“Revenue Generating Machines”? London’s Local Housing Companies and the Emergence of Local State Rentierism

Abstract

Since 2010, faced with deep austerity measures, 27 London councils have set up a housing company to acquire, develop, and manage housing. Following 40 years of privatisation, these council-owned companies have been celebrated as a post-neoliberal municipal alternative to the hegemony of market-led urban policy. By developing commodified real estate and monetising rising land values, they promise to deliver well-designed housing, generate long-term fiscal rents, and secure local state autonomy. Drawing on in-depth empirical research, this paper develops a situated political economic critique of the limitations, contradictions, and risks of local housing companies in London. Framed as a “critical case”, providing insight into the politics of speculative urban provisioning and land value extraction, I argue that local housing companies represent a mode of municipal statecraft—a local state rentierism—that leans into and reproduces a political economy of financialisation and rentierism with potentially long-term implications for collective urban provisioning.