Climate Gentrification

Abstract

Despite the growing power of finance over cities and housing, the relationships between finance, climate risk management, and urban governance have yet to be examined from a climate gentrification perspective. Putting the practices of a wide array of property finance stakeholders in conversation with the foundational concept of the rent gap, we identify two real estate rent dynamics that are emerging against the prospect of climate-driven urban restructuring: risk rents, or new forms of value capture crafted against future risk, and rent at risk, or the anticipated loss of rent due to risk. We in turn illustrate how climate risk–rent dynamics constitute new or intensified processes of gentrification in Greater Miami, Florida. Through three vignettes, we show how configurations of real estate and finance climate risk management produce variegated yet interrelated opportunities for devaluation and revaluation, displacement, and downgrading. Such strategies push the gentrification frontier into new physical as well as institutional spaces. The Greater Miami story underscores the need for new forms of knowledge, coalition building, and integrated urban climate risk management practices that directly confront underlying financial drivers of housing and spatial injustice in risky real estate markets.