Rent gap thinking beyond gentrification: rent gap deflation in Havana, Cuba

Source abstract

This article revisits rent gap theory through the lens of Havana, Cuba—a city undergoing a protracted and incomplete transition to a market-oriented housing system. While post-2011 reforms legalized home sales and enabled tourism-based property uses, they have not produced the gentrification dynamics typically associated with rent gap closure. Instead, Havana presents a case of rent gap deflation, in which potential ground rents decline amid prolonged economic crisis, geopolitical isolation, falling tourism, and large-scale, multi-class emigration. This case reveals the limits of commodification under constrained political-economic conditions, including restricted property rights, state-owned urban land, and the absence of a consolidated real estate sector. In this context, partially realized processes of reinvestment coexist with capital withdrawal, producing a condition we conceptualize as arrested gentrification. We argue that rent gaps are neither inherently self-realizing nor permanently closed, but instead expand, stagnate, or contract in relation to cyclical and conjunctural forces. Advancing ‘rent gap thinking’ as a diagnostic framework, the article highlights how macroeconomic volatility, regulatory shifts, and affective disinvestment shape uneven urban trajectories. Havana thus challenges the teleological assumptions of rent gap theory and calls for more temporally layered, context-sensitive approaches to urban transformation in (post-) socialist and Global South contexts.