Gentrification in Luxembourg: Linking social changes to property wealth inequalities

Is gentrification occurring in Luxembourg? Is gentrification changing with the return of the private rental sector and the rise of multiple property ownership in European countries? Can new sources of data, such as records of property transactions from the Land Registry, provide new perspectives on gentrification and on the social consequences of the housing crisis more generally? Gentrification is one of the most studied topics in geography and urban sociology, but there have been close to no attempts to draw on Land Registry data in order to analyse the phenomenon. This data provides detailed information on the property goods and on all the parties involved in property transactions. Drawing on the new insights available from this data source, the notion of gentrification can be extended to the process through which property investors are displacing homeowners in a context in which housing wealth is becoming increasingly necessary to one’s life chances. More generally, gentrification can be reframed as transactions in which the buyer has a larger property wealth portfolio than the seller in a given area. This project would thus bring a new methodological and theoretical perspective to a topic that is well-researched, but nonetheless still highly salient in academic debates. The creation of social inequalities through discrepancies between salary and house price increases, the lack of social housing, and migration waves makes Luxembourg accessible to a selected few. While gentrification - and the social consequences of high house prices more generally - is a recurrent topic in Luxembourg, data availability has so far hindered any attempt to measure this phenomenon. By drawing on alternative data, this project would strongly contribute to the societal debate on the social costs of Luxembourg's current developmental model and provide insights for policy makers.