Housing Precarity and Collective Belonging: Refugee Claims-making and the Contestation of Race,Space,and Place in Urban Housing

Abstract

Refugees in the United States are being resettled in low-income urban neighborhoods with long histories of housing instability and racialized poverty, and where struggles over inequality and belonging shape everyday experiences. While prior research emphasizes the structural challenges refugees face and their strategies of legal and social claims-making, few studies explore how these processes unfold within urban housing systems where race and space are deeply contested. Drawing on in-depth interviews with Syrian refugees in northern New Jersey, this study shows how refugees navigate racialized housing institutions and mobilize collective claims for improved living conditions. Newly arriving refugees, like their long-term minoritized neighbors, encountered persistent barriers to safe and affordable housing. With nonprofit support, refugee families pursuing legal claims against exploitative landlords built alliances with other marginalized tenants, resisting housing inequality and challenging their incorporation into racialized urban poverty. By tracing these everyday collaborations, the study reveals how interracial alliances emerge through shared struggles, reshaping race relations and creating spaces where refugees expand agency, build collective belonging, and contest the intertwined inequalities of race, space, and place. These findings uncover an alternative pathway to integration rooted not only in formal state resources but also in grassroots interracial collaboration within marginalized urban communities.