El desahucio de viviendas y su incidencia sobre el sujeto. Una perspectiva antropológica

Resum

As a result of the process of property speculation –from the late 1990s to 2008- housing has undergone a process of ocio-cultural resignification, going from being valued not only for its use value, but also as an investment. In this context, those seeking housing were “shaped by” and “shapers of” an exhilarating proprietary rationality regarding home ownership. These logics were encouraged from diverse legislative, financial, social, and cultural spheres, generating representations in the group imaginaire according to which property was the most desirable link to housing. And so property became naturalized. Proprietary logics materialize in the daily discourse of social agents through discursive objectifications such as: “renting is throwing money away” or “the price of housing never goes down.” These objectifications, on one hand, minimized the risks of the high indebtedness that had to be incurred to acquire housing, while at the same time promoting the goodness of investment. This corpus of objectifications was disseminated through interpersonal relations, through the graphic publicity of real estate agents and financial intermediaries, through the example of people who bought their homes, etc. Social agents responded excitedly to the idea of becoming owners. This emotion was connected to the fact of resolving housing needs and also to shared cultural meanings regarding home-owning as a good and with the proprietary rationality surrounding this good. This “excitement,1” in a second meaning, could be understood as an eager energy (Berardi, 2003) that establishes itself as a motor of capitalism, anchoring subjects in a future indebtedness that they have to face and in a market in which they act as people offering their work. However, acquisition would not have been possible without access to financing. The expansion of mortgage loans associated with bank securitization, together with the policies of objectives under which the representatives of the expert system operated, encouraged borrowers to relax their risk evaluation criteria. The relationship of those who sought financing and the expert system was mediated by the trust that those who sought financing placed in these experts, as well as by the honorableness that was attributed to their representatives. Starting in 2007, the Euribor –the reference rate for the majority of mortgages- underwent an increase, which, together with the abusive clauses of mortgage contracts and the effects of the crisis, noticeable in the increase in the unemployment rate, among other factors, favored an increase in the number of people who could not keep up with their mortgage payments under the terms established in their mortgage loan contracts. In the new economicemployment context, housing with a depreciated value, together with difficulties for paying mortgage quotas appeared, in the eyes of the indebted owners, as “a fraud” or “a swindle.” ...