Gentrification has for long been a key scenario from where to look into issues of urban inequalities, notably those related to class. On the descriptive level we have been told over and over again that in order to accommodate new coming middle classes into presumably deprived neighbourhoods there is a need for the authorities to resettle elsewhere the working-class and marginal populations that inhabited these areas. On an analytical level, Neil Smith’s explanation of the rent gap has stood out in grasping the logic of capital that lies in the generation of high potential ground rents where low capitalised ground rents are to be found.The rent-gap explanation is one that takes at its centre the manoeuvres of capital with portions of the city and the properties within them. Class, seems to be solely reserved for the descriptive level of gentrification, not for its inner workings. What if we were to take labour at the core of the rent-gap hypothesis? Whereas the higher potential ground rent would translate into the arrival of the so-called middle classes, the lower capitalised ground rent would relate to the presence of people belonging to a fading working class as well as to disparate categories of marginality united by stigma.By drawing on material gathered from Es Barri (Ciutat de Mallorca, Balearic Islands), this paper will focus on the production and reproduction of stigma and on how this stigma is put at use towards the consecution of rent gaps.

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