Browsing by Author "Herrera, Nicolas"

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    (Dis)connecting rent gap and gentrification in verticalizing cities: The cases of Iquique and Antofagasta, Chile
    (2024) Lopez-Morales, Ernesto; Herrera, Nicolas
    This paper explores the concept of density rent gaps in verticalizing cities, with relation to Peter Marcuse's displacement categories. The study highlights a commonly uncritical relation with the rent gap that both defenders and critics of gentrification usually assume in the literature. Results from a quantitative analysis of a Displacement Index suggest that the largest rent gaps do not always correlate with the highest displacement rates because, in verticalizing cities, the most significant rent gaps come from 'density rent' and not necessarily the most expensive new housing. The study focuses on Chile's second-tier towns of Iquique and Antofagasta (seldom seen in the international literature). It uses real estate and population data and fieldwork analysis to fill data voids and caps the rent gap to estimate the amount of land value capture possible to implement to reduce Chile's highly exclusionary housing environment. We believe this analysis helps to conceptually separate the rent gap from gentrification for a more precise urban analysis of vertical cities.
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    Neoliberal urban segregation and property tax: A critical view of Santiago, Chile
    (2024) Lopez-Morales, Ernesto; Herrera, Nicolas; Garreton, Matias
    Urban property taxes are primordial land value capture mechanisms that can potentially redistribute public income to underprivileged areas in a city. However, in Santiago, Chile, a city with considerable socio-spatial segregation correlated with significant disparities in municipal budgets, social welfare, and intergenerational reproduction of wealth, the property tax system is weak to address this issue effectively. This study analyses the potential redistributive capacity of property taxes in Greater Santiago, comparing the evolution of real estate surplus values with municipal budgets. These results show that a 2% increase in property taxes would suffice to equalize per capita municipal budgets, essential to redistribute social welfare. In Chiles's neoliberal planning framework, we argue that weak property taxes are critical for the intergenerational reproduction of wealth and poverty in different municipalities. Property as capital is efficient for capturing unearned value in the long term and obtaining rental income, two mechanisms of inequality reproduction, as property accumulation is only feasible if it is not progressively taxed. In sum, this analysis of property taxes in Santiago contributes to the theoretical understanding of passive mechanisms of inequality reproduction in a neoliberal system and empirical support for a progressive increase of property taxes.