The City in the Country: Wilderness Gentrification and the Rent Gap

Abstract

In this paper I explore the efficacy of applying Neil Smith's theory of the rent gap to rural gentrification in New York State's Adirondack Park, making three central claims. In the first place, although the underlying impetus for both rural and urban gentrification (namely, the maximization of profit on the part of a variety of gentrifying agents from individual owner-occupants to large-scale developers) is essentially the same, some fundamental differences between the determination of what constitutes ‘undercapitalized’ ground rent in the city and the wilderness leads to subsequent differences in the geographical expression of gentrification in each area. In the second, the unique land-management practices instituted by the State of New York in this region have set up the conditions for a singular type of disinvestment not typically found in the city, rendering disinvestment a central aspect of Adirondack gentrification but in a different way than the disinvestment which anchors Smith's argument. Finally, I argue that the ‘postproductivist’ theories which have recently gained currency in the extant rural gentrification literature are not applicable to the empirical realities of Adirondack land use, suggesting that rural areas themselves may be sufficiently differentiated to render the idea of an overarching, homogeneous ‘rural gentrification’ suspect and pointing to the need for a more refined and specific set of labels to indicate a variety of landscape-specific gentrification models in the hinterlands.