The amorality of rent gaps: A response to Elvin Wyly. Issue 1 (March 2023)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Kallin, Hamish
• Is Part Of: Dialogues in urban research. Volume 1:Issue 1(2023)
• Page Start: 89
• Page End: 92
• Publication Date: 2023-03
• Subjects: Rent gap -- gentrification -- capitalism; Urban renewal; Sociology, Urban; Cities and towns; Periodicals; 307.76
• DOI: 10.1177/27541258231156429
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 2754-1258

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.