Property, housing and processes of gentrification : a case study of the neighborhood of Mar Mikhael (Beirut) -

Abstract

Since 1940, a rent control regulation has constrained more than half the units in the neighborhood of Mar Mikhael (Beirut, Lebanon) to lower than market-value rates. More than 70 years later, currency devaluation, thousands of restrictions and impediments and the increasing price of land has produced a major gap between the current market value of most neighborhood apartments and their current rent, as it is collected by property owners. While proponents of market adjustments have convinced the parliament to pass a new regulation that lifts the ceiling on rent, the materialization of these new policies on the ground appear enormous. Indeed, thousands of elderly long-time neighborhood residents are threatened with imminent displacement. The trend has been exacerbated by the fact that most of the neighborhood properties have now been inherited by multiple family members, many of whom are absentee landlords. Building on a theoretical framework that approaches the question of gentrification from the standpoint of property value and the rent gap, this thesis argues that the ongoing transformations of the neighborhood are made possible by the very structure of the property market that disempowers both small-scale landlords and old time tenants and favors the take-over of property by large-scale developers who actually reap the profits generated by the accumulated rent gap. It further shows that this same structure of property limits the ways in which the neighborhood can be claimed, reducing the possibility of negotiation for evicted neighborhood dwellers to the amount of compensations, while other forms of claiming the neighborhood on the basis of past use, for example, are denied (Blomley 2004). The data gathered for this thesis include the records of 86 property-titles in the neighborhood, 30 interviews with neighborhood dwellers and 3 interviews with developers who have worked in the neighborhood. Additional information was available from participation in a workshop in Mar Mikhael in May 2015.