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This paper explores the concept of density rent gaps in verticalizing cities, with relation to Peter Marcuse's displacement categories. The study highlights a commonly uncritical relation with the rent gap that both defenders and critics of gentrification usually assume in the literature. Results from a quantitative analysis of a Displacement Index suggest that the largest rent gaps do not always correlate with the highest displacement rates because, in verticalizing cities, the most significant rent gaps come from 'density rent' and not necessarily the most expensive new housing. The study focuses on Chile's second-tier towns of Iquique and Antofagasta (seldom seen in the international literature). It uses real estate and population data and fieldwork analysis to fill data voids and caps the rent gap to estimate the amount of land value capture possible to implement to reduce Chile's highly exclusionary housing environment. We believe this analysis helps to conceptually separate the rent gap from gentrification for a more precise urban analysis of vertical cities. • The study contests the automatic association between rent gap and gentrification. • Residential density increases rent gaps; developers capitalize on more substantially than landholders. • Census data from 2002 and 2017 shows no statistical correlation between the largest rent gaps and displacement. • Displacement correlates with more expensive, low-density areas with lower rent gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]