Who Does Real Estate Value?
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Who Does Real Estate Value?

Tricia Enns

How does a financialized housing system affect our relationship to land and to the concept of home? How do we collectively address the exclusivity of such a system? Through a series of poetic and visual posters, Tricia Enns encourages us to consider who is favoured and who is excluded by our current approach to housing.

Thematic

Professor

Location

Date

Value

Marie-Sophie Banville

Montreal, Qc

May 2020

1. Introduction

I hope, as you read this, that you are safe and cozy in your home. What does “home” mean to you? Does it hold value beyond the rent or mortgage payments you make? Our sense of home is now unavoidably attached to the idea of property, which is itself attached to a financial system. This basic need for human survival has suddenly become financialized and commodified. Access to shelter and, in turn, safety is no longer considered a right. You have to pay to play. Through the use of street art, a public form of expression that reclaims space from private ownership, I explore the feelings of isolation and exclusion caused by the commodification and valuation of space solely in financial terms. 

2. Putting People in Danger

Let’s take our recent, or current, experience with COVID-19 as an example. One of the largest affected demographic in Montreal was its homeless population. How do you quarantine yourself when you have no home? How do you find safety when you can’t afford a house? With few financial assets one can easily feel isolated, alone, disconnected, and vulnerable in the face  of a financialized housing system. Real estate clearly values certain demographics over others, namely those who can pay. With the poster Taped Mouths I blatantly call out today’s reality: safety costs money and this cost isolates us from the land, as a home we once all had a right to. Today, it is a commodity we have to pay for. (See Image 1)

3. The Public affecting the  Private

Speaking of home, how do you value yours? One type of value can be established through the rent or mortgage paid each month. But the market value of a property is also tied up to its proximity to services like food, public transportation, and entertainment. Economic value, as well as social value, is therefore embedded within these very services... Ironically, the more an area becomes “livable” in relation to services, the more it becomes “un-liveable” in relation to the increasing rents and/or mortgages. As housing costs rise accordingly, the area’s doors gradually shut themselves to more and more people. What if these services of liveability manifested themselves as other types of value: social, environmental, cultural, historical, etc. In the poster A Home’s Value I challenge us to consider if our homes could be valued using other forms of currency that provide a framework that includes rather than excludes. (See Image 2)

4. What about the earth?

Finally, let us look at how our current real estate market has isolated us from the Earth that supports and provides us with what we need to survive. When was the last time you thought of the earth beneath your apartment or house? Ryan-Collins hit the nail on the head by saying that “as a result of these economic changes, public, political and academic attention has become increasingly focused on the housing market, while the critical underlying role of land itself has been largely obscured.”

The land has been “obscured”, forgotten. Land is zoned, parcelled off and sold. What say does the Earth have in this transaction? As Robin Wall Kimmerer emphasizes in Braiding Sweetgrass, I reiterate in the poster Isolated from the Earth how our financial system conditions us to think we are other than the earth, rather than reminding us that we are a part of it. (See Image 3)

5. Using Art to Fuel Housing Discussions

Unfortunately, our  financialized housing system is a vicious circle of isolation, dividing humans from the Earth and humans from one another. Without a concrete answer I use art to process my thoughts and hopefully inspire discussion. My art challenges us to first see our current reality and then explore how we want to live and how we can get there, without forgetting anyone along the way.

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About

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The Office of Rules and Norms (ORN) is an arts-based transdisciplinary collective that engages with regulations, the rule of law and cultural norms. These engagements reveal, comprehend, play with, subvert, and transcend current ways of understanding and acting in relation to regulatory forces in order to make room for more equitable alternatives. In its attempts to query legal and behavioral urban infrastructures, the ORN specifically deploys art and design practice, culture, and methods along three axes:
Art as Subversion | Intervening in grey areas of regulation
Art as Pedagogy | Making public various forces and forms of influence
Art as Decision-Making | Reorienting modes of knowing and deliberating