Racism in laws and real estate companies forces migrants to live in ghettos

BarcelonaHamid Hmata has had to wait four years to see the real estate agency fined 10,000 euros from Mataró, who refused to rent him a home, even though his salary is above the Catalan average. In the end, more than money, it has been shown that it was a matter of surname and ethnic origin different from the hegemonic ones. This case is a textbook example of real estate racism, a sum of discriminatory practices that go far beyond individual behavior and that flow above all through laws and intermediaries who channel racialized people—foreigners but also Roma—towards housing of worse conditions.

This is the diagnosis of l'Report on the anti-racist transformation of the housing sector The study, authored by researchers Marc Borràs-Batalla and Aliou Diallo, was commissioned by the Office for Equal Treatment and Non-Discrimination (OITND) of the Department of Equality and Feminisms, in response to a motion put forward by the Comuns party. It analyzes how this system, which perpetuates real estate racism from above, operates.

On the one hand, it points to a legal framework of "seemingly neutral" laws and regulations that end up discriminating against the very people they are supposed to protect and perpetuating stereotypes. It refers to the fact that public policies follow technical and universal criteria, but when it comes to selecting beneficiaries, professionals fall into discriminatory parameters—likely without malicious intent, the authors clarify—and tend to implicitly prioritize "deserving" applicants because they conform to the dominant sociocultural norm. These are profiles that have a "higher probability of success," which leads to the systematic exclusion of those considered "complex." On the other hand, real estate professionals who act as intermediaries between property owners and potential tenants are clearly discriminatory agents, because depending on the skin color or passport they encounter, they offer homes in "worse conditions than those offered to locals" or even apply [unclear - possibly "attached" or "unfair" terms]. This system fosters racial segregation by neighborhood and creates ghettos in cities with a majority immigrant population. People discriminated against because of their origin are treated with the prejudice that they don't earn enough, that they won't pay, that they won't fit in with the standards of native residents, or simply that they will be "problematic," the researchers point out. Requirements that exclude without explicitly stating it.

The report also includes responses from professionals who admit, sometimes unwittingly, to discriminating against racialized clients, justifying their actions by claiming that racist landlords still exist. "The most common method is 'we'll put you on the waiting list and get back to you, because we have a lot of people and no apartments available.' This is their smokescreen. I think it's the easiest way for them to cover everything up," reads the document presented this Monday to a parliamentary committee.

The Director General for the Promotion and Defense of Human Rights at the Department of Equality, Noa Monràs, emphasized in her presentation that, for those affected, real estate racism is "a compendium of obstacles fueled by intermediaries and regulations" that condemns them to live in substandard housing, while the system maintains them and their salaries."

Furthermore, the head of the department endorsed the proposals of both researchers regarding the need for data disaggregated by racial and ethnic origin in order to identify both subjective discrimination and the structural aspects of access to housing. "Statistical invisibility is political invisibility," Monràs stressed, also mentioning the possibility of providing anti-racism training to real estate professionals as an example of best practices.