Pass by a new residential building that is being built, and you will come across an advertisement. The ad will promise you that this home is not a house but an investment. The house can be rented for earnings that can be used to pay off the bond and also create generational wealth for you and your family.
As one Cape Talk caller put it, housing has now become an investment, and every developer is pitching it in that manner. But this shift from home as sanctuary to home as asset has profound implications for who gets to live in our cities and how communities form.
Gone are the days when you grew home and it was envisioned as a place where you would grow old, perhaps have a family and pass it on generationally so that your lineage would always have a place to come back to. The question has changed from “how should we live together?” to “what generates the highest return?”
Two ideas help explain what’s happening here. First, political theorist Claude Lefort argued that in a healthy democracy, no single group should permanently control decisions that affect everyone. Power should keep shifting as people’s needs change. Second, urban theorist Henri Lefebvre believed that residents, not developers or distant investors, should have the primary say in shaping their neighbourhoods and cities. Both thinkers shared a core insight: the big questions about how we live together should never be settled once and for all by any single authority.
While the shift to housing-as-investment is often justified as “democratising” property ownership, giving everyone a stake in the market. But this actually fills the empty place with a false unity (we’re all investors now) that obscures real conflicts over housing access and urban development.
This financialisation doesn’t just change individual relationships to property – it fundamentally alters the democratic fabric of our cities. When housing becomes primarily an investment vehicle, we lose the space for collective decision-making about how we want to live together. The question becomes: how do we reclaim housing as a foundation for community rather than just individual wealth accumulation?
Aliasgher Janmohammed 