In debt to the rent gap: Gentrification generalized and the frontier of the future

Abstract

His work focuses on the myriad ways in which capital remakes the city. He has published on territorial stigmatization, state power, and gentrification.

Capital’s welfare dependency: Market failure, stalled regeneration and state subsidy in Glasgow and Edinburgh

“…Yet, these isolated incidences were apparently compelled by a lowering of market ambitions rather than structurally transformative progressive policy regimes. And since speculative finance capital is increasingly mobilised within UK social housing (Kallin, 2020; Wainright and Manville, 2017; Wijburg and Waldron, 2020), such potentially liberal-reformist developments should be examined with careful scrutiny as another instance whereby the apparent autonomy of local state urban development is interpellated by private capital whilst being underwritten by state subsidy. In conclusion, we hope that urban scholars will embrace a research programme investigating regeneration failure as a means of establishing the instability of capitalism as a reproductive schema.…”

“…Yet, as numerous scholars have reiterated, rent gap theory was never conceived as a predictive explanation for gentrification in all its manifestations (Clark, 1988; Slater, 2017; Smith, 1987). Indeed, recent work has focused more on how rent gaps can be generated from relatively stable or even rising rent levels and how potential values can be maximised through housing financialisation (Aalbers, 2019; Christophers, 2022; Risager, 2022), platform capitalism and digital technologies (Fields, 2019; Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018), the repeal of rent controls (Fields and Uffer, 2016; Krijnen, 2018; Teresa, 2019) or the use of debt-led shared equity schemes in newbuild ‘affordable’ housing (Kallin, 2020). The devalorisation–revalorisation relationship, then, is not always pivotal to rent gap creation and closure.…”

“Revenue Generating Machines”? London’s Local Housing Companies and the Emergence of Local State Rentierism

“…Following the explosion of credit made available to prospective homeowners and rentiers, land has become the principal vector through which the city is reproduced simultaneously as “a wealth machine and a poverty machine” (Edwards 2016:234). For those able to purchase property land functions like Willy Wonka’s Great Glass Elevator, breaking free of social constraints (Kallin 2020). For those on the other side of this relationship the experience is crushing.…”

“…Rather it is to unlock the “unearned increment” of rising land values generated by increasingly indebted urban residents and workers. Across the three models, the value of what can be produced and realised on public land—the bricks and mortar commodity of housing—is less important than the value of the rents (actual and capitalised) that can be extracted from it; values that have been inflated by exceptionally high levels of household mortgage debt (Kallin 2020). The commercial property company and cross‐subsidy model debt‐finance the means (commodified real estate) with which to speculate on increases in exchange values of state‐owned land and properties.…”

Potential rents vs. potential lives

“…Critical analyses of gentrification processes from around the world that draw on rent gap theory account for a significant share of the vast volume of gentrification research. The 'research gap' today is not to test the veracity or robustness of rent gap theory, but to analyze underlying structures that generate the mechanism in order to develop theory and practice concerned with how to make rent gap theory not true (Clark, 2014(Clark, , 2018Kallin, 2020;Lees et al, 2008;Slater, 2017). There is also a need to deploy rent gap theory in analyses beyond the confines of gentrification.…”