rent gap

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How to Kill a City: The Real Story of Gentrification by Peter Moskowitz

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, affirmative action, Airbnb, back-to-the-city movement, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Blue Bottle Coffee, British Empire, clean water, collective bargaining, company town, David Brooks, deindustrialization, Detroit bankruptcy, do well by doing good, drive until you qualify, East Village, Edward Glaeser, fixed-gear, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Kickstarter, Kitchen Debate, land bank, late capitalism, messenger bag, mortgage tax deduction, Naomi Klein, new economy, New Urbanism, off-the-grid, private military company, profit motive, public intellectual, Quicken Loans, RAND corporation, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, school choice, Silicon Valley, starchitect, subprime mortgage crisis, tech worker, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, trickle-down economics, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, working poor, Works Progress Administration, young professional

“People can say whatever they want about these rich people coming in and doing this that and the other, but I was comfortable down there,” Robinson continued. “I wanted to stay there. And they kicked me out.” The rent-gap theory—that capital flows to the rate of highest return, and return is highest after a city has been economically drained and primed for gentrification—explains the economic rationale behind the new Detroit. Detroit has been in decline for decades, but its bankruptcy in 2013 put it in position for a rent-gap rebound: not only was the city broke, but it was now run by an emergency manager named Kevyn Orr, who was intent on slashing city services and making the city more palatable for investment.

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Sure, they could buy land even farther from the city and attempt to develop it, but commuters are only willing to travel so far, and New York’s suburban commute times were already pushing the hour mark. The city, on the other hand, was a bargain, thanks to white flight and deindustrialization. In 1979, geographer Neil Smith came up with what has become possibly the most influential academic theory on gentrification: the rent gap. Smith posited that the more disinvested a space becomes, the more profitable it is to gentrify. The idea behind his theory is a basic tenet of free-market economics: capital will go where the rate of potential return (i.e., the potential to make profit) is greatest. Smith realized that gentrification wasn’t happening at random.

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If you wanted to find the neighborhood that would gentrify next, all you had to do was figure out where the biggest potential for profit was in a city—the place where buildings could be bought cheap and made more expensive in a short period of time. By looking at tax data, Smith could pinpoint blocks that seemed to be gentrifiable, which usually meant buildings were in disrepair (so they could be bought cheap) and were close to other gentrified areas (so it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch for gentrifiers to move in). The rent gap was the disparity between how much a property was worth in its current state and how much it would be worth gentrified. The larger the gap in a neighborhood, the higher the chance it would gentrify. Gentrification might seem rapid when you’re in a neighborhood experiencing it firsthand, but it’s really a long game: real estate developers (at least the smart ones) know they can benefit from the vast, decades-long shifts that happen in metropolises.

Big Capital: Who Is London For? by Anna Minton

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Airbnb, Berlin Wall, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Boris Johnson, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, collateralized debt obligation, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, Donald Trump, eurozone crisis, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Frank Gehry, gentrification, high net worth, high-speed rail, housing crisis, illegal immigration, Kickstarter, land bank, land value tax, market design, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, payday loans, post-truth, quantitative easing, rent control, rent gap, Right to Buy, Russell Brand, sovereign wealth fund, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, urban renewal, working poor

He argues that when that gap becomes big enough, developers become interested and private capital flows in, attracted by the potential to make large profits.25 Academics have claimed that the failure to maintain estates, which keeps prices low, contributes to a ‘state-induced rent gap’.26 When he talks of local authorities adapting to the ‘potential’ for market-priced development, Adonis himself is clear that the ‘rent gap’ offered by potentially very high land values is driving estate regeneration. He argues that at a time of acute housing crisis, redevelopment is the only way to build the numbers of houses required, as the sales of new expensive homes also help pay for new affordable homes.

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Since 2004, Channel 4’s long running ‘ident’ – identity logo – has been taken from the Aylesbury, with grainy black and white footage shown panning across rubbish-strewn balconies, while the concrete structures shift into place to form the Channel 4 logo; except that, unbeknown to viewers, the washing lines, shopping trolleys, rubbish bags and satellite dishes were never really there23 – they were added in as props by the film makers to make it look as dystopian as possible. While most people watching wouldn’t know the images of decay are from the Aylesbury, the local community certainly does. THE ‘RENT GAP’: FROM SOCIAL HOUSING TO SUPER PRIME I’ve put the bulldozing of sink estates at the heart of turnaround Britain. David Cameron, Sunday Times, 10 January 2016 In this piece in the Sunday Times, which launched the former prime minister’s ‘Sink Estates’ initiative, Cameron stuck carefully to the by now familiar story of estate failure: There is one issue that … for me, epitomises both the scale of the challenge we face and the nature of state failure over decades.

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Borough by borough, a city village programme, centred on systematic estate regeneration, is required.’ So it is clear that if these plans are even partially realized they will completely alter the social make-up of London. This policy – of redeveloping estates – is driven by American academic Neil Smith’s concept of the ‘rent gap’, which he developed as a different way of looking at gentrification. The model favoured since the 1970s maintained that the middle classes moved back to the post-industrial city attracted by new economic opportunities and lifestyle as the former spaces of industry opened themselves up to trendy loft living.

After the Gig: How the Sharing Economy Got Hijacked and How to Win It Back by Juliet Schor, William Attwood-Charles, Mehmet Cansoy

1960s counterculture, Airbnb, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, American Legislative Exchange Council, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, bike sharing, Californian Ideology, carbon footprint, clean tech, collaborative consumption, collaborative economy, Community Supported Agriculture, COVID-19, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, financial independence, future of work, gentrification, George Gilder, gig economy, global supply chain, global village, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job satisfaction, John Perry Barlow, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, Mason jar, mass incarceration, Mitch Kapor, Network effects, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peer-to-peer rental, Post-Keynesian economics, precariat, profit maximization, profit motive, race to the bottom, regulatory arbitrage, rent gap, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ruby on Rails, selection bias, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, smart cities, social distancing, Stewart Brand, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Telecommunications Act of 1996, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, urban planning, wage slave, walking around money, Whole Earth Catalog, women in the workforce, working poor, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

Abrahao et al. (2017). 30. Ayres, Banaji, and Jolls (2015); Nunley, Owens, and Howard (2011). 31. Mehmet’s detailed findings are contained in his PhD dissertation, “ ‘Sharing’ in Unequal Spaces” (Cansoy 2018), and various papers, such as “Gentrification and Short-Term Rentals: Re-assessing the Rent Gap in Urban Centers” (Cansoy 2019a); “The Fault in the Stars: Public Reputation and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality on Airbnb” (Cansoy 2019b); and “Who Gets to Share in the ‘Sharing Economy’: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb” (Cansoy and Schor 2019). For pioneering research on Airbnb also using scraped data, see Slee (2015) and the work of Murray Cox, who posts research on the website Inside Airbnb, http://insideairbnb.com. 32.

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“The Rise of Algorithmic Work: Implications for Managerial Control and Career Pathways.” Unpublished paper. University of Michigan. Cansoy, Mehmet. 2018. “ ‘Sharing’ in Unequal Spaces: Short-Term Rentals and the Reproduction of Urban Inequalities.” PhD diss., Boston College. ———. 2019a. “Gentrification and Short-Term Rentals: Re-assessing the Rent Gap in Urban Centers.” Unpublished paper. Boston College. ———. 2019b. “The Fault in the Stars: Public Reputation and the Reproduction of Racial Inequality on Airbnb.” Unpublished paper. Boston College. Cansoy, Mehmet, and Juliet B. Schor. 2019. “Who Gets to Share in the ‘Sharing Economy’: Understanding the Patterns of Participation and Exchange in Airbnb.” www.bc.edu/content/dam/files/schools/cas_sites/sociology/pdf/SharingEconomy.pdf.

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“The Impact of New Short-Term Rental Regulations on New York City.” Montreal: Urban Politics and Governance Research Group, School of Urban Planning, McGill University. www.sharebetter.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/Impact-of-New-STR-Regs-2019.pdf. Wachsmuth, David, and Alexander Weisler. 2018. “Airbnb and the Rent Gap: Gentrification through the Sharing Economy.” Environment and Planning A: Economy and Space 50 (6): 1147–70. Walker, Edward T. 2016. “Between Grassroots and ‘Astroturf’: Understanding Mobilization from the Top-Down.” In The SAGE Handbook of Resistance, edited by David Courpasson and Steven Vallas, 269–79.

Sunbelt Blues: The Failure of American Housing by Andrew Ross

8-hour work day, Airbnb, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, carbon footprint, Celebration, Florida, clean water, climate change refugee, company town, coronavirus, corporate raider, COVID-19, do what you love, Donald Trump, drive until you qualify, edge city, El Camino Real, emotional labour, financial innovation, fixed income, gentrification, gig economy, global supply chain, green new deal, Hernando de Soto, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Housing First, housing justice, industrial cluster, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, land bank, late fees, lockdown, Lyft, megaproject, military-industrial complex, minimum wage unemployment, mortgage tax deduction, New Urbanism, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Peter Calthorpe, pill mill, rent control, rent gap, rent stabilization, restrictive zoning, Richard Florida, San Francisco homelessness, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social distancing, starchitect, tech bro, the built environment, traffic fines, uber lyft, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, working poor

Today, the ambition of the 1949 act is carried on by the housing justice movement, with its renewed focus on renter rights, tenant organization, and the rallying cry of “Homes for All.”10 THE DIFFERENT FACES OF A CRISIS Although it is national in scope, the US housing crisis looks quite different from place to place. Housing markets are intensely local, so pricing and rent gaps can vary greatly even within a single metro area, and even more so between them: consider the great disparity in housing affordability between, say, Boston and Detroit, or between space-starved cities in the Frostbelt and those in the Sunbelt regions with room still to spread out. In strong metro markets, like Austin or San Diego, homeownership is increasingly out of reach for middle-income earners.

Rentier Capitalism: Who Owns the Economy, and Who Pays for It? by Brett Christophers

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The UK’s mobile operators have been geographically selective in building out their networks, cherry-picking densely populated hot-spots. In sparsely populated rural areas (the so-called ‘not-spots’ without coverage), the subscriber rents potentially available from service provision simply do not justify the necessary infrastructure investment. Think of it as another type of ‘rent gap’. Like financial rentiers, infrastructure rentiers are exclusionary. To paraphrase Joan Robinson, from a consumer’s perspective the only thing worse than paying rent to a rentier is not even having the opportunity to do so. The second set of criticisms, meanwhile, relates to fixed-line services, and more specifically to BT.