Discrimination in housing: the other face of Europe’s habitational crisis

“Fair rents, now!”, chanted tens of thousands in Spain’s Barcelona on November 23, 2024, in one of the biggest housing protests ever recorded. The city joined the wave of mobilisations unleashing from Madrid to Seville, Valencia and other big cities in the last few months, all calling for an urgent housing reform: according to an independent report, rental prices in Spain have surged by 78% over the last decade.

But rent prices were not the only cause protesters stood up for during the nationwide demonstrations. A prevailing demand from Spain’s mobilised civil society has been inclusive and non-discriminatory housing, a problem affecting not only foreign residents in the country, but also Spaniards from diverse ethnic backgrounds or religious minorities.

A government-funded study released in 2024 by the organisation Provivienda exposed that seven out of ten real estate agencies in Spain refuse to rent/sell to people based on their origins despite fulfilling all other requirements. An issue not specific to Spain: the European Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA), records that 31% of people of African descent in Europe faced racial discrimination when trying to rent or buy an apartment or a house from 2016 to 2022. As for Muslims, those who think their background prevented them from accessing housing was 26%.

“The right to housing is incomplete as long as racism prevails” stated the Barcelona-based Observatory for Social Rights and Ecological Justice (DESCA) back in 2022. Today, Miguel Ruiz, housing researcher at the observatory and collaborator in the Provivienda study, tells Voxeurop that “there is a great part of the population that are totally excluded from the housing market because of the colour of their skin, name, surname or accent.”

“Irreparable damage to the human being”

Miguel Ruiz claims that he sees this phenomenon on a daily basis through his research, and still, he says, “we only count on two sanctions at a national level, both of them issued by Barcelona’s city council.”

The lack of sanctions is alarming, considering the findings of recent studies. The level of direct discrimination in the Spanish housing market has been found to stand at 72.5%, cases in which real estate agencies have directly accepted not to offer deals to people of foreign backgrounds, the Provivienda study indicates. 

In cases where discriminatory clauses are not openly accepted, the same study shows that 81.8% of agents practice relative discrimination, asking for a higher price, reducing the time of the contract or adding abusive clauses.

“They could live in other places and in better conditions according to their purchasing power and in the end they end up living in worse places or on the outskirts,” says Miguel. Indeed, big apartments are more often offered to locals (50.4%) than to perceived foreigners (39.8%) when the purchasing power and the number of family members are the same. Likewise, blocks with elevators are more rarely shown to discriminated groups, only to 21.2%.  

“This has long lasting psychological effects, because feeling that you are being dehumanised or a second-class citizen is not a minor thing”, Miguel Ruiz stresses from DESCA observatory. A report they published this last December shows that people who suffer housing insecurity, regardless of their nationality, have a worse mental health than average people, with more than 80% of respondents showing these signs. 

“The feeling of rejection, I believe, causes irreparable damage to the human being”, Aziz Sabbani says as he describes his reaction when suffering from direct discrimination when he wanted to move to an apartment a few years ago. He had dealt with the real estate agency smoothly on the phone, everything was fine: until, on the day of signing the contract, they saw his name. 

“Probably because of my level of Spanish and Catalan at the time, I had gone unnoticed,” Aziz tells Voxeurop. Although born in Morocco, he also calls Spain home after 23 years in the country. “The girl taking care of my file asked insistently if I was the same person on the phone, and then told me that we had a problem: the owners had reservations about renting to ‘outsiders’.”

People of African descent and Muslims, the main victims

Important cases like 2005’s complaint in Austria about adverts offering properties for ‘Austrians only’ or ‘no foreigners’, 2012’s fine to two French sisters who refused to rent to an Algerian couple on the grounds that they “did not want Arabs in the house”, and many others have made the public and housing actors across Europe “more and more aware of anti-discrimination law”, making explicit discrimination and adverts “becoming ever rarer”, and “incredibly difficult to prove that a refusal to let out property was based on prohibited grounds of discrimination,” said a European Commission report already in 2013. 

Less explicit remarks however do not mean the situation is getting better. Spokesperson of the European Union Agency Fundamental Rights Nicole Romain tells Voxeurop that their latest report and survey findings “point to rising intolerance and hatred across Europe, affecting far too many people, including Jews, Muslims, people of African descent, Roma and migrants.” Especially, she argues, people of African descent and Muslims “experience the harshest discrimination in the labour and housing markets, impacting not only their future prospects but also those of their children.”

The second edition of their reports “Being Black” and “Being Muslim in the EU” exposes that the discrimination that these groups experience when looking for a place to live is higher than in 2016 by 21% and 22% respectively. These practices result in nearly one in two people from African descent (45%) living in overcrowded housing, a percentage that is 2.5 times higher than in the general EU population. As for Muslims, the number is 40%. 

“According to our 2022 survey, the highest rates of racial discrimination in access to housing were reported in Germany (62%), Austria (49%), Belgium (44%) and Italy (43%),” says FRA’s spokesperson. “Similarly, Muslim respondents reported facing high levels of racial discrimination in accessing housing, with the highest rates in Germany (54%), Austria (50%), Belgium and Finland (43% in both).”

Juan Carlos Benito Sánchez, human rights’ law expert specialised in housing, tells Voxeurop that Western European countries, and Belgium in particular, where he is based, have better tracking systems. 

“In a place like Belgium you have strong institutions, quite well funded, against discrimination, carrying out studies and receiving direct complaints from people who consider themselves discriminated against, being able to file a complaint and open an investigation,” he explains. “In Spain the system is not so strong.”

“We always try to push for public policies to obtain more data on discrimination,” Miguel Ruiz, from the Spanish observatory, agrees. “We know that from 2018 until 2024, at least two million people have been evicted from their houses, but we do not know how many had Spanish nationality, how many belonged to an ethnic or racial minority, how many were women … These are details that aren’t registered anywhere.”

A call to end the real estate status quo

Both in Spain and the rest of European countries, PhD Juan Carlos Benito Sánchez sees that the “the right to non-discrimination is underutilised to respond to the challenges linked to housing” and that the potential of the right to non-discrimination “could be exploited much more to realise the right to housing more broadly and make sure that all peoples have access to decent affordable housing.”

FRA’s latest Fundamental Rights Report underlines that rising housing prices “mean that many people, not just with migrant backgrounds, cannot afford to heat their homes or to rent decent accommodation,” their spokesperson Nicole Romain stresses to Voxeurop.

“In 2022, the number of Europeans who could not afford to keep their homes adequately warm rose to more than 40 million (9.3% of the population),” she adds, something that has affected more directly vulnerable groups. 

On those grounds, the agency calls on countries to use existing evidence to enforce existing laws and put an end to discrimination in housing, considering that combating poverty and social exclusion is a headline target of the European Pillar of Social Rights action plan to be reached by 2030 and that the 2021–2027 action plan on integration and inclusion reiterates that “access to adequate and affordable housing is a key determinant of successful integration.”

For researcher Miguel Ruiz, discrimination in housing and the general prices’ crisis are connected and have a common solution: fighting the current status quo by which real estate agencies are exempted from complying with the rules.

“Real estate agents have for years been allowed to not comply with any type of law, that is, setting abusive clauses, not advising the tenant correctly, assisting landlords to perform fraudulent activities and discriminating,” he states. “It is unacceptable that the actors of the housing market, which is a fundamental right, are not adequately monitored and supervised, and that requires a lot on the part of the public administration.”