Whose (Im)moral rent gap?

Abstract

I first met Neil Smith after my first and probably most disastrous conference presentation in the mid-1990s, in Boston (USA). In the epoch before PowerPoint, I experienced a technology-fail, and an out-of-body sensation as my examples, captured on photographic slides to be projected on a large screen, flew out of the slide-carousel and landed willy-nilly in the crowd. Neil came up to me later and offered to show me around Manhattan’s lower east side to compare the racialized experiences of gentrification with my inner Sydney case study—he was not fazed by my presentation disaster. He had latched onto my take on whiteness in the revanchist city. Several years later, Smith agreed to examine my doctoral thesis. However, a year after its dispatch, he deemed my thesis to be ‘too cultural’ to assess. To me, cultures of white privilege encroaching on an inner-city Aboriginal community were embedded within the revanchist city. He clearly did not agree. Smith, and his work, has certainly challenged and enlightened many of us but one concept—the rent gap—has not been the cause of much consternation. To me, and many others, it is a reasonably simple observation of the underpinning mechanism of gentrification: where potential rents far exceed actual rents paid for property. This creates precarity for renters, including community welfare services, and potential capital gain for property owners if they can afford rising rates and taxes that come with increased property values. Many cannot. Yet in those heady days of neo-Marxist critique, real-world issues were often couched in densely expressed and sometimes aggressive ways of arguing, often cleverly embedded in layers of detail. This complexification was for the few to extoll. For me, particularly then, this intellectual elitism seemed off the mark—I had just come out of community-based activism, working with young homeless and ‘at risk’ people. I saw the rent gap in action, glaringly operating in the service of capital. Of far more interest to me was how revanchism operated within the process of gentrification. I could not see why ‘the cultural’was not part of the politics of capital. I wondered why gentrification could not be conceived of as both economic and cultural. How best should we further a social justice agenda? Surely theory should be flexible and, if need be, promiscuously fluid (cf Gibson-Graham, 1996). Perhaps I am ‘intellectually lazy’ (Wyly, current volume).