Abstract
Wyly's essay has the potential to form a pivotal work in future debates on gentrification by taking rent gap theory to new places, both figuratively and literally. His reformulation of what is at the core of rent gaps opens up the concept beyond primarily economic readings and as such adds depth, tension and complexity to the concept. In this commentary, I want to focus on a resulting tension between the original concept's simplicity and Wyly's addition of layers of complexity. This represents a welcome response to critiques that rent gap theory is too simple to fully understand displacement and even gentrification itself. However, the moral rent gap risks losing some of the benefits of the original formulation's simplicity that gave it a lot of explanatory power and made it highly adaptable. This prompts the question if the rent gap is the right target for a reformulation.
One of the strengths of Smith's original formulation of the rent gap is its simplicity, exemplified by the graph titled “The depreciation cycle of innercity neighborhoods” (Smith, 1979: 544): a literal gap is visible between the lines representing the potential ground rent level and the actual ground rent. As such, it is an easy-to-grasp theorisation of gentrification processes that provides a convincing explanation of the incentive for landlords to evict tenants and renovate housing (assuming that a property-based land-use system is in place). This simplicity and resulting operationalizability appeal to academics studying gentrification, but also to landlords who see rent gaps as demanding to be closed. A fellow student who had developed a model during their undergraduate studies to predict which neighbourhoods were at risk of future gentrification as rent gaps emerged told me this model led to a job offer from real estate developers (fortunately, they refused the offer). Understanding how, why and where rent gaps emerge can be highly valuable to diverse public.
The simplicity of the rent gap also allows it to be applied to new situations and developments. Moving beyond rent gaps within urban space, in my work with Niels van Doorn I have sought to use the concept to explain how digital platforms such as Airbnb may identify exploitable rent gaps within the platform itself. Rent gaps emerge in space, but as space becomes increasingly entangled with code and software (Kitchin and Dodge, 2011) they can also be calculated through algorithmic, data-based procedures. A platform like Airbnb opens new rent gaps by attracting new (temporary) users and allows property owners to close them and make a profit (Wachsmuth and Weisler, 2018). Beyond that, it has highly granular data that provides insights into what type of listings on the platform could potentially generate higher rents. Such platform-scale rent gaps “exist on an analytical level only accessible to and actionable by Airbnb, and [their] identification and closure is vital for ensuring the continued growth of the company's revenues, profitability, and financial value” (Bosma and van Doorn, 2022: 6). We argued that the case of Airbnb showed that rent gaps can be exploited by others than landlords who own physical land – we found the concept sufficiently flexible to help understand how such gaps may also shape transformations of digital space.
However, in some respects the concept is also too simple, or rather: a partial explanation. For Ghertner (2015), referring to gentrification theory more broadly, this partiality lies in the theory's initial basis in a limited number of specific, mainly Anglo-American cases. This geographical specificity results in flaws in the sense that the concept does not take into account violent forms of displacement in contexts of, for example, “enduring legacies of largescale public land ownership, common property, mixed tenure or informality” (Ghertner, 2015: 552). Similarly, using a Polanyian understanding of the entanglement of markets and societies, Bernt (2016) has argued that rent gap theory lacks a robust understanding of the role of institutional arrangements and social relationships in constituting markets. Accordingly, the commodification of housing does not exist in a vacuum, but is inextricably connected to societal processes of decommodification. To properly take this into account, “other and more contextually sensitive devices are needed” (Bernt, 2016: 643).
Does Wyly's reformulation of what a rent gap is offer such an alternative, contextually sensitive device? It adds a degree of complexity, openness and tension: the rent gap can no longer be appropriated by landlords as “a positivist theory” (Wyly, 2023: 77) that helps them increase profits. Wyly's emphasis on the moral tensions inherent in rent gaps foregrounds the immoral aspects of landlords’ exploitation of rent gaps. In other words, to (attempt to) close moral rent gaps is by definition no longer a matter of economic calculation, but requires ethical consideration and reconciliation or repairs. Importantly, to a large extent, moral rent gaps are ‘inescapable’ (Wyly, 2023: 69) and competing moral claims to land incommensurable.
As such, Wyly has in my opinion successfully transcended a large swath of the critiques of Smith's original concept: he shifts the rent gap's emphasis beyond the domain of economics and stresses gentrification's ethical dimensions. In relation to today's dizzying “complex mosaics of space and time” in cities (Wyly, 2023: 76), the moral rent gap also adds a welcome aspect of ambivalence to the concept, resonating with recent debates on ambivalence in critique (see Ruez and Cockayne, 2021). By reconceptualizing urban land parcels as “portals into multidimensional transformations of space and time produced through diverse, competing moral claims to the benefits of urban life” (p. 1), Wyly overcomes the rent gap's seeming determinism and connects it more directly to a tradition of thinkers focussing on space not as an euclidian container but as a social product (e.g. Lefebvre, 1991). It allows the concept to be used in contexts beyond what Lefebvre would call abstract space, i.e. space under capitalist social relations that is to be optimised and rationalised by seeking a “highest and best use” (Smith, 1979: 543). The moral rent gap stresses other aspects of space and in that sense points towards the possibility of other understandings and uses of space. Wyly's essay might be able to contribute not just to the gentrification literature, but to the theorisation and understanding of space more broadly.
The essay establishes an exemplary point of departure for this journal's aim to foster dialogue, not just between fields, but as Wyly writes, from grave-to-grave and across space-times. These are the “difficult dialogues” that this journal aims to foster, “the types where epistemological, theoretical, and political differences will give us all something different to say” (Davidson, 2023: 9). Bringing together highly diverse voices that at first read might make a weird conjuncture, the essay opens up new perspectives; it forms a portal in itself to diverse literatures, events in recent and distant past, and spaces across the globe. This essay only seems to start to uncover the edges of the full potential of reading together the diverse literatures, schools of thought and epistemologies in this essay - I would love to read a more extended version of this work in book form.
But would the metaphor of the ‘gap’ still be appropriate and required in the context of that hypothetical book? Given the multi-dimensional nature of land plots as space-time portals, it seems a linear concept as a gap might not be able any longer to seize the tensions at hand and grasp what is happening. While the rent gap in Smith's schematic visualisation is clearly visible as a gap, the moral, multi-dimensional aspects of rent gaps emerging across space-times seems impossible to simply chart and measure. As a metaphor, the gap seems to be too simple to cover the full scope of these ideas, while aiming to put them under this umbrella might risk losing some of the strengths of the original formulation.