"There are also ghettos of rich immigrants": segregation in Catalonia

BarcelonaThe Martínez Mejía family has been denied a mortgage four times, despite being backed by the salaries of all four members, and they have to continue living in a rented apartment in La Torrassa —a neighborhood in L'Hospitalet where 54% of residents were born abroad— that is falling apart. The apartment is so small that one of the sons, in his twenties, has to sleep in the same room as his parents. For the Khans, the father's good salary does not open doors to the homes they like and could afford. “Even with money, I can't live where I want,” complains Atusa Khan. The couple and their two young daughters are subletting in the El Raval neighborhood of Barcelona – with 64% of residents born abroad.

Khan's complaint is a response to the photograph ofwhere the immigrant population lives in Catalonia today, published by ARA based on INE data, coinciding with the start of the extraordinary regularization of the 150,000 people who already live —and even work— in Catalonia. “You live where you can and where you are allowed to live,” graphically summarizes Lucila Rodríguez-Alarcón, director general of the PorCausa Foundation, which focuses on immigration narratives. The Johnsons are a Californian family who, right after the pandemic, settled in the Gràcia neighborhood of Barcelona – with 31% of residents born abroad– and pay rent that is almost four times the interprofessional minimum wage; even so, they have bought a couple of apartments: one they sold the following year and the other they are renovating to rent out seasonally. The two teenage daughters attend an international school, and for them, Spanish andCatalan are foreign languages, because their social life remains within an English-speaking circle.

Voluntary segregation

From here on, Rodríguez-Alarcón states that “there are ghettos of rich immigrants” within the city and in developments that facilitate physical isolation. Along the same lines, geographer José Lasala indicates that “the greatest segregation occurs in the most favored neighborhoods because it is a voluntary separation, while the most disadvantaged are where people with less economic capacity end up”. Lasala is a doctoral candidate and a member of Fragmedcites, a project led, among others, by the Universitat de Lleida to analyze fragmentation in medium-sized Spanish cities (with Lleida, Manresa, and Girona among the Catalan ones).

From the analysis of the map of Catalonia, it is noted that the two million foreigners –25% of the census– residing in the country are predominantly concentrated in large cities of the Barcelona metropolitan area, and to a lesser extent in the periphery, although with significant exceptions –such as Guissona, Salt, La Jonquera, with rates far above the Catalan average–. Outside the large Barcelona conurbation, Lasala points out that physical segregation is more complicated in small or medium-sized towns due to their dimensions, but physical barriers are replaced by symbolic ones and the feeling of “urban legitimacy” for some to occupy these neighborhoods and for others to stigmatize them and avoid them.

How is this concentration explained? Can we speak of segregated societies? “In Catalonia, we have not reached the point of the Netherlands, France, and Belgium, with hyper-marginalized neighborhoods, but the material and economic conditions are beginning to arise for this to happen”, replies Lasala, who warns that administrations are repeating the same mistakes of decades ago, concentrating the few public housing developments that are built in certain neighborhoods or on the outskirts of cities. Furthermore, with a wild real estate market, the only option for poor immigrants is to live in the most socially disadvantaged neighborhoods, where housing is of poorer quality, smaller and older, or with a lack of investment for years that has caused degradation and will ultimately lead to only those with no other option living there.

Once the ghetto concept is banished, because it implies criminalizing people, Jordi Bayona, professor at the University of Barcelona (UB) and associate researcher at the Centre d’Estudis Demogràfics, speaks of “concentration” and agrees that in Catalonia it is of a “medium level, surely lower than that of decades ago”, when the newly arrived population had to make do with living in shacks and caves or in segregated neighborhoods in industrial estates. Unlike other areas of Spain, immigration here is “structural”, increasing with economic prosperity and slowing down with crises. For this reason, he points out, an reception system must be prepared, and he also emphasizes that the level of integration depends to some extent on the time of arrival in the country. “Those who arrived 10 or 15 years ago surely did not have as many problems finding a rental as those arriving now”, he reflects.

Income and housing

According to Lasala, there are three factors that indicate the level of segregation in a neighborhood: the place of birth of the residents, the level of education, and disposable income. Logically, all three “go hand in hand” and are responsible for distributing the population by neighborhoods: rich with rich and poor with poor, regardless of nationality or origin. “If housing is stratified, the population ends up being stratified,” she concludes.

Rodríguez-Alarcón also emphasizes the fact that a change in policies is necessary to promote “social mixing” and to move away from the approaches of France or Belgium, which created a lot of public housing to accommodate immigration from former colonies. Concentration created ghettos and contributed to social confrontation that still persists. The expert also says that quality “public services” “eliminate” segregation because they “equalize everyone” and make it easier for people to occupy the same places, whether schools or medical centers. The danger Lasala sees is that “the prices of apartments will end up revaluing” because, in the end, those who benefit are those who have the least and can decide the least.

In a square in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Martorell, a group of women in their eighties, who sixty years ago moved into the subsidized housing of the Housing Board of the Franco regime, spend their afternoon. They chat about their lives, mixing Catalan and Spanish. Some came from regions in southern Spain during the great migratory wave that changed Catalonia forever. Others are Catalan through and through. Today, in the neighborhood, 27% of residents were born abroad, two points above the municipal average and well below the 36% in historic centers. “My husband and I came from a town in Seville because in Martorell we knew some compadres who rented us a room; three couples lived in one apartment,” explains Lola González.

The story is not very different from that experienced by some young sub-Saharan Africans occupying another bench in the square, chatting in English, the colonial language they share, as most of them come from Nigeria and Ghana. They explain that they ended up in Martorell because they have friends there who told them there would be work – most of them work in local companies – and in this particular neighborhood because with effort they have found it easier to find a shared sublet with compatriots. "Does anyone know of a room?", asks a young woman, also Nigerian, in a laundromat frequented by the immigrant population.

This pattern, that of following the path of acquaintances, is a pattern that is always repeated in all migrations. "Those who arrive are looking for a host community," states Rodríguez-Alarcón. Word of mouth among countrymen who create a network – with a similar language, culture, and customs – is activated, on the one hand, when there is a need to emigrate to improve conditions or to flee persecution and wars, and on the other hand, when the host society requires labor to maintain economic activity and general well-being. Some now-gentrified neighborhoods, like the Chinatowns or Little Italys of North American cities, or the traditional neighborhood struggle of the Barcelonian neighborhood of Torre Baró depicted in El 47 are good examples of coexistence between those who share language, culture, and customs.

Real estate racism

The complaint that Atusa Khan expressed at the beginning of this text was directed at real estate agencies, which she accuses of discriminating against her because of her name. It is not a personal perception, but rather that "real estate racism" is a "structural" practice, in the words of Aliou Diallo, a researcher at the University of Girona who recently published a report on this issue commissioned by the Generalitat. This political scientist states that real estate agencies have become

Over the years, the most degraded neighborhoods or those with a cheaper housing offer have been changing their type of residents. As biology has made its way and residents age and die, or move to affluent areas, a younger foreign population has entered many of the apartments, points out demographer Bayona. These movements allow new people to settle and the old ones to sell their homes, and therefore, a “coexistence that is not only of different origins but of different ages” occurs. The same process occurs in the historic centers of medium-sized cities “that have not been gentrified”, points out the geographer from the Universitat de Lleida, noting the degradation of those in Lleida, Manresa, or Balaguer.

On the contrary, Girona's has been gentrified and has attracted European immigration with a high economic level and has caused housing prices to skyrocket. In these wealthy neighborhoods, says the PorCausa researcher, not only is housing more expensive than average, but shops and restaurants become more expensive, creating invisible barriers for others. “The rich also create their own spaces,” she insists.