Displacement without Social Change? Placing Overcrowding As a Rentier Strategy.

This article widens the common understandings of the impacts of evictions and foreclosures in housing-centered forms of rentierism and the social change embedded in such forms of displacement. Specifically, we illustrate that violent forms of displacement do not automatically lead to gentrification or social change in neighborhoods by analyzing the impact of direct forms of displacement on the Global South population living in Palma’s neighborhood of Son Gotleu (Majorca, Spain). This neighborhood is both a hotspot for evictions and foreclosures from 2008 onwards, and with a large concentration of national from Global South citizens.

Our key argument is therefore that overcrowding complements gentrification as a key strategy by which the extraction of housing-based rents by landlords can be increased. We therefore dissect the conditions by which, through eviction and foreclosure, housing overcrowding is placed as a rentier strategy.