In the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, Spain’s housing prices doubled and its immigrant population increased by 1000%. How did immigrants fare when the market crashed? Carlos Delclós joins us to discuss the “citizen gradient” among Spanish citizens, EU citizens living in Spain, and non-EU citizens and how citizenship status influences housing precarity and displacement outcomes.
In the years leading up to the Global Financial Crisis, Spain’s housing prices doubled and its immigrant population increased by 1000%. How did immigrants fare when the market crashed? Carlos Delclós joins us to discuss the “citizen gradient” among Spanish citizens, EU citizens living in Spain, and non-EU citizens and how citizenship status influences housing precarity and displacement outcomes.
Shane Phillips 0:04
Hello, this is the UCLA Housing Voice podcast and I'm your host, Shane Phillips. This week we're joined by Carlos Delclos to discuss his research on the huge boom in immigration, housing production, and housing prices experienced by Spain in the years leading up to the global financial crisis. His research brings a valuable lens to the conversation looking at what some call the citizen gradient. In Spain, this is a sort of hierarchy that goes from Spanish citizens to EU citizens living in Spain, and then to non-EU citizens. It's easy to see a similar hierarchy of rights and privileges in other countries, including here in the US, where citizenship status has a very real influence on housing precarity and displacement outcomes. We were very overdue for a conversation about the relationship between immigration and housing so we're excited to bring this one to you. The Housing Voice podcast is a production of the UCLA Lewis Center for Regional Policy Studies with production support from Claudia Bustamante, Jason Sutedja, Divine Mutoni and Phoebe Brous. You can email me with any questions at shanephillips@ucla.edu, and you can give the show a five-star rating or review on Spotify or Apple. Now let's get to our conversation with Carlos Delclos.
Carlos Delclos is a Postdoctoral researcher at the Institute for Government and Public Policy at the Autonomous University of Barcelona and a Research Fellow at RMIT University. He's joining us today to talk about rapid integration starting in Spain in the late 1990s, and the housing precarity and displacement disproportionately experienced by that immigrant population which I imagine will also hold some lessons for those of us in other parts of the world as well. Carlos, thank you for joining us, and welcome to the Housing Voice podcast.
Carlos Delclos 1:55
Thanks for having me.
Shane Phillips 1:56
And my co host today is Paavo. Hey Paavo
Paavo Monkkonen 1:59
Hey, Shane. Good to meet you, Carlos. I'm excited to talk about Barcelona and the other cities
Carlos Delclos 2:05
It's a pleasure!
Shane Phillips 2:06
That is a great transition, we're going to start with a tour.as always. Carlos, you said you're going to give us a tour of Barcelona where you've been for I think you said 17 years now. Where are you taking us? In fact, since I'm going to be there in a month, where are you taking me?
Carlos Delclos 2:21
Well, I think one of the important stops on my tour is the Camp Bethuel area of the Sanz neighborhood. Camp Betheul is sort of a cooperative of co-ops type of organization. It came out of the 15 M movement so in 2011, May of 2011, in response to austerity and a number of corruption scandals, and especially the fallout from the crash of Spain's housing bubble, millions of Spaniards took to the streets demanding real democracy now in what became a precursor of the Occupy movement in the United States. A couple of weeks into that, a bunch of neighbors from the Sanz neighborhood who were involved in the Plaza, in the 15th M movement, the plaza Catalonia Camp, said "hey, there's this sort of unused, underused, abandoned textile colony", I guess is the correct term - textile complex, textile colony, they call them colonia sexta in Spanish. But this textile colony in the center of the Sanz neighborhood on the border with a "hospitalette". It's been in disuse for a long time, and it's really quite beautiful in a lot of ways, but it's, you know, rundown and all this kind of stuff, and so they decided to squat it and turn it into a space for community use. Sanz has long been sort of a working-class stronghold in Barcelona. It's also been a stronghold of anarchist and cooperativist organizing for over a century now. So they have a very strong cooperativist movement, and over time, what they did was they occupied different parts of this area, of this colony, and opened it up to community management, and slowly asked the city to cede usage of the property to the community under a regime of self-management. So over time, this is what the city did, and let's say 12 years later, it's an area that has different spaces for artists, that has bars, gyms, urban gardens, and a housing co-op called 'La Borda', and a couple more in construction. And it's very much a symbol I'd say of a lot of this sort of bottom-up organizing that's typical of the city, and that Chris Elam captures so well in his book 'Anarchism in the City'.
Shane Phillips 4:52
That sounds like worth taking some time to visit while I'm there. So attentive listeners may have already guessed that we were connected to Carlos through some folks working with the International Social Housing Festival, which, again, is happening in Barcelona about three weeks after we published this episode from June 7th to June 9th. Carlos, I assume you will be there.
Carlos Delclos 5:13
That's right. Yeah, I'm organizing a panel on housing justice from a capabilities approach on June 7, with my colleague, Boram Kim, of TU Delft (Delft University of Technology), and Julie Lawson will also be in attendance from RMIT. So it should be an interesting group of folks with an interesting group of speakers.
Shane Phillips 5:41
Yeah, awesome, see you there. So the article we're discussing was published last year in European Urban and Regional Studies, and it's titled, 'The Burden of the Border: Precarious Citizenship Experiences in the Wake of the Spanish Housing Crash'. It's really looking at the role of citizenship in housing instability and displacement, beyond or in addition to, other factors that may be associated with someone's citizenship status, like income or education levels. We, of course, have our very own complicated history with immigration here in the US, and since you're from Houston, you're very familiar with that as well. And that has implications for people's living conditions here. And I think this conversation might actually have particular relevance to our neighbors to the north and Canada, which, like Spain has had very rapid immigration. Canada welcomes about a third as many immigrants each year as the US, but it does so with about a ninth of our total national population. So they have about three times more immigration, per capita. And all that aside, we know that the number of immigrants and refugees is likely to increase across the board in the future, whether due to war, or climate change, or other pressures. So this is a really important topic that we are very excited to finally talk about on the podcast.
Carlos Delclos 6:52
I was just going to add that I think it's something that we really need to start thinking about as demographic pressures increase, precisely because of climate change. But also, as I think our housing regimes are going to be adapting to the new sort of energy transition, that is going on right now. So I think it's an increasingly important topic, and I think it was important to examine it in a context of sort of systemic shock, which is what Spain was going through during the time period I analyzed. Yeah,
Shane Phillips 7:27
So let's first set some context about the Spanish housing market. Spain built more homes than any other European country in the years leading up to the global financial crisis, and it also experienced one of the biggest price bubbles and subsequent crashes. And we are really talking about a lot of housing built during that period. Housing starts peaked in 2006, at about 760,000 units while here in California, just for comparison, our peak year was 2004 when we hit just shy of 210,000 permitted units. California has about three-quarters of Spain's population, but less than a third of its housing production over that time. I believe France was building the second most housing in Europe during that period but despite a 40% larger population, their housing starts were 35% lower than Spain's. Between 2000 and 2007, real residential property prices doubled in Spain, which was a sharper rise than the US, UK, Canada, France, Sweden, and really just about everywhere else, and the recovery has also been much slower in Spain. As of 2023, prices in Spain were only about 40%, higher than they were in 2000 and 30% below the 2007 peak, whereas all those other countries I mentioned have reached or exceeded their pre-global financial crisis peaks. Spain has had a very volatile housing market for the past few decades. Before we get into discussing immigration Carlos, is there anything else you'd like to add just on the housing market side of things? And you know, just to pose a specific question, and you can say other things as well, why do you think Spain's high production rates, high housing production rates, during those years didn't translate into more affordable housing, at least relative to Spain's neighbors?
Carlos Delclos 9:18
That's a very good question because standard sort of neoclassical economics would tell you right, that if the supply is going up so much, the demand is going to sort of match it and there's going to be some sort of equilibrium reached as this takes place. Now, it's true that Spain during this period had a sort of very unique demographic situation in that it reached the lowest low fertility levels around 1997 just before the housing bubble sparked at about 1.15 children per woman.
Shane Phillips 9:52
Oh, wow, that is very low.
Carlos Delclos 9:54
Yeah, it's what Francesca Billari has referred to as the 'lowest low fertility rate', at the time, it was the lowest in the world. And so it had been facing fertility decline since really the end of the Franco dictatorship in the late 1970s but it really peaked in about 1997. So as it was sort of experiencing this, this very, very low fertility, you know, this housing bubble started, the massive increase in construction jobs, also brought a lot of immigration. And the bulk of Spain's population growth during this time was accounted for by migration. So this was sort of what was happening, you know, both on the supply and demand side of housing and housing starts. But the other part of the story that I think really gets to why there was not, you know, more affordable housing, I tell the story in two parts. One is that Spain has very, very residual social housing, only about 2% of Spanish households have social housing, actually a little bit less even. On the other hand, this does not mean that the public sector and subsidies did not play a major part in building Spain's housing market, in fact, there was a famous declaration by Arrese, the Housing Minister under Franco's dictatorship, who viewed the high percentage of tenants in urban areas as a threat to public order, and so he decided that he wanted to make a 'pais de propietarios no de proletarios' so a country of homeowners, not of proletarians, that's how that literally translates.
Shane Phillips 11:49
Sounds better in Spanish.
Carlos Delclos 11:50
Yes, it rhymes a lot better. So they made a very concerted effort to not only build a lot of housing, in areas where there was a lot of informal housing due to rapid rural-to-urban migration. But they specifically decided to create this housing with the goal of promoting homeownership. So over several decades, Spain created a large amount of housing, but that was quickly privatized, and the houses that were built with public funds, were able to be sold by homeowners about 10 years after, you know, after about 10 years. So this meant that a great great deal of the publicly funded housing stock quickly became, you know, private assets that were bought and sold during this period, conservative estimates would put the number of social housing units or public housing units in Spain today, at about 4 million more than it has at the moment, which is nowhere near 4 million if this had not taken place, if public housing had stayed public. So I think this lack of reduced-rate housing did a great deal to prevent affordable housing from emerging. Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway has said that as a result of this lack of social housing, and taken together with the very high homeownership rate which peaked at about 84% of households in 2006 just to have an idea, what this meant was that the private rental market ended up taking on something of a social function. So that's where people who are accessing housing as you know, in a sort of intermediate state, prior to homeownership, that's how they did it - through the private rental market. What we've seen over time since then, is that a lot of people have persisted in the private rental market. And in fact, it's grown since the crisis. But the other point, and the other part of the story is the one that I kind of talk about in this paper, which is, not only were these young Spanish households, you know, the few that could leave their parents' households, rather, this was like largely immigrant centered housing market.
Shane Phillips 14:17
Yeah, and I do want to add that - this kind of came up in our conversation with Sorcha as well last episode, that the very high homeownership rate, I think, also just has some kind of influence on expectations and housing, kind of serving a different purpose, and so having it become more affordable, (is) sort of not the point of building more, it's to allow more people to kind of get on that property value appreciation ladder. And I think if you look at rent prices during the pre-global financial crisis era, they weren't really climbing nearly as fast they tend not to be nearly as prone to bubbles. And so I think that emphasis on just, you know, social housing for sure, public housing for sure, but just rental housing period as like a direction for Spain to move in has some appeal. Paavo, I think you had something to add?
Paavo Monkkonen 15:06
Yeah, so I lived in Spain in the year 2001, in the coastal soil in Andalucia, and you know, so I wonder how much you can speak to the purchase of homes and the construction of new housing for, like, you talk about immigration to Spain but a lot of the homes, as I understand, were bought by people in other parts of Europe as an investment or a vacation home. It's kind of like Florida or Texas, to the 10th degree, at least that was my experience when I was living there. And then combined with kakaw system, which was like the savings and loan banking for mortgages. And as I understand it, there was like a huge web of corruption and problems in that system that really, you know, like happened in the US as well. But even more, so I don't know how big of a role that played?
Carlos Delclos 15:52
Well, I would say that there's a few factors here. So the first thing is that it's not just other European nationalities, or people of other European nationalities purchasing vacation homes in Spain, rather Spain itself, Spaniards themselves have a fairly high rate of, you know, secondary residences. This has a lot of different explanations. On the one hand, there is this relatively recent history of massive rural-to-urban migration, where people just you know, on the one hand, want to keep roots in their hometowns. On the other hand, there is this sort of key role that housing plays in welfare so to speak. That is to say, the Spanish welfare state is often classified as a familistic welfare state, where a great deal of social protection is externalized onto families, right? This is very typical of southern European countries but in Spain, it's particularly pronounced. And in this setup, intergenerational transfers play a major role in keeping people out of poverty, or sort of maintaining social status, any social status that's been attained. And ofcourse in the story of intergenerational transmission of wealth, housing plays a, you know, absolutely central role. So I think this has a lot to do with it, and a lot of the transformations that we're seeing in Spain in recent years have to do with these practices. Now, at the same time, it is a. you know, a holiday hotspot, it's a tourism-oriented country, and indeed, people do like to buy nice homes on the coast. But this goes for foreigners as much as it does for, say, in Spain.
Shane Phillips 17:43
I do appreciate that because I often, you know, we often have people here saying, what about all the foreign buyers? What about, you know, in particular people pointing to Chinese buyers, and there's a sort of, you know, intentional or unintentional xenophobic strain to that
Paavo Monkkonen 17:58
It gets racist pretty quick!
Shane Phillips 18:00
Yeah, and I think it's just it also, in addition to that, it kind of tries to deflect our own responsibility for these problems, and just put it on someone else like, well, what can we do, what could we have done if it's these outsiders that are causing these problems when we know, in fact that it is
Paavo Monkkonen 18:17
You know, I think that's true but I mean, I'll just say that at that moment in time, it was like the EU was opening up, you could live everywhere, you could move your money around, it was like a unique moment in time where there was...
Shane Phillips 18:28
I think you can go the other direction, and like, be too dismissive of it but yeah, laying it all at the feet of that, I think is where some people want to go, and that's clearly wrong.
Carlos Delclos 18:38
I mean, I would say, I would say that it did not help that in response to the global financial crisis, Spain instituted a golden visa program where you could obtain basically instantly Spanish nationality just by purchasing a property over 500,000 euros. So now that didn't really help a whole lot, and certainly pointed to a major hypocrisy, vis-a-vis some of the findings of this paper.
Shane Phillips 19:06
Yeah, so around the same time that Spain was building all this housing and experiencing this huge price bubble, specifically, we're looking at 1998 to 2008, its foreign born population increased tenfold, from 500,000 to over 5 million, which in 2008, would have been about 12% of the total population. What can you tell us about where these immigrants were arriving from, and what was drawing them to Spain in particular?
Carlos Delclos 19:32
Sure, so those folks mostly came from Latin America. That was one of the sort of the biggest sending regions and the North of Africa, primarily Morocco, as well as West Africa. These were the sort of the big non-EU countries that were moving to Spain, but there was also a great deal of migration from the rest of the European Union, including Great Britain, and Romania in particular, Now Romania had an interesting case insofar as they did not really access the same mobility rights as sort of Western Europeans until about between 2006 and 2008 so right at the moment of the crash but these were the main sort of nationalities that were that were coming into Spain - (they) were Morocco, Ecuador, Colombia, Romania, UK, and then you know, it varies by city so for instance, in cities like Barcelona, you had a very large Pakistani Bangladeshi population, you had a greater percentage of Chinese immigrants in outlying areas of the Barcelona metropolitan area, such as Santa Paloma and so on. And, you know, it was quite varied, in fact, it was quite diverse, the different sort of sending countries that Spain was receiving from.
Shane Phillips 20:56
Just out of curiosity, the immigration from Romania that just like kind of sets something off in me where I know that they also have an even higher homeownership rate because of their history as a former Soviet bloc country and sort of just turning over all of the publicly owned housing to individuals. Is there any connection there or is that just a coincidence? I think it's I think the homeownership rate there is something like 95%,
Carlos Delclos 21:22
It's like over 95% yeah. No, I honestly don't know. I really couldn't say what the cause was other than the fact that there was a great amount of work in Spain at the time.
Paavo Monkkonen 21:34
I don't think people are moving based on homeownership rates of receiving countries...
I didn't know if there was a connection but it just hit me yeah
It's called no welfare state.
Carlos Delclos 21:46
So the reason that I think so many folks were arriving was there was just a lot of work at the time, there was a lot of work, a lot of demand for cheap manual labor in the construction sector, and, you know, surrounding sectors. And, quite frankly, you know, Spain made efforts to sort of recruit and promote migration to Spain in Latin America during this period. So there's a history of colonial ties as well with Latin America of course, and one of the things that I think is particularly relevant about this diversity, and even stratification of migrants sending countries is that there were different degrees of first linguistic affinity, whereby, you know, migrants from Latin America obviously would arrive to Spain and already know the mother tongue, you know, with some exceptions, such as in perhaps Catalonia, where everybody understands Castilian anyway but for the most part, you know, they were arriving somewhere where you spoke the language that everybody else was speaking. And, on the other hand, folks from Senegal, or from even Morocco perhaps had greater difficulty with the language and this translated to different outcomes in the housing market
Shane Phillips 23:02
Not just in terms of where people live, but just like economic struggles and being able to earn enough to afford housing, that kind of thing.
Carlos Delclos 23:10
Sure yeah, well, on the one hand, in terms of accessing, you know, different levels of occupational prestige, and different income levels, but also just as being attractive tenants, or, more importantly, perhaps, prospective mortgage holders
Shane Phillips 23:24
Uhm got it!
Paavo Monkkonen 23:25
Just for some more local context of the city of Malaga, where I lived in 2001 for a year. It was a really fascinating time, because I think, you know, I taught English so I had a lot of Spanish students, and what I understood from them is that, you know, this boom in Spain's economy, and the emigration to Spain, from other parts of Europe, was exciting for them because, you know, previously for generations, people in Spain had been leaving because it was relatively poorer than other parts of Europe. And so they had been going to work as manual laborers in other countries, and so the fact that they were receiving immigrants to do manual labor was like a source of pride, I think, for a lot of my students, actually. Although the dynamics of not having had much immigration previously, being a pretty closed, you know, homogenous-ish society compared to what I was used to at the time, there were cultural challenges in that. And yeah, my roommate, I was a proletariat not "proprietario", and we found this really nice guy from Morocco, and we rented a part of his apartment with him. He was from actually Ceuta, which is like this Spanish city in Morocco - a bizarre place. But yeah, I mean, and so learning from him, just the cultural shock and the experience of an immigrant in the country was, there were a lot of challenges in addition to the housing challenges that we talk about.
Carlos Delclos 24:42
Absolutely, absolutely! And I would say to that, you know, there's the issue of whiteness, right? And so the odds that you would encounter someone who was non-white in Spain prior to 1998 were substantially lower than what they were in 2002, 2004, 2006, and this sort of happened at a very fast speed. But then at the same time, you know, Spain has sort of universal health care. They don't distinguish whether you have papers or not when they treat you for illness, you know, it's free no matter what, because they view that as a sort of human rights. So it's like, they were not very good at dealing with racism, talking about it. I mean, I'm talking as someone who was there.
Paavo Monkkonen 25:27
That was exactly my experience, the students would talk about other people in ways that someone from California was like, "whoa, what are you saying" right but it was just it was all new to them
Carlos Delclos 25:38
Yeah. It's really crazy so they'll make these horribly, horribly stereotyped jokes, you know, and just be like, well, what's the big deal? You know, and then like, if you were to ask them well, do you think we should cover their healthcare, they're like, "yeah, man, they're people Jesus!", and it's like, okay! You know, it's this very, very strange thing for us in the states where we don't even, we don't need to get into that, it's a very different situation than in the United States. So, this did create a large number of challenges, and it's true, I mean, Spain was a net-sending country until the 1980s. And then after the 1980s, it was just kind of, it was not an attractive enough economy to receive tons of people, but it was, you know, just nice enough, and just not dictatory enough to retain population, right. But as soon as the economy really started to expand, it became a very, very attractive destination country.
Shane Phillips 26:32
So when things started to fall apart after 2008, there was a wave of foreclosures and evictions from 2008 to 2014, there were 600,000 foreclosures and 400,000 evictions, and these figures as with housing starts led the rest of Western Europe. Protests followed, but the organization that protested foreclosures was different from the one that organized protests around evictions. And you actually open your article by linking this to immigration. Could you tell some of that story and explain its significance for us?
Carlos Delclos 27:06
Sure, so this story's been told best by Sophie Gornick, whose book I strongly recommend. She really gets into this story about how Ecuadorian migrants primarily through the Coordinadora Nacional de Ecuatorianos En España (CONADEE), they were the first to organize to block an eviction because they had been subjected to essentially abusive and I'd even say fraudulent mortgages. One of the common practices that has been reported on in the media in Spain was something called 'cross mortgages' so what banks would do during this time, and we're talking about sort of the peak of subprime lending between 2004 and 2008 when, at the same time, immigration is also kind of peaking in Spain, one of the things that the lenders would do was, you know, you're an immigrant, you move to Spain, you apply for a mortgage, and someone has to cosign on the mortgage. But of course, migrants often have a great difficulty establishing networks, they don't have the pre-existing family networks that natives have. If anything, perhaps they have, you know, other Ecuadorian migrants that courage them to come or something like that. But what the banks would have them do is say, "okay, well, don't worry about it, another Ecuadorian family or another Ecuadorian debtor will cosign your mortgage, and you just cosign theirs or someone else's". And so they did this...
Shane Phillips 28:35
I'm seeing problems.
Paavo Monkkonen 28:39
Diversifying risk?
Carlos Delclos 28:40
Yeah, exactly, you got to diversify your bonds, right? But of course, it wasn't very diverse. It was very, very targeted. And so what you got was, you know, a major problem at a time when lending was being done at about anywhere between 100 and 125%. loan to value.
Paavo Monkkonen 29:01
Wow!
Carlos Delclos 29:01
So as might be expected, when defaults started to happen, it created a cascading effect, and when the housing market started to go wonder, first immigrants were the first to become unemployed in the construction sector, as construction, you know, died down, and then they were the first to be foreclosed upon. So the CONADEE, who, again, was a National Coordinator of Ecuadorians in Spain, noticed this was very widespread in their community, and started to organize to stop evictions on the grounds that these were abusive mortgages and that there is a constitutional right to housing in Spain. So they were the first to do that. At the same time, it must be said, the mortgage victims platform in Barcelona also started organizing against evictions. So it's not that they were different organizations. It's just that two different organizations were doing in and taking on this tactic of stopping evictions. However their focuses, well, you know, they were built throughout their own networks, whereas, the CONADEE was largely focused around Ecuadorians just by nature of the organization. In Barcelona, Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca, a particular mortgage victims platform or PAH was really organized, really came out of the Barcelona housing movement, squatter movements, folks who during the bubble itself, were calling out the bubble, and talking about the difficulties being faced in a precarious labor and housing market by younger folks in Spain.
Shane Phillips 30:37
Got it! So one part of this study is looking at the objective and subjective experience of housing conditions for Spanish citizens, citizens of other EU countries living in Spain, and non EU citizens living in Spain, like those from Latin America, for example. First, could you just tell us where that data comes from and what conditions were actually being measured?
Carlos Delclos 31:00
The data comes from the European Union statistics on income and Living Conditions, or EU SILC, And this is basically a harmonized data set for all European countries. In Spain, it's called the Spanish Living Conditions Survey so it's just an iteration of that survey in Spain. And specifically, I use data from the 2012 iteration of that survey, because on the one hand, it was during the sort of peak moment of the housing crash in Spain, and at the same time, it included a housing module that got into a great deal more detail around specific housing conditions, housing distress, and so on. So this this dataset can contains a very, very large number of households. In the study, we limit our sample to those with ongoing rent or mortgage payments in Spain, so that it has about 4,619 heads of household in it. Among the sort of indicators of housing that we use in our descriptive analysis are subjective shortage of space, objective overcrowding, which is a specific rate determined by Eurostat, subjective high financial burden of the total housing crossed, the proportion of households that were paying over 30% of their income on monthly rent or mortgage, principal repayments, inadequate electrical installations, plumbing, insufficient heating in winter, insufficiently cool in summer, and overall dissatisfaction. Those are sort of some of the descriptive indicators that we used.
Shane Phillips 32:30
And you had two more aggregated measures, which were exposure to displacement pressure and housing, precariousness, what do those ones represent?
Carlos Delclos 32:39
Sure, so exposure to what we refer to as displacement pressure here is basically it was a binary variable so yes or no, that captures whether people had experienced a move due to economic reasons in the previous five years, or expected to experience such a move within the next six months. And this includes evictions, forced evictions, as well as what they what the social movements hear referred to as invisible evictions. And then the other is a scale of housing precarity, sort of a multi-dimensional four-point scale of housing precarity, that was originally developed by Amy Claire and colleagues. Although I made a small modification to it, Claire's indicator of housing, precariousness captures four dimensions of housing, which are security, affordability, quality and access to services. The difference between Claire's measure, and my adaptation of it in this paper, is that Claire originally uses the subjective financial burden of housing costs but if I use that, in this survey, like 70% of all households would have at least one dimension of housing precariousness. So what I use, instead of the sort of the subjective measure of , you know, how much of a burden is your housing, or your housing costs, what I just used was whether you were paying over sort of a specified amount of 30% of monthly wages on housing.
Shane Phillips 34:08
Getting into the results here, I thought it was interesting, but maybe not too surprising that even though there was a big gap in the objective conditions of non-EU citizens and EU and Spanish citizens, the gap was much smaller when it came to this objective reporting. So just to make up an example, for illustrative purposes, a household maybe with Ecuadorian citizenship could be objectively overcrowded by the Eurostat threshold or definition but they'd be less likely to report being overcrowded compared to a household living in maybe similar conditions that had moved to Spain from Italy or Denmark or somewhere like that. Could you contextualize that for us a bit and what were some of the other differences in objective and subjective measures that you think are worth discussing between these three groups, which again, are Spanish citizens, EU citizens living in Spain and non EU citizens living in Spain.
Carlos Delclos 35:05
So I think this this sort of gap between the subjective and objective conditions is really, really interesting, and I'm very cautious when talking about it because, you know, this is a quantitative study, and I really wasn't able to observe and get into it with qualitative research. And I think, you know, ethnographic research or qualitative research was really what you want to get out this, you know, because it deals with sort of the constructed expectations around housing, and how these, you know, are met by the actual built environment of it. So I don't want to be too speculative here but there are a number of explanations that I could sort of, I could imagine, let's say. On the one hand, one of the things I found particularly interesting, for instance, is that the subjective shortage of space was lower among Spaniards than Among EU and non-EU immigrants, but it was almost five times higher than the objective overcrowding rate. However, the experience of subjective overcrowding or subjective shortage of space was more prevalent among EU immigrants, but objective overcrowding was lower amongst them. So that tells me something's going on here, and this is interesting, too, because Spain has a much higher lived density than other European countries, it has the largest proportion, if I'm not mistaken, it's the largest, if not, it's on the higher end of households that are living in dwellings that are in buildings with 10 or more dwellings, right? So then just the huge housing blocks. I mean, that's the bulk of where folks live in Spain, and in particular, in urban Spain. So I'm thinking that one of the explanations might be this sort of, you know, perhaps the contribution of megacities to migration to Spain and just a higher prevalence of overcrowding perhaps in other countries,
Shane Phillips 36:58
You're you're sort of saying, like, if someone is moving from another place, you know, if you're, if you're moving from, say, Latin America as as a non EU citizen moving into Spain, and you're from a very large and very dense and very overcrowded city, and then you move to Spain, like, you know, this doesn't seem so bad, essentially.
Carlos Delclos 37:15
Right.
Shane Phillips 37:16
Whereas if you're moving from Switzerland, or something, or somewhere in the EU, where things are a little less dense, and you're kind of coming to Spain, where things are actually quite dense for Europe, you might feel like, wow, this is a lot.
Carlos Delclos 37:31
Yeah, I think that might be part of it, and I think the other part, of course, has to do with the age composition. So we might quite likely have an age composition effect in the sense that, you know, migrants, and in particular, non-EU migrants in Spain were substantially younger than the bulk of the Spanish population. And so they're at just a different stage in the life course, their expectations are rather different maybe they're not having as many families, et cetera so that might be a part of it, too. I'm quite certain, and unfortunately, the dataset that I use does not allow for a more fine grained analysis of nationalities but I'm quite sure that there's a great deal of heterogeneity in these responses, amongst specifically the non-EU migrants so this will almost certainly vary substantially by region of origin.
Shane Phillips 38:20
I can understand your hesitancy to speculate on some of this, you know, when I was reading this, something that came to mind for me, is how we sort of interpret or explain things by just pointing to culture. And, you know, I'm thinking specifically here of our experience in Southern California, we went through this regional housing needs assessment process, which is where cities are told basically by the state and then the regional government or body where they need to build more housing, and in estimating the need, we have to now take into account overcrowding that exists, you know, on the ground right now. And one argument that was made was, "well, look, we have a lot of Latin American households, and it's just cultural for them to live in overcrowded conditions, or multigenerational households". And, you know, like, that may be true to some degree, but to just assume that that's like, people are fine with overcrowding, and it's, you know, has nothing to do with say, like, their economic conditions living in this country is a little dicey.
Carlos Delclos 39:27
Right, that's precisely what I want to avoid, because, you know, there's this slippery slope towards cultural essentialism is slippery and steep, and, you know, I can't observe it with this data so at the same time, I wouldn't want to venture a guess really, but at the same time, there's something to be said about like, this isn't very academic, perhaps, but there's a difference between something being culturally determined and just being used to something. That is to say, you occupy this second-class citizenship in a country, right where your expectations are curtailed, because, you know, you're living in this oppressive system that you know, curtails your rights in many ways. And so when you start to think about how much space is yours, you know, maybe you internalize a lot of that, or maybe even for your own mental health, yeah, you're just like, "man, it's not that bad right now!" So I think that there's a certain degree of that, and of course, there's always the reporting bias because it's like, you know, this is a state body, interviewing you about these situations so some folks perhaps, especially immigrants, are often very hesitant to sort of voice complaint because they might not feel safe in making certain demands.
Shane Phillips 40:53
And so how about the actual, some of the other differences in the results here, and in particular, for these displacement pressures and measures of housing precarity, ahat kind of differences Did you see between these three groups?
Carlos Delclos 41:06
Yeah, so when we get to our analytical results using multivariate regression, I think that's where we get to the really, really interesting part of the study. On the one hand, you know, to describe the poor conditions faced by non-EU migrants in the housing market. On some level, you're not, it's not particularly surprising, it's unjust, but it's not surprising. But what I wanted to get at was sort of what accounts for these differences. So the main finding that we have is that after you control for all of this sort of standard socio-demographic characteristics, we find that the odds of facing displacement pressure for non-EU migrants was nearly three times higher than it was for Spaniards. And it was also higher among those from other EU countries but for those from other EU countries, the differences became non-significant once we kind of included income differences and educational differences, and so on. But the really, really important part here, I think, is that we do include missed housing payments in our analysis, so that the odds of having experienced an eviction, whether it was a visible or invisible eviction, or to expect to experience one were much higher for non-EU migrants, even when you accounted for the presence of missed housing payments. In a similar way, and with the exact same covariance, we find that the level of housing precariousness experienced by non-EU migrants was also significantly higher than it was for Spaniards.
Shane Phillips 42:53
And you discuss this idea of a citizenship gradient where, you know, Spanish citizens are at the top, and then the EU citizens living in Spain are kind of stuck below that, and then the non-EU citizens who migrated from somewhere else are even further down. And to be clear, I don't think this is a like hierarchy that would be unique to Spain in any way. It is interesting, coming from the US hearing about this, in part because we talk about certain groups being second-class citizens in the US, you know immigrants being among them, I mean, to the extent they're citizens at all, but also renters and so forth. And it's just interesting in Europe that like, they're actually are like, literally second class citizens in a way where you're part of the EU and you have these various rights, but you're still not if you're not from that nation if your citizenship is not with that nation, there is a meaningful difference there.
Carlos Delclos 43:49
That's correct. And I think one of the things that allows us to talk about a citizenship gradient, or a scale of citizenship precariousness is precisely that there's a third category, that is to say, there's native Spaniards, there's EU citizens, and then there's non-EU citizens, right? So what we see is that, sure, there are some differences between natives and EU citizens, that perhaps we could interpret as being inherent to the process of migration in and of itself, that is to say, of leaving the country that you have your family in, your networks in, where you were educated, where a lot of your social capital is, and so on, and the sort of imperfect portability of human capital from that country to another. But you know, you're a legal resident, basically automatically. So the sort of administrative barriers and the threats that come to your own security, to your own freedoms, you know, through detention and so on, are kind of erased from the picture because you don't really face that. All you face are certain types of discrimination perhaps because of your accent, or your linguistic abilities, the lack of the social network, a lot of things that are just inherent to migration. But then there's this other group of citizens, which the EU typically refers to as third-country nationals, which is folks that are from outside of Schengen or outside of the European Union, who very clearly have only partially fulfilled citizenship rights, and, you know, face a large number of administrative barriers, as well as you know, discrimination, racialized discrimination, ethnic discrimination, and so on, which may have nothing to do with linguistic affinity or, in the case of Ecuadorian migrants or Latin American migrants, the linguistic affinity made you, you know, just accessible enough to be the subject of predatory inclusion by mortgage lenders.
Paavo Monkkonen 45:55
Yeah, I wonder how you think about the, I think it's useful to have these three groups where you can get at some of the impacts of just being an immigrant, right, and not having the deeper social networks in the place you're living, versus the administrative and legal apparatus ways in which people are having a harder time in the housing market. You know, the complication here, though, is that within the EU bucket, you have people from Romania and people from Norway, and so I wonder how you thought about that, or whether you were able to get at that disambiguation to some extent.
Carlos Delclos 46:27
Right, so here, I mean, this is the issue with this data set is that they did not get into the nationality, and it's a big problem. So the only thing that we could do was control for things like the income level, we did it through various forms through log income or income quintiles even, we also controlled for educational levels, sex, age, and so on their activity status, labor market activity. So that's as much as we could really do on that level, and I really do wish we could get into it with a greater level of detail.
Shane Phillips 47:01
And there was also no data on race and ethnicity, right?
Carlos Delclos 47:03
No, yeah, Europe is completely allergic to that data.
Paavo Monkkonen 47:09
Now they are
Carlos Delclos 47:09
Because I guess it's racist. Yeah, I guess it's racist to ask about race but it's not racist to discriminate to...
Shane Phillips 47:18
They have like very clearly different outcomes by race and ethnicity yeah
Carlos Delclos 47:22
Correct.
Paavo Monkkonen 47:23
I was wondering if you could think of any examples of kind of the mechanisms here whereby somebody would, I mean, there's kind of discrimination, but are what are the kinds of administrative or legal mechanisms through which someone that's not from the EU would have a harder time?
Carlos Delclos 47:39
Sure, I can actually give a pretty good example, because part of my fieldwork, I should say that this research is part of the Property and Democratic Citizenship Project, which is a European Research Council project, led by Ghent University, and specifically professor Dr. Marian Mackelberg, and it's a really cool project because it combines anthropological and ethnographic work with sort of my cross-cutting statistical analyses. That's kind of the role I play in the project but I was doing both things. I was doing quantitative research, like I do in this paper but I was also doing ethnographic research. And my ethnographic research was working at a small real estate agency, and my job there was just to be the guy who opens the doors when I want to have a look at it, and to enter the information on sort of the portal website. So there's a couple of direct mechanisms I can cite, and this isn't in the paper, the platform that I used, that this agency used which is an industry standard, includes one section, and this is for the landlords, right, It's not forward facing, it says "smokers, yes/no; pets, yes/no; foreign, yes/no, and this is particularly interesting, because the City of Barcelona has issued heavy fines on certain real estate portals for including ads that, you know, the person advertising says "Only Spaniards" or something like that, right but this has always been shocking to me, because it actually, you know, it's really hard to regulate a portal that's like open like that, right. When the real offender there is actually the landlord right? They're the ones discriminating but in any case, this was just, you know, something that was, I found this very interesting because it's actually integrated into the platform used to post listings across multiple platforms, right? So that's one thing, the other thing gets up my second result, which we haven't talked about yet, which is the higher sort of rent burden placed on immigrant households. So during this fieldwork, I'm showing this one flat to different folks, and it had been listed for several weeks and it was up for rent. And it was just a total lemon. No one wanted to rent it. It was there was not a lot of light, it had a bunch of old furniture in it, it was just not particularly attractive but you It was sort of well located, and the landlord did not want to rent below a certain amount. And so when different folks would apply to this, they were just like, now it's way too much they try to talk it down, there's no way, there's no way, there's no way; the real estate agent tried to convince this landlord that, "hey, this is really too high, you know. No one wants to rent this flat for this, for this amount" until a group of young Argentinian workers came, and they were like, "look, we've been rejected everywhere else, you know, we just started working here six months ago. Our labor contracts are temporary, very precarious but you know, my dad in Argentina can cosign on us here, we're going to start Master's programs, like in next year or something, and so you have our word on all of this, right?" And so you think of this from the landlord's perspective, and it's like, okay, I have, on the one hand, like just not the greatest labor market situation, right, it's a very unstable sector at the time that they are working in. At the same time, I have to depend on a cosign from someone who's in another country that I can't really properly follow up on. Any history I look back on and with these folks is going to be like a foreign bank account so there's all these administrative components to the border so to speak, right? But they're willing to pay 100 bucks more than the real estate agent is telling me that I need to rent this flat out for so that's what happened in this person and ultimately ended up renting it out to these folks.
Paavo Monkkonen 51:37
That's very reminiscent of the 1972 work by Kanan Quigley on racial discrimination in housing markets in the US where they studied St. Louis, and showed that black households were paying more for worse housing back then.
Carlos Delclos 51:50
Yeah, it's a lot of what Kianga Yamada Taylor's talking about in her book.
Shane Phillips 51:55
So you argue that this and other research points to the importance of not just the act of displacement, but the condition of disposability, and I find that compelling, and I think it brings attention to how many people may experience some kind of stress or hardship due to their housing precarity, but don't necessarily or ultimately show up in the displacement statistics. Is there anything you want to add to that?
Carlos Delclos 52:21
Yeah, I think the idea of focusing on the condition of display stability is not my idea, that's already if toggle has done amazing work on this, and I would strongly recommend their work, scholarship on displacement pressures generally focused on, like I said, the act of displacement or even the consequences of displacement for specific areas, and so on. But I think the condition of displaceability, on the one hand, you know, what I get at in this paper has to do with sort of the determinants of displaceability. In a recent paper that I published with Josette Maria Carlos, John Venac, and Mireilla Julia, we discussed the impact of housing precariousness on mental health, right, and unsurprisingly, it's an important stressor of mental health, even when we use a structural equations model to sort of identify its mediating role between labor market precariousness and mental health, right? So there might be a temptation to say, well, this precarious housing situation or the displacement pressure, are really just a knock-on effect of what's happening in the labor market poverty, (or) whatever but what we are trying to get at here is like, no, it's actually its own independent thing. Not entirely independent, because it's very profoundly mixed up with labor market trajectories but I do think that it's a very, very improvable realm for future research because in the world of labor, we've done a lot of theorizing about how power relations work there, we've done a lot of research on how power relations work in the fields of gender, in the fields of race, ethnicity, and so on, and we've thought about democratic citizenship a lot in these terms. You know, if you think about liberal democracies, the standard story goes like who was the original citizen, it was the white male landowner. Okay, well, we've done pretty good work on the white and male part but what about that owner part? You know, why do they get full citizenship, and I think housing is just a really interesting window into that.
Shane Phillips 54:35
And it's clearly something that people still believe in at some level when they show up to a community meeting and say, you know, I've lived in this neighborhood, (and) owned my home for 40 years, and I pay property taxes these kinds of things, they clearly think there is some special rights or privileges that are conveyed upon them for owning a home or owning land.
Carlos Delclos 54:55
Absolutely, absolutely. And I think that this is this is really what I wanted to get out with this paper. And I don't know how successful I was at it but I think the point is non-EU citizens in this system, the one that I study here, the Spanish housing system, were used as disposable citizens. They were called in to do the work of building all these homes and building the bubble, so to speak, and then they were very quickly exposed to unemployment when that bubble crashed, and they were kicked out of their homes, and they were exploited for rent, and it has to do with this whole other field where an emerging type of citizenship is visible, this insurgent citizenship that we see through, you know, the Mortgage Victims Platform, the PAH, we see it today in the tenants unions that are proliferating throughout Spain which are heavily migrant social movements, and are organized around civil disobedience, and demanding sort of the universal right to housing. But this is an area that we don't have, I think adequately theorized, and we don't have a lot of work being carried out on it as a form of collective bargaining, contentious citizenship, and I just kind of wanted to open up the door to that and kind of bridge with some of the ethnographic literature, and theoretical literature that, unfortunately, quantitative studies are very often not in dialogue with.
Shane Phillips 56:32
So for our last question, here, you had a somewhat hopeful line in the conclusion about how "over time, Ecuadorian migrants, and those from other regions would become a major part of the PAH as a result, what was once perceived as an immigrant problem became a Spanish problem". First, could you just say a little bit about what you mean by that, and then, you know, just thinking about what has happened since this time? Like, where do you think it stands - has real progress been made, does it feel like there's a little more equality or rights for non-Spanish citizens, like, what do things look like today?
Carlos Delclos 57:13
So I actually mean, something very specific about this translation of the housing crash as being a immigrant problem, or the evictions being an immigrant problem and becoming a Spanish problem. And that is that through mutual aid and solidarity, through breaking borders, in that praxis, this was viewed as something that affects us all. And it was viewed as an injustice that was carried out by the Spanish State, through corruption, through just truly abusive lending practices, lending laws, and through an economic model that is premised on the extraction of rents of income and wealth from working class folks. And so I think this, the PAH, one of the things that they did was they had a very simple principle, which was, "you show up to block my eviction, I'll show it to block yours, I don't care if you have papers, I don't care about the color of your skin. We're all in this together, we're all affected by the mortgage crisis", some of them moved beyond mortgages to talk about tenants, and so since then, you know, a lot of hopeful things have happened. One of them is that the spokesperson of the PAH is now the mayor of Barcelona or has been for eight years now right? She made the jump to politics.
Shane Phillips 58:41
And this was this kind of like her starting point.
Carlos Delclos 58:45
Yeah, this was where she became a household name, and so you know, that not a story that you hear every day, and I think that, personally, I don't think the left wing movements that have come out of this have been great on immigration topics but they do view rights as something universal, and that it should not matter whether or not you have papers. But the deeper implications of that I don't think that they handled particularly well. But nevertheless, I do think that it created a sort of solidarity through praxis, through mutual aid, not just tweeting, and not just saying stuff, but actually doing things together and organizing around a common need. That was not just blocking evictions, it was squatting bank owned properties and turning them into housing for evicted families. It was engaging in citizen initiated legislation to put an end to abuse of mortgage lending practices. It was just action on a wide range of fronts that have defined the last 10 years of Spanish politics. And we're in the middle of a bit of a reaction to all of that that is very, very troubling but during this time, we've seen the emergence of tenants unions, we've seen the emergence of just today, a citizen initiated legislation to regularize the documentation status of over 500,000 undocumented people in Spain. We've seen the focus of the government start to become more porous to the demands of the housing movement to the extent that in the last few weeks, Spain has passed a new housing law, its first housing law since the transition to democracy, that reinforces the idea that the right to housing is a substantive right, and should be a substantive right and not just, you know, ink on paper. And so I think there's certainly, the fact that the housing movement in Spain has had a major impact is just undeniable. I do fear, unfortunately, and it's a reason that I said that it became a Spanish problem, that there is some degree of erasure that I think is troublesome. That is to say, as it became viewed as a universal struggle, the problem was that the specificities of how it differentially affects non EU migrants in Spain, kind of fell by the wayside and fell out of the conversation, and I think that's still a huge part of what is happening today and Spain's housing markets.
Shane Phillips 1:01:23
Carlos Delclos, thank you so much for joining us on the Housing Voice podcast, and I will see you in about a month or so in Barcelona.
Carlos Delclos 1:01:32
Looking forward to it, man. Thanks for having me.
Shane Phillips 1:01:33
You can read more about Carlos his work on our website lewis.ucla.edu. Show Notes and a transcript of the interview are there to the UCLA Lewis Center is on Facebook and Twitter. I'm on Twitter at @ShaneDPhillips, and Paavo is at @elpaavo. Thanks for listening, we'll see you next time.