A ‘gentrification regime’ change: The fiscal roots of buy-to-let gentrification in Dudelange, Luxembourg

This article introduces the notion of the ‘gentrification regime’, which we believe is better able to capture the diversity of gentrification trajectories than the more macro-level notions of gentrification ‘waves’ or ‘stages’. We define a ‘gentrification regime’ as a specific set of relations between producers and consumers of housing made possible by a particular policy and financial context. Empirically, this article tracks the shift from a gentrification regime in which social upscaling is linked to increases in ownership to one that foregrounds the development of the private rental sector. To evidence this shift, we use the full set of property transactions linked to the production and the sale of apartments in the city of Dudelange in Luxembourg between 1970 and 2019 to reconstruct the trajectories of residential projects. We observe the replacement of local developers, responsible for a construction boom in the early 1990s, by national-level developers focusing on locally supported flagship projects targeting investor demand, itself stimulated by national fiscal policies. We witness an investor interest for both new and existing housing, signalling an increased pressure on the housing market, which seems to lead to an incipient (cross-border) exclusionary displacement. The article thus shows that national-level fiscal policy, and not only the deregulation of the private rental sector, can create value gaps that trigger a shift to buy-to-let gentrification. The notion of ‘gentrification regime’ is thus shown to provide a new way to understand the locally and temporally specific processes underlying the diversity of gentrification dynamics we see today.