2026/01/23 by Veit Braun · 1 voice
Economics, Econometrics and Finance · Social Sciences · #Housing, Finance, and Neoliberalism #Migration, Aging, and Tourism Studies #Place Attachment and Urban Studies
paper · pdf · doi:10.1111/amet.70060
openalex publication_date 2026/01/23 · openalex created_date 2026/01/24 · openalex updated_date 2026/03/10
To have a home is one of the most universal aspirations across the world. It is also one of the most fundamental preconditions for participating in social life, as Mohamed (2022) so vividly points out, recalling his childhood as a second-generation immigrant in Great Britain: a place to sleep, a place to eat, a space to raise children and receive friends, a mailbox with your name on it—all this is what it means to have a home, and all this is at stake in finding or losing a home. A home is thus more than a house, an apartment, a room. It opens your door to social life. And yet having a home often feels like the opposite: being able to close the door behind you and leave social life outside. Precisely because our homes serve so many different purposes for us, because they take over so much of the activities that would otherwise have to take place in hotels, canteens, kindergartens, and restaurants, or would not have a designated place in the first place, they make us feel as if we do not rely on others. This, we could say, is homeownership's fictitious side, one we all too often fall for. In their ethnographies, then, Inés Escobar González and Emrah Yıldız do us a great service in reminding us of the importance of having a home. They take us to places—Hacienda Santa Fe, in the Mexican state of Jalisco, and Tabriz, the Iranian city close to the Turkish border—where homes are not to be taken for granted, but neither are they quite out of reach. In that sense, one could argue, these authors could have taken us anywhere in today's world: whether we are in Pudong, Johannesburg, or Malmö, homes are a universal aspiration. Yet homes are also in short supply. In addressing this, Yıldız's and Escobar González's accounts go far beyond the now-frequent lament about the “housing crisis,” about a middle class that is priced out of the market, or about the conflicts between those who fear for their home's value and those who want to settle among them (Marble & Nall, 2021). The authors do not simply take us to their interlocutors’ prospective homes; they take us to all the other places these homes depend on in their making: Mexico City, Tehran, Istanbul, Manzanillo, Antalya, Berlin, New York City, Washington, DC. It is in these places that we find the investments, savings, debts, and sanctions that shape homeownership, largely outside residents’ control. For people in Tabriz or Hacienda Santa Fe, it is not simply a local or national economy that moves their homes out of reach. In Yıldız's article, it is the sanctions regime imposed on Iran and later reinforced by the United States that has put the Iranian middle class under pressure to move their savings across the border and disentangle themselves from a crumbling national economy by buying a Turkish passport attached to real estate. In contrast, Escobar González tells the story of global, especially US capital flowing into Mexico to build homes on a mass scale after 2001, promising affordable homes to aspiring working-class families, and reliable and solid returns to investors. It because these homes are spread across different countries, economies, and jurisdictions, they remain out of reach. Just when aspiring homeowners think they have finally secured ownership, they are reminded that the price, the value, and indeed the control over their homes lie in the hands of others. Yıldız, describing how sanctions-induced inflation continually moves buying a home out of reach for middle-class Iranians, provides us with a fitting image: “Muhsin and Narmin began to feel as if they were running an impossible race in which the finish line kept receding into the distance.” Where Yıldız's interlocutors are struggling to finalize a crucial transaction, Escobar González's account shows us that even finalization does not mean the end of the struggle for a home. After the bursting of the North American real estate bubble, investments in Mexican homes turned sour on a large scale. At a dizzying pace, firms bought and sold their accounts receivable and the real estate that served as their collateral. As a result, the inhabitants of Hacienda Santa Fe are left in the dark. Who actually owns their homes and their debt, how much do they owe, and can they ever satisfy their obligations? They liken their recurring debt payments to a drug addiction, a need that can never be satisfied. Meanwhile, their houses crumble, shady characters (drug dealers? debt collectors?) roam the neighborhood, and inhabitants of Hacienda Santa Fe turn to vigilantism. Yıldız's protagonists Ahmad and Nazanin fare little better, having paid in full for an Istanbul apartment that is half finished. The social nature of property is at the heart of both political economy and anthropology. Political economy insists that because the ultimate source of wealth is society, society shall be the ultimate beneficiary of wealth enshrined in property. But as Escobar González and Yıldız make clear, owning a home depends on a myriad of preconditions—one's creditworthiness, exposure to financial markets, and skill at smuggling goods, as well as the reliability of one's currency, the state's willingness to redistribute land, and geopolitical security interests. This is the society that contributes to and takes away from our homes. But who, other than the people who end up with half-paid, half-finished houses, is the society that benefits from homeownership? Anthropology's stance on property differs in a crucial aspect from that of political economy. The relations between people and their things, as anthropologists have pointed out from the very beginning, are only a proxy for relations between people (Hann, 1998). Yet anthropology makes no assumptions about how the rights and obligations articulated through property should ultimately be distributed. Perhaps it is even misleading to distinguish between private and social, or between people and things (Strathern, 1998, 2022). What Yıldız's and Escobar González's accounts show is that around the world, people are implicated in things and vice versa; that time and again what was supposed to be individual and private turns out to be collective and public, although not in the sense that political economy would have hoped. Political economy's society is made of people with houses; anthropology's society is made of passports and tobacco, vigilantes and relatives, sanctions and pension funds. The first is a society of equals with shared entitlements and responsibilities; the second is a dizzying web in which we have trouble locating and comparing people and things. Ultimately, the society of political economy—the one that can be described and evaluated by how many people have access to a home—can be brought about only by the society of anthropology, that is, the society that makes people and homes from social relations. The latter assembles the property the former sets out to distribute. Yıldız's interlocutors know this well, and they are mobilizing all the social relations they have to turn them into a home that will undergird their future financial security and independence from the Iranian state. For the very reason that gold, money, tobacco, family, houses, and citizenship can hardly (but not impossibly) be made commensurate, it is sometimes possible to trade them back and forth, up and down across the border to escape the fate of the Iranian state. Sometimes, however, social relations cannot be turned into a home in the wake of a crumbling order. How is it, as Escobar González's interlocutor Alicia says in despair, that her parents—working-class, informal occupants—were ultimately able to own their home, while she is still struggling to do likewise? As social scientists, we might be tempted to think that Alicia falls for the fiction of private property: that in overestimating her parents’ achievement, a modest self-built house, and downplaying their sacrifices, she disregards the continually reproduced social relations that underpinned her parents’ success. Yet Alicia does not complain that she has sacrificed too much or that having a home is a simple matter. Rather, her complaint is that it will never be enough, that even when she has finally found a home, it slips through her fingers. Like Narmin and Muhsin, she is trying to reach a perpetually moving finish line. Escobar González and Yıldız both portray their cases as resulting from economic dissolution—the crisis of neoliberalism since 2008 and the economic troubles haunting Iran in the wake of international sanctions. Undermining the relations that are at the heart of property, these dissolutions once more foreground its sociality. So much for anthropology. But we should not forget about political economy: just as social relations are the foundation of property, having a home is a precondition for maintaining the social relations we value. It should worry us, then, that the dissolution of economic order in Hacienda Santa Fe is followed by the dissolution of public order. A home is more than an investment or four walls and a roof; it is also the positive outlook on the future that Alicia is missing from her life. In Yıldız's and Escobar González's pieces, homelessness emerges from the orders of neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and international sanctions, both directly and indirectly from their weakness. Maybe that is what sets Alicia's experience apart from that of her parents. In any case, we cannot expect those who created these problems to fix them. Perhaps some of us can escape the chaos they leave behind. But whom can we call on to ensure that all of us will find a place to call home?