The amorality of rent gaps: A response to Elvin Wyly

Abstract

This short intervention offers a sympathic criticism of Elvin Wyly's paper ‘The Moral Rent Gap: Views from an Edge of an Urban World’. Whilst welcoming the invitation to reconsider the implications of the rent gap in relation to long histories of racism, morality, and dispossession, I highlight three issues with the neologism itself. ‘The moral rent gap’, I suggest, risks foreclosing too much in its temporal insistence on generations past; risks complicating too much by making the rent gap about everything it connects to; risks depoliticising too much in shifting the functionality of the rent gap from profit to morality.

Elvin Wyly's discussion of the moral rent gap makes for an intriguing, almost disorientating read. It goes in a load of directions I was not expecting and could not go myself. Fascinating snapshots are presented in an order that makes them more fascinating still, akin to a piece of music that is both improvised and deeply thought through. There is no doubt that ‘the moral and ethical dimensions of gentrification are inescapable’ (p. 13), and so it follows that inserting the word moral into our understanding of what rent gaps are or signify might be a simple affair. But (as Wyly shows), morality is rarely cut and dry, especially when it relates to land, which is far older than any of us, our memories, or our claims. I admire this paper as an invitation to stare right through the ‘politico-economic window’ of the rent gap (Hackworth, 2019) to the mesmerising and long-enduring relations of inequality that underpin it, and as an act of alchemy that brings together a host of fascinating ideas. But something gnaws at my enthusiasm, and I think it's the neologism itself: ‘the moral rent gap’, which is never defined as concretely as I want it to be. For me, this risks foreclosing too much in its temporal insistence on generations past; risks complicating too much by making the rent gap about everything it connects to; risks depoliticising too much in shifting the functionality of the rent gap from profit to morality.

‘From the very beginning’, Wyly tells us, ‘the rent gap was not really about urban land economics’ (p.13), and was instead about ‘moral outrage over social and spatial injustice’. I read this as a response to those detractors who dismiss the rent gap as narrowly ‘economistic’. But those who defend the utility of the model should be wary of surrendering too much to this criticism. In my own work, I often emphasise the more-than-economic dimensions of the rent gap. The relationship between territorial stigmatisation and gentrification (Kallin and Slater, 2014) reminds us that the decline of ‘building value’ and the rise of ‘potential ground rent’ are entangled with policy, culture, and discourse, playing out over generations. The reputational gap between a denigrated past and a promised future highlights how ‘potential’ is always an imaginary value (Kallin, 2017). At the heart of this work is an understanding of the present (reconfigured as the past) juxtaposed against the future (represented as a present we’d be stupid not to want). In other words, I find it provocative to see the rent gap as a measure of how capitalists envisage ‘progress’ as much as a measure of how profit is realised, and this is particularly clear in instances where the vision takes precedence over actually existing profit (Kallin, 2021). The point, then, is that of course the rent gap is about more than urban land economics, and it always has been. But, and this is crucial, it is also always about urban land economics, and I think we need to make this explicitly (and unashamedly) clear. If we don’t, what does the rent gap mean?

Certainly, whatever you thought it meant, Wyly blows that wide open. He takes the x-axis of the rent gap model – ‘time’ held against ‘building value’, which in Smith's (1979) original model starts ‘from construction date’ – and prompts us to ask how we got to that construction date to begin with. What ugly, ambiguous, and hidden histories took hold of the land and carved it into parcels for construction, rent, demolition, more construction, more rent? Answering that question reframes the current ‘value’ of any parcel of land on a much longer timeframe of habitation, dispossession, and contestation, fulfilling (to the nth degree) Smith's (1982) suggestion that gentrification is only one small part of the wider machinations of capital. There is undoubtedly value to insisting that all this is connected to the rent gap, but when we are told that ‘the rent gaps of today's gentrification must be contextualised in histories long before Neil Smith, before Adam Smith, and even before cities’ (my emphasis), does this not risk stripping us of the ability to highlight the (im)morality of the rent gap as it can occur at much shorter timescales? Average rents in Edinburgh have risen 67.3% over the last decade, which includes a 14.7% rise in the last year, almost 10% of which took place in just three months (Citylets, 2022). In that context, the rent gap opens and closes again and again along timespans that can be measured in days, weeks, and months. The displacement machine works on distressingly short timespans, but the process is certainly no less immoral for this speed (it's arguably worse).

If we want to understand how contemporary gentrification comes to be, or the conditions that make the rent gap function, then, yes, we need to head back to the point at which the land becomes private property. In Scotland, we are oddly blessed by the fact that Marx chose the enclosure of the Highlands as his case study of so-called primitive accumulation (it was in the news at the time). I make this link in my own teaching. In a course on how capitalism remakes the Scottish landscape, I start with the slave trade and the Highland Clearances. These are keystone ‘moments’ that explain Scotland's entanglement into global capitalism and its norms. They are intertwined with each other far more than an older generation of Scottish historians would ever admit (Alston, 2021); inter-twined, too, with the hyper-fluid puzzle of capitalism's global history that intoxicates Wyly's prose, for dispossessed Scots made frontline dispossessors in Canada and elsewhere across the British Empire, willingly or not. Capital and its order certainly came into the world ‘dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with blood and dirt’ (Marx, 1990: 926). In other words, on a course where I get to the rent gap and gentrification in Week 7, Week 1 begins ‘long before Neil Smith’. But is this story part of ‘the rent gap’? To my mind, no. What would we do if we took every concept to mean all the things it is related to?

If ‘there were certain risks in the use of an urban land parcel as a pedagogical device to explain capitalised and potential ground rent’ (p. 19), there were also surely benefits! It is still and (to my mind) always will be interesting to consider the rent gap on any definable parcel of land: how much profit does its current use make versus its new or recent use, whether aspirational or concrete? The beauty of the model is the simplicity of this question, which (as multiple generations of critical urbanists have shown) unfolds with complexity. Answering the ‘simple’ profit question, whether precisely (building by building, in numerical terms) or more vaguely (neighbourhood by neighbourhood, as framing for a noticeable but perhaps unmeasurable shift) leads us to a whole other set of questions. Whose vision of ‘better’ is this? Who owns it? How did they get it? ¹ Who is it for? Who is it not for? Why have values declined? There is also always a subversive, even utopian, element to the rent gap because if ‘they’ (those who own the land, who seek to profit from it, as well as the more abstract norms of those who have controlled it for generations) envisage a ‘highest and best’ use that comes pre-defined with armour on, it also opens up questions about what we might imagine the city could become, if we chased a different vision of what's better, higher than their high. In this sense, I absolutely agree with Wyly that ‘the rent gap’ cannot and does not exist alone, because its reality rests on a bloody and long history of dispossession, property, and speculation. The model is perhaps already a ‘portal’, insofar as it takes us through to so much more than it contains, but for the purposes of teaching and understanding, I prefer to see it as a discrete concept interconnected in as many ways as we want to explore to that wider story, but not to the point where it can subsume all that into itself. The word capitalism exists for that.

By the time we reach the end of Wyly's intervention, ‘morality’ lies in tatters. The paper can easily be read as an exploration of how consistently amoral capital is! Ancestral claims become just another title deed, anti-racism is reduced to a shield for the super-rich, and an older generation's Queer activism feeds today's content machine. Morality, in this context, is mercilessly fluid and, worse still, it has always been a fickle ticket to dignity. Capitalism (not to mention misogyny or white supremacy) came with its own moral order, stamped it down, and still clings to it for justification. Work is virtuous, poverty is vice, property is sacred. Does any worthwhile sense of ‘morality’ fit into a calculation of land values? Perhaps it should, but I struggle to think of any examples where it does. All that is sacred is profaned. With all this in mind, I can only say (with a tinge of regret) that for me, for now, the rent gap remains the rent gap, with no ‘moral’ prefix.

Allow me to end with a less serious point, meant seriously. At times in this electric essay, Wyly seems uncomfortable with his proximity to science fiction. I find this an unnecessary precaution. If there's a reason our current predicament feels and sounds like a sci-fi novel, it isn’t some embarrassing quirk of style: it simply reflects the fact that good sci-fi writers thought about the future. Just as we see the relevance in the words of old bearded philosophers, we shouldn’t be surprised if the melting permafrost of The Drowned World (Ballard, 1962), or the nuclear wastelands of Prisoners of Power (Strugatsky and Strugatsky, 1977) feel somehow to belong to the 60 s, the 70 s, today and tomorrow. I’ll leave the last line to Joanna Russ, whose feminist classic The Female Man came out four years before Neil Smith's eponymous back to the city paper, and features four protagonists who visit each other from separate dimensions in space and time …. ‘She wanted to get back to the freedom of Fifth Avenue [in New York City], where there were so many gaps – so much For Rent, so much cheaper, so much older, than I remembered’ (Russ, 1975: 87).