Gentrification in Dudelange: the production of housing and stages of social change (1980 – 2019)

This article studies the relation between the production of housing and the social changes that occurred in apartment ownership over four decades in Dudelange, a postindustrial city close to the capital of Luxembourg. We draw on Land Registry data that contains information on the characteristics of apartment buyers: country of birth, age at purchase, occupation, and number of buyers. We identify four key actors in the progressive gentrification of the city: marginal gentrifiers, local developers, first wave gentrifiers, and investors. Marginal gentrifiers were the first non-locals to purchase new apartments in the city in the 1980s, as the industrial sector was gradually replaced by financial services. In the early 1990s, local developers built frantically in the city to capitalize on the growing demand for housing in Dudelange from workers in the financial centre. This supply shock created two parallel lines of gentrification: that within new apartments built from the 2000s onwards and that within the resales of the large number of apartments built in the 1990s. For both of these types of apartments, we find progressive change in the four characteristics studied – ageing, professionalization, internationalization, and an increase in couple buyers, reflecting the arrival of the first wave of gentrifiers in Dudelange – as well the important presence of investors. These changes are however much more pronounced among purchasers of new apartments. Despite the increased competition for housing and the surge of apartment construction, the paper argues that second-hand purchases slowed down gentrification and kept housing affordable in the context of incentivized real estate investments, decreasing ownership rates, and spatially displaced demand from the capital city. The findings show how the supply of housing (its timing and the actors involved) is a crucial factor to understand the unfolding of gentrification, both in terms of accelerating and limiting its spread.