Martine August
Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo whose national dataset of Canadian apartment ownership documents REITs and other financialized landlords growing from zero to nearly a fifth of the country's private rental stock.
Overview
Martine August is an Associate Professor in the School of Planning at the University of Waterloo, whose research examines the political economy of housing, urban social justice, gentrification, and the financialization of rental and seniors housing.[1] Her best-known contribution is "The financialization of Canadian multi-family rental housing: From trailer to tower" (Journal of Urban Affairs, 2020), which compiled the first national ranking of Canada's largest apartment landlords and traced how REITs and other financialized owners grew from owning zero apartment suites in 1996 to nearly one-fifth of the country's private multi-family rental stock by 2017 — work that won the 2019 Best Conference Paper award at the Urban Affairs Association's annual meeting.[1][2]
Her research page on this wiki, August (2020): The Financialization of Canadian Multi-Family Rental Housing, documents her "core," "value-add," and "opportunistic" typology of financialized-landlord strategies and her finding that REIT penetration is systematically higher in Canadian provinces with weak or absent rent control.[2] The paper is a mainstream urban-planning study with no Georgist framing, but it supplies a national, firm-level Canadian case of the financialization of land and housing mechanism — real estate shifting from a use-value asset toward a financial one whose returns depend on extracting more from existing tenants.[2]
See Also
- August (2020): The Financialization of Canadian Multi-Family Rental Housing — her flagship research page on this wiki
- Financialization of Land and Housing — the concept her Canadian data corroborates
- Real Estate Investment Trusts (REITs) — the ownership vehicle central to her findings
- Canada — the country her national landlord dataset covers
Sources
- University of Waterloo, School of Planning, "Martine August" faculty profile. uwaterloo.ca/planning/profiles/martine-august — used for her title (Associate Professor, School of Planning), research focus (financialization of rental and seniors housing, gentrification, urban social justice), and the 2019 Best Conference Paper award.
- Wiki page August (2020): The Financialization of Canadian Multi-Family Rental Housing — used for the paper's findings (REIT growth from 0 to ~10% of stock 1996–2017; ~20% for all financialized landlords; the core/value-add/opportunistic typology; the rent-control comparison) and its relation to the Georgist case.