The permanent regime of temporary solutions: Housing of forced migrants in Europe as a policy challenge

Abstract

Periods of forced migration to and in Europe have been common in the past decade and show no expectation of stalling due to ongoing armed conflicts, global inequalities and the adverse effects of climate change. Nevertheless, the provision of accommodation for asylum seekers and refugees continues to depend on temporary, ad hoc solutions. In the context of housing financialisation and shortage of affordable housing across European cities, this decreases opportunities for integration and securing other needs, such as jobs, language acquisition and childcare, but increases the risk of refugee homelessness and social exclusion. Based on cross-national Urban Living Labs exchanges in Leipzig, Riga, Lund, Helsingborg and Vienna, this commentary argues for a European agenda for long-term housing solutions for forced migrants in the arrival and settling phases that tackle issues from discrimination to access, to belonging. Importantly, creating long-term housing solutions for refugees would benefit whole housing systems as instruments of social inclusion.

Introduction

The migration-related effects of the war in Syria in 2015 and Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 have produced both critical challenges to the European asylum system and innovation in government and civic support structures. Nevertheless, while a ‘structural’ need to accommodate forced migrants from different contexts in a mid- and long-term perspective has become highly likely, innovation in responses of the housing sector remains scarce even in “cities of solidarity” (Mayer, 2017). From 2021 to 2022, as a consortium working on the intersection of housing and integration, we organised a series of Urban Living Labs consisting of local and cross-national exchanges on refugee accommodation in several European cities that included Leipzig, Riga, Lund, Helsingborg and Vienna. These exchanges brought together relevant actors and experts on the intersection of housing and integration by holding online, in-person and hybrid policy design workshops, cross-country co-creation workshops and case study visits. We found that while all the involved cities had developed ways to accommodate refugees through a mixture of government, municipal and civil society practices, most if not all of the solutions were working ad-hoc.

Responding to this challenge, in this commentary we discuss the pros and cons of ad-hoc housing solutions and identify the possibilities for systemic local and European improvement. Our exchanges reveal that the ad hoc basis of solutions emerges from (a) broader European imaginaries of housing provision manifested similarly despite differences in national housing ownership structures and the availability of affordable and social housing and (b) from a lack of readiness to accept forced migration (no matter of its conjunctures) as a structural challenge for European societies that needs a systemic, consistent, long-term response. Nevertheless, we point towards solutions that ensure forced migrants’ right to housing in more promising ways.

Responding to austerity urbanism in European housing

While standards are often high, access to housing in Europe is an open-ended question. Newcomers arriving in European Union (EU) cities are often uncertain of their pathways towards stable accommodation. The grid of housing governance is patchy, fragile, with overlapping actors and uncertain time horizons (Darling, 2016; Lacroix and Desille, 2018; Meer et al., 2021). For people fleeing war or persecution without sufficient financial means or, in fact, for anyone wishing to start a new life elsewhere, either short- or long-term, housing is likely to be the entry point towards securing other needs. In turn, housing struggles often result in a sense of continued displacement (El Moussawi, 2023).

Within this context, European cities have proved to be networked and contested spaces of immigration policy (Mayer et al., 2017). Although a range of support for arriving refugees has emerged since 2015-16 exemplified by the debates on welcome or solidarity cities and refuge or sanctuary cities in the context of insecure legal status (see Neis et al., 2018; Bazurli et al., 2019; Agustín and Jørgensen, 2019; Kreichauf and Mayer, 2021), settling has remained a challenge for many. The need to find appropriate housing forms part of this challenge as it can undermine advances in immigration policy. This is mainly due to the fact that the European housing market, while diverse in its ownership structure and government responsibilities, in the past decades has been shaped by an idea of housing as an asset benefitting everyone ‘responsible enough’ to invest in it (Power and Mee, 2020; Rolnik, 2019). This leaves out groups excluded from accessing such resources, especially those most affected by both displacement and austerity regimes at places of arrival (see also the review by Brown et al. (2022)).

As a study by El-Kayed and Haman (2019) states for German cities, settlement for refugees is affected by a range of restrictive regulations, challenging market conditions, and discriminatory housing market actors that make it extremely difficult for them to find housing. This often results in negative social consequences for refugees (precariousness, need for squatting) due to the denied access to housing and lack of appropriate (long-term) housing policies (Bolzoni et al., 2015). Subsequently, forced migrants are often directed towards various types of emergency housing as a temporary solution and which often include inadequate standards. This temporariness manifests itself as an ad-hoc solution for preventing homelessness (as shelters are widely non-accessible to non-nationals), instead of being meant to secure stable housing as a prerequisite for social inclusion. Consequently, as temporality is used as a policy mechanism for limited support, its inefficiencies create high risk of excluding refugees from permanent housing (Dotsey and Lumley-Sapanski, 2021). When combined with broader austerity urbanism based on the trust in market mechanisms and retrenchment of the state (Soederberg, 2019), this approach requires a lot of individualised support with the heaviest contribution provided by civil society actors engaged in “solidarity work” (Mayer, 2017), who are often precariously financed or even unpaid and remain unnoticed in public (care) debates.

Access to housing and assistance

At the start of their path to housing most forced migrants who request international protection, with the exception of Ukrainian refugees under the Temporary Protection Directive, start their housing experience in asylum centres. While in Vienna accommodation for asylum seekers is mostly situated within urban areas, in Lund and Riga, asylum centres are located at the outskirts of the city or isolated locations within the city’s territory. In Leipzig, accommodation facilities are spread over the city but also include a large-scale camp at the outskirts. This is the start of exclusionary effects limiting access to resources available in the city. While upon leaving the asylum centres, refugees can access social support, the odds are not in their favour. Rental markets are under high pressure of price, availability and distribution. This applies both to growing cities with a large rental market like Leipzig and Vienna and to shrinking cities like Riga with a relatively small rental sector. Mortgages, however, are mostly inaccessible even to refugees who have settled for a longer time span.

In all five cities, nongovernmental organisations (NGOs) support refugees in calling the landlords, arranging visits and helping with bureaucracy and language issues. While such mediation may delay some of the discriminatory practices, often NGOs are as helpless as the refugees themselves since the housing market is inadequate to their needs and discrimination is widespread. Landlords often refuse to rent their properties to people that have foreign-sounding names, different skin colour, limited residency status or non-regular income. A telephone conversation between a prospective tenant and a landlord may end in the first couple of seconds as soon as the landlords hear English, an accent or the name of the caller. In case of Ukrainian war refugees, many landlords showed a remarkable solidarity to offer housing, but this is undermined by the many cases where other refugees have been refused (Astolfo et al., 2022; Haase et al., 2022). Such private hosting allows migrants to access decentralised housing and exchange with local residents. However, faced with lengthy procedures (access to funding, social support, healthcare, language barrier or permits) and an unknown end of the crisis, hosts experienced exhaustion and the newcomers became overburdened emotionally. ¹

The desperation to find housing – amid all the other integration requirements like finding employment, learning the language, school education and so on – is often exploited by landlords. We observed informal agreements with little protection from being forced out anytime and less possibilities to demand municipal housing benefits (e.g. Vienna, Riga). In addition, looking for housing is not a process that has a clear destination point. One is likely to change several apartments and be continuously engaged in the quest of finding a better, more secure place. In Latvia, refugees’ struggles in the housing market often lead to refugees leaving for other countries, like Germany and Sweden, increasing the housing demand there. In all cities, most of the rental agreements are temporary which is also compounded by the unwillingness to seek help at the municipal and state level and the very limited help the public sector can offer. In cities with significant social housing sectors, migrants with short-term residential status do not have access to the social housing market at all (e.g. in Vienna, cf. Gruber and Franz, 2020).

The permanent regime of ad hoc solutions

In situations of a pronounced lack of accessible and affordable housing in European cities, recent responses show reliance on ad hoc solutions such as tents, gyms, temporary use of hotels, container ‘villages’ and private hosting. More promising are examples of temporary housing integrated in residential neighbourhoods (e.g. in Lund, Helsingborg, Vienna, cf. Aigner, 2019) or municipal concepts of decentralised accommodation (Leipzig, cf. Werner et al., 2018). Often, however, these solutions do not meet the needs in terms of numbers, are under pressure in contested housing markets (ambition-reality gap), are limited in time (interim use) or are affected by migration-policy related electoral narratives. As long as ideologies of individualism and neoliberalism reign supreme in social and housing policies, housing is not only a means to inequality, but a tool for migrant exclusion and precariousness. This ideology meets its limits when a housing need arises among people that do not have the resources – social and material – and face specific disadvantages, for example, precarious legal status and language barriers (Haase et al., 2020) to secure housing on their own.

Currently, the municipalities do not have the resources – in the number of social workers, financial instruments or housing units – to deliver assistance that combats exclusionary effects. The lack of capacity within the public sector (mostly on the local scale) and the lack of the political will (mostly on the national level) to infuse it with the necessary capacity mean that the responsibility of care is delegated away to organisations and people who feel personal outrage at the overall state of affairs. This results in the civil sector assuming an ever-expanding set of responsibilities driven by humanitarian and moral concerns. As they fill the void, they enable the political sector to get away with this ‘strategy’. Even if there is awareness of the issue and strategies to tackle it at the state level, ad hoc measures buy enough time to keep postponing a permanent or structural resolution to the impasse. In many cases, it is also hampered by the ideological convictions of the dominant or influential political parties’ that refugee acceptance and consequently housing solutions should be limited – making funding scarce and always under threat. In some EU countries, there is a clear political preference for making the country unattractive for forced migrants with good housing conditions being seen as an unwanted pull factor. However, the ways in which forced migration has recently affected European housing markets has raised policymakers’ awareness to address the issue with housing policy.

Towards long-term solutions

While we have noted an ongoing reliance on ad hoc housing solutions, this does not mean that there are no ideas for or already existing solutions in European cities. In fact, both ad hoc and long-term solutions depend on institutional support. Nevertheless, they often remain fragile exceptions due to political resistance and since refugee housing is not perceived as a structural issue of refugees’ exclusion from housing policy instruments. As we elaborate in our policy information within HOUSE-IN, ² a comprehensive long-term refugee housing policy would tackle the issue from multiple sides and scales: (a) increasing access to affordable housing for refugees, (b) monitoring and tackling discrimination and (c) facilitating inclusive milieu’s for settling and belonging.

Clearly, it is paramount to increase affordable, public and needs attendant housing for all where refugee housing solutions can then be embedded. This is a long-term process to be supplemented with adjusting the already existing systemic capacities for housing inclusion to become accessible and tailored to forced migrants. One example is making refugees eligible for rental and utility supplements during times of need, possibly with tailored conditions differing from other groups. In Hungary, rental supplement has been provided by United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (Kiss et al., 2023), but this can come from state sources as the example of countries that provided it for Ukrainian refugees shows. Even temporary housing units with flexible and modular structures or housing planned to be rented or sold after periods of higher refugee inflow, such as those assembled in Sweden, represent long-term thinking. The key is not to use them to increase segregation or pass lower quality housing as an appropriate solution, but use them as a bridge for other types of housing in the arrival phase.

While the goal should be to increase the opportunities for refugees to access housing in all sectors of the market, either social, affordable or non-subsidised, this is not always possible under constrained market conditions. Due to how crucial many NGOs are in assisting refugees in the housing market independently of local political support, the examples of NGOs running housing units (either private, cooperative or public) also show a much needed safety net near the arrival phase. Institutionalising such support in the form of paid mentorship and social rental management significantly improves housing security.In addition, NGO mediation is not enough to combat the largely prevalent discrimination experienced by refugees in Europe. Tragically, many countries do not have any legislative means to sanction discrimination in the housing market. Recognising this as an issue and developing structures such as an ‘anti-discrimination office’ in Leipzig also holds the potential to decrease the need for ad hoc solutions to combat market discrimination. Combatting housing discrimination on municipal, national and European scales remains a largely unsolved challenge. Even in cities with highly developed social housing, such as Vienna, housing allocation to refugees would be possible if preconditions to qualify for social housing are adjusted.

Finally, and as a broader policy of increasing urban social inclusion through housing, there is a need to increase forced migrants’ and especially refugees’ access to collaborative housing with broad socialisation activities, such as SällBo in Helsingborg (Arroyo et al., 2021) or Que[e]rbau Seestadt in Vienna (Reimann et al., 2022) where part of apartments are allocated to people with a refugee background. This crucial need in the settling phase can be achieved through an increase of collaborative and inclusive housing projects around Europe and quotas for refugees and newcomers in such housing projects.