Berkeley Planning Journal

Over half a decade after the collapse of home prices in 2006, and with no shortage of books and essays on the ensuing crisis, the place of the housing bubble in political economic remains contested. Preoccupations of scholars have been high levels of income inequality model, through this brief essay I hope to highlight the usefulness of a debate that preoccupied geographers between the 1970s and 1990s, and suggest how theoretical and empirical work since, as well as the illuminating shock of the Great Recession, should compel us to interpret the political economic function of the housing bubble.