global dynamics with local conditions, implying a diversity of concrete experiences. In the case of Latin America, among the local and global determinants, we highlight the role of international agencies like the IADB (Inter-American Development Bank) and the World Bank (Blanco et al., 2014; Peppercorn & Taffin, 2013) in the promotion of reforms to the models to the financing and the provision of housing, as well as the arrival in the region of firms and corporations with regional performance connected with global financial circuits. These interventions take place in a context of urban development of historical characteristics, where housing has been produced in the frontier between legality and illegality, between formal and informal, in a context marked by “virações” 1 (Telles, 2007). In this article, we intend to describe the development of the most current forms of housing financialization through the rental mechanism, under the hypothesis that its flexible form, which transforms housing into a service, may be the new frontier that connects financial and real estate sectors, with ‘popular world’, instrumentalizing and generating illegalities (Telles, 2013). For this purpose, we shall draw on examples coming mainly from the Chilean and Brazilian experiences.

The expansion of the connection between finance and real estate in the region has travelled a path that began in the 1990s with products related to commercial spaces, with the formation of the first Real Estate Investment Trusts (REIT), Fundo de Investimento Imobiliário [FII] in Brazil, Fideicomisos de Inversión de Bienes Raíces [FIBRA] in Mexico) expressed in corporate towers (Fix, 2007), shopping centers, and logistics warehouses (“Cidade Estado Capital”, 2018), eventually including housing. The housing sector, being a universal necessity, is strategic in this process, with the potential of reaching large scale, apart from its great political appeal, which translates into public support for private ventures involved in this sector and the attraction of large capital investment funds.

The construction of the connection between housing and finance has had different phases in the region. Since 1990, in Latin America two parallel processes took place. The first one, related to the mass-production of homeownership through mortgage loans; the second emerged in the realm of self-promotion of housing, with policies for the regularization of titles. In the first process, Chile was an important laboratory, due that, since the 1980s, public housing funding was based on mortgage securities traded in the secondary market. In this manner, a private housing supply system was configured with subsidized demand, linked to the financial system through mortgage markets (Mioto, 2015). This model expanded around the region and grew in scale during the 1990s with the IPOs of real estate development firms (Fix, 2011), first in Mexico (INFONAVIT program) and later in Brazil, by the end of the decade of 2000, as anti-cyclic policy in response to the financial crisis of 2008 (Programa Minha Casa Minha Vida [PMCMV]).

However, the predominant model in the region, self-promotion of housing and of the city, has always been a limit for the expansion of financialization, insofar as informality imposes a high degree of legal insecurity. The theses on the massive granting of property titles to informal settlements by Hernando de Soto (2001) were praised by multilateral organisms as the solution for this problem and were implanted in a number of Latin American countries. These measures were unable to promote a broader access to credit, among other reasons, due to the low level of bancarization access of the population (Cockburn, 2011; Riofrio, 1998). The informality in the production of housing is still to this day a limit for the financialization of ‘popular housing’.

Our hypothesis in this article indicates that the recent transformations in housing markets in the region, related to the rise in rentals and to mechanisms for the concentration of its income flows, have the ability to configure a new frontier for the expansion of finance over the ‘popular’ real estate market. Housing transformed into a service by means of the rent, shows greater flexibility in terms of regulations, production, and mobilization of demand, shifting the issue of housing from a need to respond to precariousness and informality, to the field of housing insecurity management. In this place, the links between housing and finance take predominance over the profitability coming from large scale production of ownership housing, prioritizing the payback of invested capital through centralized and long-term income flows, reinforcing, and consolidating the context of “permanent transience” (Rolnik, 2018) to which the ‘popular classes’ are subject to. These processes open spaces for diverse forms of public-private partnerships, in which, in the name of the housing needs of the population -both to activate real estate rents from the availability of public land and to give security to contracts through guarantee funds (“Cidade Estado Capital”, 2018)-; even securing income flows over time, that can be securitized. Thus, housing, like all the rest of social rights, can be provided through outsourced services (Lavinas & Gentil, 2018).

In this article, we shall observe, firstly, the global transformations that have occurred in the housing sector after the 2008 subprime mortgages crisis, which promoted rental housing as a mechanism for the extraction of real estate profit, producing large global portfolios of assets, by corporate landlords linked to the financial market. We shall then address the way in which the connections of these new dynamics are being established with the territories of the low-income classes, traversed by informality. We shall demonstrate the way in which its nature, seeming at first glance to be an obstacle for the expansion of finance, has strongly marked a new frontier of financialization at a time of global flexibility of labor relations, and their concentration through income flows.

In methodological terms, the article is based on a review of the bibliography as well as of documents and official policies on housing, with an emphasis on those that promote rental housing at a local level, particularly in Chile and Brazil, as well as on documents with a regional and global reach (multilateral agencies), as a way to reveal the discourses, ideologies, and practices that constitute this new frontier for the financialization of rental housing. Interviews have also been done with key actors in Chile and Brazil related to the production of new rental-oriented real estate products, such as real estate developers, construction companies, real estate consultants, investment fund managers, and experts in the field, in order to assess the strategies for the constitution of this new market, and how the financialization circuits that stimulate the production of rental housing operate. The interviews were complemented with data from different sources: company catalogues, web pages, developers’ associations, articles in the press and specialized media. The latter sources also supplied knowledge on the progress of rental housing financialization in other Latin American countries, like Mexico, Peru, and Colombia.

Finally, based on a field work in the popular territories in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil (Moreira et al., 2020), it was possible to explore the new dynamics related to investments in lucrative low-income rental housing, associated with illegalities, evictions and even with rent subsidy policies.

There is a structural transformation underway in the global scenarios: the grow of private rent at all income levels (Nethercote, 2020). In Latin America, especially, this process has intensified approximately two decades ago.

It is an important transformation within a relatively stable framework, which, since the decades of 1950-1960, has marked the access to housing trough possession or private property ownership and self-construction, with a large presence of informality in diverse aspects of housing production, commercialization, and usage. In all of Latin America, this process has combined a heavy industrialization phase with the predominance of access to housing through ownership, resulting in a 20% regional average ratio of rent tenancy -Colombia is the country with the highest rate of tenants in the region, with a 45.6% rate according to CEPALSTAT (2021)-, while the average rate in Europe is 30% (ranging from 20% in Iceland to 55% in Switzerland), and 33% in the US and Canada (Blanco et al., 2014).

However, this scenario has changed in several countries. According to data by CEPAL, since the year 2000, the percentage of households with rentals grew by 8.8%, being Mexico, Paraguay, Uruguay, and the Dominican Republic the countries with a variation above the mean, and Argentina and Brazil, Colombia, Costa Rica, Chile, and Nicaragua with variations beyond 20% (Figure 1).

This trend of change in the housing tenure profile presents different, yet combined, dynamics in the different market segments. In formal markets, there is a trend towards concentration of assets in the portfolios of corporate landlords, as we shall see next, with a clear segmentation of the demand profile, on occasions supported by public-private partnerships. In the case of the informal markets, to which we will go into more depth later, the tendency is to the establishment of new forms of capturing rent via schemes of private control of territorial management, immersed -or not- in illicit circuits, and even promoted by public policies of distribution of demand vouchers.

After the 2008 Crisis, we are witnessing in the private market the emergence of new corporate landlords (Fields, 2018), together with a supply of housing related to new models or management, such as the “collaborative economy”, which articulates financial capitals and digital platforms (Fields, 2019), promising to democratize access to the residential markets and to the formation of communities based on the predominance of use over ownership (Slee, 2017; Tavolari & Nisida, 2020).

In a previous text, we pointed out the relevance of the connection between residential rental housing and finance, an issue that sets the course for a new front of housing financialization and expropriations on a global scale:

The global financial crisis made evident the key relation between housing and the dynamics of wealth and profitability, underscoring how the imperatives of accumulation create cycles of speculation with adverse effects like the crisis itself (Fields, 2018). After 2008, as a consequence of the financial and real estate debacle, in several countries in the Global North, ownership housing ceased being equivalent to housing security (Ronald, 2008). However, it subsequently offered new opportunities for the extraction of value (Fields, 2018).

In the case of the United States, for example, private equity funds benefited from the fall in housing prices and bought thousands of units with foreclosed mortgages, reconverting them into rent housing, given the rise in the demand, issuing at the same time new financial instruments backed by this type of tenancy (Fields, 2017); adding to the eviction of persons and families from the foreclosed homes, new access barriers to credit, apart from incomes that were even less stable (Hochstenbach & Ronald, 2020), rental housing is defined as an important secondary plot in the history of the Global Financial Crisis (Kemp, 2015, quoted by Hochstenbach & Ronald, 2020). There is also the arrival of the “Global Corporate Landlords” (Beswick et al., 2016), who centralize the financial management of large real estate portfolios internationally. The global corporate landlords were also present in the privatization of rent-oriented public and social housing in European cities.

In Latin America, ownership housing has played a more relevant political role in comparison with the reality in some countries in the Global North (Santana-Rivas, 2020), where there has been -to different degrees, depths, and relevance- a housing trajectory linked to rental housing. In Latin America, in general, rental had functioned rather autonomously, that is, a private market, fragmented and dispersed, that had evolved both into a formal as well as into an informal market. However, new actors appear, involved in the rental market, appropriated, and managed at a large scale under the logic of financialization, instead of including small owners, non-professionalized, that own just one property destined for rental.

What we have observed in the region so far is the emergence of the multifamily model, widely present in the United States. It consists of buildings that do not make up a condominium, that is, the sum of fractions of properties; but a single property that is rented in fractions, in a centralized and standardized management model. The typology corresponds to minimal units, hotel room type, with shared services and linked to the e-commerce market, frequently associated with residential rentals via short-term stay platforms like Airbnb (Vannuchi, 2020).

When creating a product adapted to this market, buildings must lose their local characteristics, be it qualitatively or by management of their property, so that they can be centralized through investment funds, which demand a fixed form of profit that is reached by means of asset standardization. There is a fundamental change in lifestyle that is now directly addressed as a service, insofar as the relation that it establishes between owner and consumer is of use, for a certain period of time, and not of sale.

The interest on the part of the corporate landlords for the multifamily model is due to it being an anticyclical model, that is to say, it responds better in periods of crisis; an alternative to other types of assets like industrial, office, and retail, whose performance is more linked to economic growth. Besides, the multifamily scheme also acts as shelter against inflation, because, in general, rental prices grow at a higher rate than inflation, adding to the profits that the investor gets from the asset ( “Multifamily, oportunidad de inversión”, 2019).

In Latin America, the model was first used in Chile in 2013 (Sepúlveda, 2018) and was exported by investors to other cities in the region, especially to two countries: Peru and Colombia (Osorio, 2020), but this model is also present in Mexico and Brazil. In Mexico, Greystar, the largest apartment manager in the United States, has around 3,000 apartments under development or planned in Mexico City. Two former executives at Greystar have also started up a private equity firm: Hasta Capital, for the construction of multifamily homes (Kusisto, 2016). In the case of Brazil, new firms have emerged that have bet on this model, developing buildings that are fully linked to residential rental in a multifamily property scheme, with the prospect of “changing bricks for bytes” (“Alex Frankel”, 2021). Additionally, buildings are being inaugurated that are fully produced for the rental of residential units through Airbnb international platform (Tavolari & Nisida, 2020; Vannuchi, 2020). The choice of these countries is due to their governments having implemented instruments and mechanisms that facilitate the circulation of capital within the built environment, measures that allow the creation of a “secure” environment for investment. Presently, it is this type of country that most attracts the different international financial flows to real estate.

The relation of local firms with large Global Corporate Landlords is evinced by the presence of foreign investment funds, and also by the purchase of technological management platforms, allowing them to become large operators of rent-oriented units. The technological advances in the rental market have been vital in the adoption of property-driven financial accumulation strategies for a new rental market segment (Fields, 2019).

The owners of these developments share a corporate profile: investment and pension funds, real estate developers, family offices, insurance companies. An important characteristic in the case of Latin America is that the implementation of this model implies the restructuring of local firms, which now receive capital contributions from international real estate-financial management corporations (European, North American, or Asian), resulting in the centralization of rental managements outside the countries. In Chile, Prudential Financial is present, a large American insurance company whose branch, PGIM Real Estate is one of the main real estate management firms in the world. Also present in Chile, Colombia and Peru is the British investment fund AshmoreAVENIDA. US’s Greystar is present in Mexico, Chile, and Brazil. Paladin Realty is in Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Chile, Costa Rica, and Colombia. In Brazil, Asian companies are present (Singapur’s CapitalLand), as well as American and Canadian (7 Bridges Capital, ARS and CPP), and European (Q Apartments from Denmark).

The new form of lease under the logic of financialization is a recent market in Latin America but is gaining strength accessing the region and positioning itself, even as a part of public policies, as we shall see next.

The process of `tenancy` in Latin America is also established within the popular territories, that is to say, an increment in the percentage of rented homes in relation to owned ones, independent of the legality of the possession (Abramo, 2009, 2012). The phases of mass-production of ownership housing, as well as precarious housing, even though resulting in less persons living with relatives, have contributed to the increase in land prices and, consequently, an increase in the price of renting. In the case of Brazil, this trend of shifts in the type of tenancy have resulted in an alteration in the profile of the housing deficit for the first half of the 2010 decade due that, at the same time the PMCMV program was being implemented, the rent-related excess expenditure indicator increased exponentially. The excess payment for rentals in Brazil went from 30% of the total housing deficit in 2010 to 50% in 2015. In metropolitan regions, in 2019, the average was 59%, and above 70% in some of them. In families earning up to two minimum wages, in 2018, it represented in average up to 41.2% of their income. (“Características gerais dos domicílios”, 2019), and even beyond 50% in some metropolitan regions (Fundação João Pinheiro, 2021).

In Chile, the cost of land and housing has been steadily on the rise. In 2015, 28% of tenants spent more than a third of their family income paying rent (Link et al., 2019).

It is worthwhile delving deeper into this phenomenon, insofar as it seems to be part of a greater process of transformation in labor relations and housing dynamics throughout Latin America. The increase in accessibility to low-income housing through renting seems to be part of a new scenario of changes in the labor market, becoming increasingly more flexible. The flexibility of the labor market is related to the flexibility of access to housing, particularly among the popular classes, with a key role played by initiatives of “individual ventures” in the search for the daily sustenance, in which the commodification of the old constructions in low-income settlements by means of rentals, is also part of this process.

This flexibility, however, must be analyzed from the perspective of the link between the flexibility trend in the formal market and the historic informality in the region, either in the production of housing or in labor. Our hypothesis is that renting is a relevant mechanism in this link, insofar as it separates property from use, transforming housing into a service, a shift in which the profitability obtained from housing management is more relevant than the one related to its production.

Renting allows to formalize contracts that generate a continuous flow of income and provide access to housing in premises without formal registered ownership, or devoid of full urban legality. This is because rent operates in a private contractual relation that does not necessarily require verification of ownership or legality of the property or the leased portion, information that is necessary only in case of an intervention by the judicial authority in eviction processes. It is thus that the lease contract ends up formalizing the use of a property that, from the physical and judicial-administrative legality point of view, can be informal and precarious.

The trend towards of flexibilization of formal labor relations in work and housing constitutes a double move in peripheral economies such as those in Latin America. On the one side, the institutionalization of precarity, generating insecurity in the reproduction of life; and on the other, this same insecurity is managed as a service in the form of temporary rental housing, allowing increasing financial gains in the market by pushing for greater flexibility in the forms of action of the public authority.

This “new informality” that establishes links, either with the public powers or with the market, but does not become fully formalized, is a process that articulates with others in the peripheral territories. According to Abramo (2009), the scarcity of new land in the periphery transforms and intensifies the dynamics of the dispute for it in the formal or informal market. An issue that generates, among other dynamics, the densification through the formal or informal market, of already consolidated settlements 2 , where a certain centralization of capital 3 and private territorial management starts to appear, often but not exclusively; other agents have also become involved, including business institutions, providers of urban services, and `popular` rental platforms, which operate in a blurry zone between contractual formality and urban and building informality.

From the economical point of view, the informal spheres of accumulation face a difficultly in the concentration of capital due to their “deficient” judicial determination. However, this does not mean less profits, on the contrary, it is a submarket whose profitability is even higher than in formal areas in the city, up to three or four times higher according to data by Abramo (2009) and Meyer et al. (2017). This has resulted in the production of a new form of commodification of the popular territories, based mainly on the mechanism of rental, particularly with the forming of cortiços or tenement houses inside the favelas, the construction of verticalized rooms for rent, and the informal practices of real estate brokerage that emulate formal practices.

Considering how the informal practices of production of the territory approach the formal ones, what characterizes the informality in those markets, differentiating them from the so-called formal markets? According to Telles (2007) these polarities become meaningless and obsolete when they are traversed by financial liberalization, the opening of markets, and less State control.

We must note here the analysis done by Verónica Gago (2015), for whom the financial circuits of global accumulation cannot be understood only by their sphere of circulation “from above”, within the stock exchange markets and corporations, or through financial investment funds that are involved in real estate production. Also “from below”, these circuits are, above all, centralized extractors of value, with many diffuse and “self-managed” properties, mediated and constructed through popular practices of life reproduction as a type of survival viração (Telles, 2007), presently solved by the matrix of entrepreneurialism.

If the “entrepreneurialism” logic crosses all spheres, taking calculation as subjective matrix and financial securitization as guarantee for public policies, it means that we must also delve deeper into the characterization of the new extractive-dispossessive forms, that are no longer based on the whole society, self-construction, and intervening State.

We consider very relevant that renting is being promoted as a new frontier of expansion in a consensual way on the part of public policies, the real estate sector, and the informal real estate market. Perhaps renting seems consensual because it is an instrument that allows the management of popular entrepreneurialism, supported by the existence of a large portion of the population that is dispossessed, in constant viração (Telles, 2007), subjected to the private schemes of territorial management. These private schemes of territorial control take on different forms in various countries in Latin America, but have similar characteristics: the relation between land market and illicit markets, use of private violence, and the intermediation of social practices within the territory. According to Abramo (2012), the informality in rental markets requires local contractual mediators, having assumed diverse functions in the communities, and which the author identifies as an:

In this sense, we shall see next how public policies that subsidize renting dispersed in private stocks inside these territories can legitimize, and event articulate, criminal practices and finance.

During the 1990s, in the first phases of Latin American neoliberalism, the relation between the States and the markets was established mainly through the privatization of public companies. From the next decade on, this process also developed towards a relation of permanent bond between the State and the market by means of associating public patrimony to private management, together with flows of public resources secured in time for the private market. The World Bank and the IDB started to foster, in the entire continent, programs promoting private participation in public policies, even mobilizing the International Finance Corporation (IFC). Its strategy was based on the narrative of “economic emergency” (Paulani, 2010) of the countries, that could only be overcome, according to its arguments, through private investment as advancer of resources for public policies to States that could no longer assume debt. This model establishes a new social contract, privatizing rights and managing them privately as public services (“Cidade Estado Capital”, 2018).

In the urban and housing field, this meant going from a model of participatory negotiations in the public sphere, of a political and conflictive nature, to a logic of liberal rights based on private contracting, where management through a contract assumed a central role. The enterprise-city is established based on urban governance (Harvey, 2006), expressed in different forms throughout Latin American countries, but always following an entrepreneurial logic of urban management, where the land and the public fund plays an important role in the restructuring of private ventures. Far from the ideology of the minimal State, this model of public-private association is the expression of what Aalbers (2016) called regulation of deregulation, and Raco (2014) regulatory capitalism, in which a new regulatory system allows the release of public assets for the capital market. These policies were being regulated in the different countries since the 2000s decade.

As we showed at the beginning of this article, policies of mass-produced housing promoted links between the State and the capital markets through subsidies with public funds, reassuring the markets and promoting asset liquidity for an open capital market. The new phase of financialization goes one step further: now, the purpose is to attract public funds to securitization funds that can serve as collateral for the valorization of private resources. It is not only about the private sector running the public resources for itself but allocating this resource to offer housing as a service, in a model of financial valorization that plays with risk, but whose guarantee lies in the compensations provided by the public fund, capable of ensuring the flow of profits from these investments over time. According to Pereira and Palladini (2019), the public-private association places “housing construction in the strict sense as one more of the various elements in a contract with a set of more complex obligations” (p. 13), introducing a “model of risk in the low-income housing market, for those who know the structuring of the financial market” (p. 13).

In these models of public-private association, well-located public land, and the securitization of public funds, available for private capital, become more important. Housing produced via these models function as a way of capturing real estate valorization through public patrimony and, besides this, with the transformation of housing into an array of services: management of condominiums, social management, leasing of commercial areas, among others, that will justify the compensations of public funds to the private agents for long periods of time. This flow of resources can be securitized, as long as it is backed by guarantee funds constituted by, also public land, lots, that serve as collateral remaining vacant, even with forced evictions (Almeida et al., 2020).

The last step in this process is that housing itself becomes a service, through the mechanism of rent, and is completed with the circulation of new models of public policies on social rent in the region.

Besides leading in mass-production programs, Chile, Mexico, and Brazil are at the forefront in the implementation of these public-private models of association of residential lease. In Chile, since 2014, housing policies have partially covered rent through a national program of rent subsidy called “Programa de Subsidio de Arriendo de Vivienda” (Ross & Pelletier, 2014). The COVID-19 pandemic has served as justification in a context of emergency to promote the access of new actors to this program: multifamily operators specialized in residential lease, so that the beneficiaries of the subsidies may rent in their premises, especially for middle-class groups (Osorio, 2020). Chile’s Deputy-Secretary of Housing explained that:

In the case of Mexico, since 2013, there are programs that subsidize rent in the private market. The first of them incorporates the leasing system into the program of mass-produced housing (INFONAVIT), that was named “ARRENDAVIT”, directed at families with paying capacities, but that were not able to access financing. Other rental initiatives, of a local nature, emerge from the problem of the abandoning of the housing stock built by INFONAVIT, and whose management is centralized at a municipal level, as in the case of the “Renta tu Casa” program, in Tlajomulco.

Recently, in Mexico, public-private partnerships were also established with corporate investors for the construction of projects destined for rent and produced with fiscal benefits and whose users may apply for subsidies to demand. The model is based on the diversification of the investment portfolio, demanding an important market segmentation with diversified strategies for each specific group: students, young millennials, the elderly, workers, armed forces, and immigrants.

Lastly, Brazil announces renting as new public policy. During the 2010s, there is the implementation of the PMCMV and the Programa de Aceleração do Crescimento (PAC) together with processes of displacement fostered by the governments. The mechanism of rent subsidy in the private stock was used as a form of negotiation with the evicted population, mainly in greater cities, as a response to complaints and mobilizations related to the evictions. However, the offered properties in which the aforementioned subsidies were used, are predominantly informal, unregulated, uncontrolled by the public power. In this way, the evictees remain in their own territory, in their surroundings, or in nearby neighborhoods, in informal rent relations, on occasions in a more precarious housing situation than before (Guerreiro, 2020).

The Brazilian government is currently discussing a rent program at a federal scale that drifts apart from the subsidized public stock models, done by means of public-private partnerships and the voucher system (as in Chile) and which tries to capture the flow of public resources for rent subsidies presently aimed at the informal market. The Brazilian government’s proposal wants to make available to real estate funds and corporate landlords underused public land for construction of housing developments that can be partially available for a subsidized rent policy and integrated to the market for a predefined period.

We thus see how Latin America is undergoing a process of transformation of its public housing policies, formerly linked to mass-production of public property and interventions of legalization of the settlements, giving growing centrality to the possibilities allowed by the rental housing, through two major models:

We are talking about a flow of income that relates the real estate market and the financial market with contractual, territorial, and legal flexibility, with the possibility of concentration of assets by corporate landlords, private capture of real estate valorization, subsidies, and public patrimony. Policies that, if widespread, can reaffirm or worsen housing insecurity, with evictions and the commodification of `popular territories`, for it is a form of public policy that does not have as aim a definitive housing solution, but the management of population with housing deficit based on the transformation of housing into a service. It is a policy that assures speculative earnings through public funds that can also be securitized, and which does not address the housing precarities so prevalent in the region.

The theoretical discussion during the decades of the 1960s and 1970s about the particularities of Latin American development, was based on the observation and description of the extensive, autonomous, and precarious urbanization of the metropolises. Together with the public policies for mass-production and interventions in settlements, in Latin America, housing consolidated its character as ownership housing until the 1990s, with a strong presence of self-construction and possession regimes.

After three decades of reconstruction of the Latin American democracies, in the midst of neoliberalism, the results in the urban sphere demonstrate that there weren’t any changes in the structure of spoliation in the region. On the contrary, this structure has deepened and intensified based on processes of dispossession carried out mainly by diverse partnerships between the private sector and the State, which set in motion new frontiers of extraction of the urban capital (formal and informal). In the realm of housing, the mechanism of residential lease is the most relevant one among the new extractive forms (Arboleda, 2016; Duplat, 2017) to which the region is subject, in a scenario of financialization that finds in land and in the built space the central elements of profitability.

Taking this into consideration, we deem necessary to delve deeper into the increment of the presence of residential rent in the popular classes since the last decade, from the perspective of the links between global financial processes and the local specificities of housing, considering the hypothesis that it is a re-updating of the historic informality present in the field of housing in a global context of flexibilization and informalization of the residential market as a whole. This historical informality results in large processes of dispossession in the popular territories, carried out by local forces within informality, like the private market and the State.

Our hypothesis is that there is convergence in the logic of “regulated deregulation” (Aalbers, 2016), that approaches both parts of the old scenario split between formal and informal. This is established in a specific manner by means of financial processes and digital mechanisms, with clear intervention by public policy, even under the form of subsidies, extending housing insecurity and modifying the nature of the qualitative relations with housing. Rent is understood here as a mechanism in this link between flexibilization and informality, insofar as it promotes the transformation of housing into a service, capable of linking public policy and the stock of built housing with private management over time. Instead of the management and production of space, management of time allows to obtain rent even from the poorest among the poor, overcoming a historic obstacle in the expansion of financial capital throughout the cities in the region. The possibility that this management gains momentum with the digital mechanisms, concentrating dispersed flows of income, constitutes an unprecedented connection between informality and finance.