The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Abstract

Beginning in the late 1990s, Spain experienced major changes in both its population structure and housing market. Between 1998 and 2008, the country’s immigrant population increased nearly 10-fold, from half a million foreign-born residents to five million, with the share of immigrant workers jumping from 2 per cent of all working-age people to 16 per cent. During this period, immigration accounted for the vast majority of Spain’s population growth, and this was reflected in the housing market by significant increases in the construction of new dwellings. However, the situation changed dramatically after the housing crash in 2008. In the wake of the global financial crisis of 2008 and the collapse of the country’s housing bubble, a massive wave of evictions made housing precariousness and displacement salient sociopolitical issues in Spain. Through multiple regression analyses of data from the Spanish Living Conditions Survey, this study shows that households headed by non-European Union citizens were significantly more likely than those headed by Spanish citizens to experience higher levels of housing precariousness and displacement pressure, net of housing arrears and other relevant factors. Non-European Union citizens were also significantly more likely to experience rent overburden and were found to pay higher rents than Spanish citizens for similar dwellings. By putting these results in dialogue with the ethnographic and theoretical literature on housing struggles and everyday bordering, this article argues that the differentially precarious citizenship status of migrants in Spain facilitates housing practices that multiply and thicken urban borders and facilitate rent extraction.

Keywords

Bordering citizenship displaceability housing precariousness immigration

Introduction

The collapse of the Spanish housing bubble in 2008 sparked unemployment, financial ruin, social conflict and housing distress on a dramatic scale. Though social movements had denounced a seemingly paradoxical lack of affordable housing throughout the preceding boom, a massive wave of evictions made housing precariousness an urgent sociopolitical issue in the ensuing crisis. After years of outpacing neighbouring countries in the construction of new dwellings, Spain came to lead Western Europe in foreclosures and evictions, registering nearly 600,000 of the former and almost 400,000 of the latter between 2008 and 2014 (Consejo General del Poder Judicial (CGPJ), 2015). This wave of evictions gave way to a massive civil disobedience movement against foreclosures, which spread throughout the country through the Plataforma de Afectados por la Hipoteca (PAH). Tellingly, however, the first protests against rising evictions were organised by Ecuadorian migrants through the Coordinadora Nacional de Ecuatorianos En España (CONADEE) (Gonick, 2015).

The unequal impact and sociopolitical implications of the Spanish housing crash have received considerable scholarly attention. Long-term unemployment, housing distress (Laparra Navarro and Pérez Eransus, 2012) and further impoverishment of low-income households (Marí-Klose and Pérez, 2015) were just some of the major consequences of the ensuing Great Recession, which in turn gave way to a major political crisis (Alexandri and Janoschka, 2018) and insurgent acts of citizenship (García-Lamarca, 2017). Meanwhile, Gonick (2021) has shed considerable light on precarity experienced by Andean immigrant homeowners and their key role in catalysing dissent against mortgage-related foreclosures. Yet little is known about the differential exposure of households to specific forms of housing distress and exploitation in the wake of Spain’s housing crash. This study examines the conditions under which households experienced displacement pressure, housing precariousness and rent extraction in Spain. By doing so, we not only respond to the question posed by Alexandri and Janoschka (2018) of who wins and who loses in a housing crisis, but also engage with theoretical and ethnographic literature on housing and social vulnerability in Spain, identifying the role of citizenship and property relations in the bordering of bodies and landscapes in the so-called ‘real estate and finance complex’ (Palomera, 2014). Specifically, we argue that the greater displaceability and differentially precarious citizenship status experienced by migrants in Spain facilitates housing practices that multiply and thicken urban borders and facilitate rent extraction.

The article is structured as follows. The next section briefly introduces the broader context of Spain’s housing and migration situation around the time of the global financial crisis, while the section ‘Bordering, citizenship and precariousness’ lays out the main concepts examined in this study. Subsequently ‘Data and methods’ then describes the data and methods used, while section ‘Results’ presents the results of quantitative analyses. Finally, the article concludes with a discussion of the study’s theoretical implications, limitations and potential lines of future research.

Housing and migration to Spain

Beginning in the late 1990s, Spain experienced unprecedented changes in both its population structure and housing market. Between 1998 and 2008, the country’s immigrant population increased from roughly 640,000 foreign nationals to 5.3 million, with the share of immigrant workers jumping from 2 per cent of all working-age people to 16 per cent. During this period, immigration accounted for the vast majority of Spain’s population growth, and it was accompanied by significant increases in the construction of new dwellings. González and Ortega (2013) estimate that, between 1998 and 2008, population inflow led to the construction of around 2 million new housing units, with immigration accounting for 37 per cent of the total residential construction activity over the period.

The links between housing and migration in Spain were visible in the demand for housing and the supply of labour during the bubble. Migrant workers were disproportionately employed in the construction sector, often with highly precarious contracts. According to the Spanish Labour Force Survey, when the bubble burst in 2008, 20.7 per cent of immigrant workers were employed in construction, compared to 10.6 per cent of Spaniards. By 2012, these figures had fallen to 8.3 and 6.4 per cent, respectively, amounting to a 70.4 per cent drop in migrant construction workers in just 4 years, compared to a 47.6 per cent drop in Spanish construction workers. Similarly, while the overall unemployment rate rose from 9.6 per cent at the beginning of 2008 to 25.8 per cent at the end of 2012, it rose from 14.7 to 36.5 per cent among immigrant workers during the same period. As a result, the number and share of foreign nationals declined sharply after the crisis. Between 2011 and 2017, Spain’s immigrant population fell by over 20 per cent, from 5.8 million people (12.2% of the population) to 4.6 million (9.8%).

Housing distress may have played a major role in pushing immigrants out of Spain in the wake of the housing crash. Prior to the crisis, non-Spanish citizens (with the notable exception of those from rich countries) were more likely to live in rental housing than Spaniards, more likely to live in overcrowded, poor-quality dwellings, and more likely to have a heavier housing cost burden (Iriondo Mugica and Rahona Lopez, 2009; Leal and Alguacil, 2012). In the aftermath of the crisis, foreclosures in several Catalan municipalities were disproportionately concentrated in neighbourhoods with more non-European Union (EU) citizens (Gutiérrez and Delclòs, 2016; Gutiérrez and Domènech, 2018). A similar spatial trend was found in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria (Parreño-Castellano et al., 2021). Indeed, almost half of the eviction proceedings that took place between 2007 and 2013 were concentrated in six of the seven provinces with the largest number of foreign residents (Méndez Gutierrez del Valle and Plaza Tabasco, 2016). Finally, in the context of Europe’s so-called ‘refugee crisis’, Ribera-Almandoz et al. (2020) found alarmingly high rates of rough sleeping and residential mobility among recent asylum seekers in Catalonia. This finding is particularly striking because it was observed during a period of sustained economic growth, suggesting a structural dynamic of bordered dispossession. However, it should be noted that the characteristics of asylum seekers are likely to differ substantially from the rest of the immigrant population. While the ‘push’ factors driving their migration trajectories are typically rooted in war, disasters or political persecution, other international migrants are generally assumed to move primarily in search of better economic opportunities.

Bordering, citizenship and precariousness

The higher prevalence of foreclosures in migrant neighbourhoods and the precarious housing trajectories of asylum seekers suggest the presence of bordering dynamics within Spain’s formal political borders. While bordering typically refers to the creation, re-creation and contestation of socio-spatial distinctions at the formal and everyday levels (Scott and Sohn, 2019), it is also an embodied process. Amoore (2006) argues that, through the deployment of biometric technologies, migrant bodies have become ‘the carrier of the border as it is inscribed with multiple encoded boundaries of access’ (pp. 347–348). Though referring to increasingly securitised practices at external borders, the techniques of risk profiling, predictive identity-based assumptions, authorisation and surveillance Amoore associates with biometric bordering are present in the everyday bordering practices found in local housing markets (Yuval-Davis et al., 2019). The increasingly digitalised screening practices of real estate agents and private landlords (Delclós, 2020) or the exclusion criteria deployed in social housing policies (Bulpett, 2002) are rooted in ideologies of citizenship and national belonging that border by, as Yuval-Davis et al. (2019) put it, ‘[delimiting] the area in which equality legislation and policies extend equal rights to specific categories of people’ on the basis of how citizenship and immigration intersect with racialised and gendered identities.

In Western countries, this is particularly evident in how the notion of ‘citizenship’ is often used interchangeably with ‘nationality’, both in common parlance and in official data sources, such as the European Union Statistics on Income and Living Conditions (EU-SILC) used in this study. Through such everyday and administrative bordering practices, immigrants frequently experience ‘forms of incomplete citizenship’, typically with some degree of social citizenship but no formal political citizenship (Bulpett, 2002). As a result, immigrants in Western countries are more often treated as the objects of social policy than as autonomous or empowered political subjects. Meanwhile, citizenship restrictions themselves produce racial meanings and inequalities through racialising practices that contain, govern and select migrants in detention and para-detention sights (De Noronha, 2019) or expose them to various forms of informality and illegality (Bazurli and Delclós, 2021; Stumpf, 2006). What results is a continuum between ‘the “lightness” of legality/approval/safety and the “darkness” of eviction/destruction/death’, which is ‘neither integrated nor eliminated, forming the pseudo-permanent margins of today’s urban regions’, referred to by Yiftachel (2009: 243) as a grey space in which residents are ‘permanently temporary’ and displaceable (Yiftachel, 2020).

Yiftachel’s theoretical contributions have typically been advanced within the framework of urban citizenship, yet the stratification described above is also inscribed in the broader notion of precarious citizenship. As conceived by Lafleur and Mescoli (2018), precarious citizenship is characterised not (exclusively) by ‘the absence of rights, but by ambivalent status and limited and unstable rights maintained or granted at the whim of the authorities through a highly arbitrary process’. While the consequences of precarious citizenship extend into various domains, here we are interested in whether and how, as a determinant of displaceability, one’s citizenship status might extend precariousness into the housing experiences of immigrants in Spain or expose them to a dynamic of predatory inclusion, defined by Taylor (2019) as the granting of access to conventional real estate practices and mortgage financing, but on more expensive and comparatively unequal terms.

Clair et al. (2019) recently developed a novel measure of housing precariousness for Europe, which they define as:

A state of uncertainty which increases a person’s real or perceived likelihood of experiencing an adverse event, caused (at least in part) by their relationship with their housing provider, the physical qualities, affordability, security of their home, and access to essential services.

This conceptualisation is useful for several reasons. First, it lays out four measurable dimensions of housing precariousness: affordability, quality, security and access to essential services. Meanwhile, its emphasis on uncertainty signals that housing precariousness exists within a disputed dynamic of risk allocation between interested parties, a framing that is very much in line with the broader shift towards the ‘world risk society’ outlined by Beck (1992) as well as the centrality of risk profiles in Amoore’s biometric borders. Yet, despite breaking new ground, the study by Clair et al. (2019) mainly describes the degree of housing precariousness among specific groups, without disentangling possible interrelationships through regression analyses. Moreover, its analyses do not examine the relationship between housing precariousness and citizenship, which we expect to play an important role in shaping displacement pressure.

Precariousness is best understood as a multidimensional continuum, with its most extreme manifestations in the area of housing including displacement, eviction and homelessness. Let us first consider the notion of residential displacement, specifically as it emerged from early attempts to study gentrification. In their review of quantitative approaches to residential displacement, Easton et al. (2020) refer to a definition rooted in the US Uniform Relocation Assistance and Real Property Acquisition Act of 1970, which involved the forced relocation of residents from their residential housing unit. From there, they move on to the definition by Grier and Grier (1978), who point out the difficulty in distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary moves. Meanwhile, their account emphasises the role in displacement played by the conditions affecting the dwelling or its immediate surrounding, the household’s lack of control over those conditions, previous compliance with established conditions of occupancy and the household’s ability to safely and affordably maintain occupancy. Finally, Easton et al. outline the significant conceptual contributions advanced by Marcuse (1986), which include the distinction between direct and indirect displacement and the notion of displacement pressure.

As thorough as it is, Easton et al.’s review poses some questions and limitations. On the one hand, the definitions of displacement they employ tend to hinge on its equivalence with forced relocation. Previously, authors have claimed that this approach may risk conflating voluntary or involuntary moves rooted in urban regeneration projects with the residential disruptions caused by natural disasters, ethnic conflicts or war, which are the focus of the Guiding Principles on Internal Displacement established by the United Nations (Kearns and Mason, 2013). However, this distinction does not necessarily affect how we define the phenomenon of residential displacement so much as how we interpret its causes, scale and consequences in a given context. On the other hand, and somewhat related to the previous point, the review by Easton et al. (2020) refers exclusively to displacement in the context of gentrification, leading them to conclude that commonly deployed statistical techniques ‘struggle to provide meaningful estimates of the number of individuals and households displaced by gentrification’ and tend to lack an adequately granular temporal and spatial scale (p. 286). While this is true, and the relationship between displacement and gentrification is critical, much remains unknown about how national-level dynamics might shape the distribution of displacement pressure.

Indeed, while research on residential displacement and eviction has grown in recent years, few studies have examined their social determinants at the individual or household level. A notable exception is the work of Desmond and Gershenson (2017), who use a novel longitudinal data set to identify determinants of tenant eviction in Milwaukee between 2009 and 2011. They find that, net of missed housing payments, other significant and robust predictors of eviction include family size, job loss, network disadvantage and neighbourhood crime rates. Surprisingly, they found no significant effects for income, race or educational level, and did not examine the citizenship of survey respondents.

Data and methods

This study uses Spanish data from the 2012 EU-SILC, which includes an ad hoc module on housing conditions. The module coincides fortuitously with a peak year of evictions in the aftermath of Spain’s housing crash, facilitating the examination of housing precariousness and displacement pressure at a crucial moment in the country’s property regime. While the total sample includes 12,713 households, the analyses below restrict the study sample to only those with ongoing housing payments, or 4619 households. These include homeowners, market-rate tenants and reduced rate tenants, excluding homeowners with no remaining mortgage payments and respondents in free accommodation.

Descriptive analyses focus on a selection of objective and subjective indicators of housing precariousness coded dichotomously. Objective indicators include facing monthly rental or mortgage payments exceeding 30 per cent of household earnings and the presence of overcrowding based on Eurostat’s official definition. Subjective measures include perceptions of a shortage of space, heavy financial burden of housing costs, inadequate electric installations, inadequate plumbing, inadequate heating, inadequate cooling and overall dissatisfaction with the dwelling.

The main explanatory variables used in regression analyses include household characteristics and the individual characteristics of ‘Person 1 responsible for the dwelling’. The household covariates analysed include tenure status, degree of urbanisation, household income and the presence of arrears on housing payments over the previous year. Individual characteristics of the person responsible for the dwelling include the age at the time of the survey, binary sex, citizenship status and educational level. Citizenship status distinguishes between Spanish citizens, EU citizens and non-EU citizens, while educational level was coded dichotomously to indicate a completed university degree.

Regression analyses were carried out for three outcomes. The first is a binary indicator of residential displaceability constructed using items from the housing conditions module. Households were characterised as having experienced displacement pressure if the respondent expected to be forced to leave the dwelling in the next 6 months due to eviction or financial difficulties, or if the person responsible for the household had changed dwellings for these reasons during the previous 5 years. The second outcome is the degree of housing precariousness, captured through an ascending 4-point scale based on the indicator developed by Clair et al. (2019) to capture four dimensions of housing: security, affordability, quality and access to services. The index used in this study has one key modification, namely the replacement of the subjective burden of housing costs as an indicator of unaffordable housing with the objective indicator of spending over 30 per cent of household income on monthly mortgage or rental payments. This more conservative approach leads to a lower percentage of households reporting at least one dimension of housing precariousness in the weighted sample (48.3%) than if the subjective indicator had been used (74.9%). Finally, the third outcome examined was the total amount of monthly rental payments, which limited the subsample for this specific analysis to 1358 tenant households.¹

The quantitative analysis consists of three stages, beginning with a descriptive weighted analysis comparing exposure to displacement pressure and housing precariousness by the citizenship status of the person responsible for the dwelling, as well as their sex, tenure status and income. Variation was examined using Pearson chi-square tests to identify statistically significant differences in these indicators. Those showing no statistically significant relationship above the 95 per cent level included (1) sex in the case of displacement pressure, objective overcrowding, subjective housing burden and the ability to keep the home cool in the summer; (2) degree of urbanisation in the case of displacement pressure, housing precariousness, adequate electrical installations, adequate plumbing and the ability to keep the home cool in the summer; and (3) tenure status in the case of the subjective housing burden.

The second stage of analysis uses various regression models to identify correlates of displacement and housing precariousness. Because displacement pressure is coded as a dichotomous variable (whether the householder has been or expects to be displaced), logistic regression models were used to estimate its associations with selected covariates. In contrast, the ordinal indicator of housing precariousness was analysed through ordered logistic regression models. Finally, the third stage of analysis examines monthly rental payments through multiple linear regression. Since this requires more attention to the specific properties of the dwelling, additional covariates include the type and size of the dwelling, average rent in the region, an indicator of poor housing quality, the number of household members and a dummy variable indicating reduced rent households. All analyses were performed using Stata 16, applying household cross-sectional weights provided by the EU-SILC data set.

Results

Table 1 depicts the weighted prevalence of selected precarious housing characteristics by the citizenship status of the person responsible for the dwelling. Citizens of non-EU countries experienced over three times more objective overcrowding than citizens of Spain or other EU countries. However, differences between these groups were considerably smaller in terms of their subjective experience (i.e. the perception of a shortage of space in the dwelling). A similar pattern exists for objective and subjective indicators of the financial burden of housing payments. Over four times as many non-EU citizens and over three times as many EU citizens were paying 30 per cent or more of monthly household income on housing alone compared to Spanish nationals, yet differences in perceptions of excessive housing costs were notably smaller. Meanwhile, inadequate electrical installations, plumbing, heating and cooling were most frequently perceived by households headed by non-EU citizens, followed by EU citizens (except in the case of inadequate plumbing). Accordingly, overall dissatisfaction was highest among non-EU citizens, followed by EU citizens and finally Spanish citizens.

Table 1.

Selected housing characteristics by nationality of the person responsible for the dwelling.

	Spain	EU	Non-EU
Subjective shortage of space	15.9	17.8	22.1
Objective overcrowding	3.8	3.3	11.6
Subjective high financial burden of total housing cost	61.6	59.6	70.6
Monthly rent or mortgage principal payments >30% of income	10.4	33.3	43.8
Inadequate electrical installations	3.9	6.8	10.3
Inadequate plumbing	4.1	4.1	8.8
Insufficient heating in winter	15.9	19.6	28.8
Insufficiently cool in summer	24.1	35.1	41.7
Overall dissatisfied with dwelling	13.0	19.7	23.0

EU: European Union.

Source: EU-SILC, Spain 2012 (n = 4619).

Percentages of households with ongoing rent or mortgage payments in Spain (weighted).

These results suggest a citizenship gradient in housing precariousness, wherein the further from Spanish citizenship the person responsible for the dwelling is, the more precarious the housing conditions are. Compared to Spanish households, experiences of displacement were over seven times as prevalent among those headed by non-EU citizens, affecting just over one out of every five of these households in our weighted sample.² Meanwhile, 11 per cent of households where the person responsible for the dwelling was a citizen of another EU member state experienced displacement pressure, just over four times more than those headed by Spanish nationals. Residential displaceability was also much more common among market-rate tenants than among reduced rate tenants or mortgaged homeowners, among households headed by people under the age of 30, people with no university degree, and people with arrears in housing payments and households in the bottom quintile of household income.

Housing precariousness follows a fairly similar gradient, as the mean score for the households of non-EU citizens was 2.5 times greater than for Spanish households. Meanwhile, housing precariousness was much higher among market-rate tenants, households headed by someone under age 30, households headed by someone with no university degree, households in arrears and households in the bottom income quintile. It is also worth noting that, unlike residential displacements, housing precariousness scores are modestly higher for households headed by women and increase as the degree of urbanisation decreased. Taken together, these results beg the question of whether the differences in housing precariousness observed between non-EU, EU and Spanish citizens might be due to their unequal distribution by tenure status or income level. More detailed analysis found that households headed by non-Spanish citizens had higher average housing precariousness scores across tenure types and income quintiles than those headed by Spanish nationals, with non-EU households consistently reporting the highest housing precariousness scores.³ These more intersectional dynamics are captured in greater detail by the regression results described below.

Figure 1 displays the odds ratios (ORs) and 95 per cent confidence intervals (CIs) resulting from our regression estimates on displacement and housing precariousness by selected covariates. Even after accounting for tenure status, household income and the presence of missed housing payments, there is a significant positive association between displaceability and the citizenship status of the person responsible for the dwelling. Net of these factors, the odds of having experienced residential displacement pressure were approximately three times higher for non-EU citizens than for Spanish citizens (OR = 2.95; 95% CI = 1.68–5.15). Tellingly, the magnitude of this association was somewhat greater than that between displaceability and missed housing payments (OR = 2.56; CI = 1.42–4.62). Since the indicator of displaceability refers to both the next 6 months and the previous 5 years, to ensure that its association with citizenship status was not attributable to the move that brought the respondent to Spain in the first place, analyses were performed using a dummy variable to indicate whether the respondent had arrived at the country within that time frame and results did not differ in any substantive way. In terms of their magnitude, the strongest significant association with displaceability was with the tenure status of the household, as the odds of experiencing residential displacement were nearly eight times higher for market-rate tenants than for mortgaged homeowners (OR = 7.95; CI = 4.55–13.89). In comparison, the odds were just over three times higher for reduced rate tenants (OR = 3.38; CI = 1.45–7.87).

Figure 1.

Covariates of displacement pressure and housing precariousness among households in Spain with ongoing mortgage or rental payments.

In terms of housing precariousness, a strong positive association was also found with non-EU citizenship (OR = 2.07; CI = 1.51–2.85) after accounting for age, sex, degree of urbanisation, completed university studies, tenure status, household income and missed housing payments. As in the analysis of housing displacement, a strong positive correlation was also found with household tenure status. After accounting for other factors, market-rate tenants had substantially higher odds of experiencing greater levels of housing precariousness than homeowners (OR = 2.65; CI = 2.14–3.29), as did reduced rate tenants, albeit to a lesser extent than the former (OR = 1.35, CI = 1.01–1.81).

Finally, Figure 2 displays the results of multiple linear regression for the dependent variable of monthly rental payments in euros. The overall regression was statistically significant (R² = .75; F(18, 1318) = 215.93; p < .001). After controlling for the characteristics of the dwelling and household, as well as the age, sex and educational level of the main person responsible for the dwelling, we find a significant, positive correlation between monthly rent and non-EU citizenship (ß = 48.31; CI = 15.62–81.00) and a correlation of similar magnitude with other EU citizenship (ß = 47.44; CI = −3.32 to 98.21), equivalent to roughly 48 euros more per month than Spanish citizens. However, in the latter case, the association was only significant at the 90 per cent level (p = .067).

Figure 2.

Multiple linear regression estimates of associations between selected variables and monthly rent.

Discussion

Housing markets played a central role in sorting the winners from the losers of the global financial crisis of 2008. Alexandri and Janoschka (2018) argue that, in Greece and Spain, the winners were real estate companies, international investors and hedge funds, as they were able to transform private debts from real estate speculation into public debt. The losers, in their view, were the state and citizens. While the former suffered a loss of sovereignty and democratic legitimacy, the latter were dispossessed of their rights, homes and livelihoods. Their analysis, however, draws primarily from the experiences of homeowners and refers to ‘citizens’ in the broadest sense. Our study elaborates on their argument by zooming in on the Spanish case and analysing the conditions of tenure and citizenship under which households were differentially exposed to residential displacement pressure, housing precariousness and rent extraction in the wake of the housing crash. Compared to Spanish citizens, EU and non-EU citizens in Spain faced a higher prevalence of objective and subjective indicators of housing precariousness, including overcrowding, structural damage, high financial burden of housing costs, inadequate plumbing and inability to maintain proper temperatures. Regression analyses show that displacement pressure and higher degrees of housing precariousness were systematically more likely to be experienced by non-EU citizens after controlling for age, sex, educational level, income, tenure status and missed housing payments. Non-EU citizens were also found to pay significantly more rent than Spaniards for similar dwellings.

The study has some crucial limitations, largely related to the data used. While EU-SILC provides a great level of detail on income and living conditions at the individual and household levels, to date, only the 2012 ad hoc module on housing provides enough cases and information to adequately examine residential displacement. While the retrospective items it contains are helpful and the year it took place is fortuitous (since it coincides with a peak in housing distress), its cross-sectional nature limits our capacity to examine changes over time and identify causal mechanisms. Another significant limitation is that the data only include the three categories of citizenship depicted in our analyses, obscuring a great deal of heterogeneity between countries of origin. Nor does the data set include information on the race or ethnicity of respondents. As a result, it does not allow us to account for the role of racialisation or post-colonial dynamics in shaping displaceability or exposure to housing precariousness, beyond broad classifications of ‘Europeanness’. This shortcoming is especially relevant in the case of non-EU respondents who, though primarily from the global South, may nonetheless include a few respondents from North America, whose experiences of housing distress likely differ considerably from citizens of African, Asian or Latin American countries, for instance.

Nevertheless, these limitations provide ample room for future research. For instance, a range of precarious housing and citizenship pathways can be identified through longitudinal quantitative analyses of displacement, housing precariousness and citizenship status. Meanwhile, qualitative and mixed-methods research are necessary to identify the causal mechanisms underlying not only displacement and housing precariousness but also variegated experiences of citizenship concerning housing. Interdisciplinary mixed-methods approaches would also be helpful in the development of an integrated theoretical framework identifying the pathways of housing distress and the mechanisms of its distribution among citizens. Finally, comparative cross-country research on whether and how residential displacement and housing precariousness are differentially experienced by gender, race, ethnicity, citizenship and tenure status would shed light on the role of property regimes, population structure, labour markets and public policy in shaping and addressing these problems.

Its limitations aside, this study’s findings have critical theoretical implications. By identifying the main covariates of displacement pressure, it marks a shift in the focus of research on housing distress from the act of displacement to the condition of displaceability, following the recent call by Yiftachel (2020). The main findings fall along what Yiftachel identifies as the two main axes of displaceability, namely property and identity. The strong association of displacement pressure with tenure status, particularly among market-rate tenants, entails that residential displaceability in Spain is primarily shaped by the housing property relationship, in addition to factors such as household income. Meanwhile, the fact that, net of all other observed factors, non-EU citizens were roughly three times as likely as Spaniards to experience or expect a forced move in the aftermath of the housing crash suggests that non-European identity is a determinant of displaceability, independently of tenure status or even the presence of missed housing payments. Yet, while Yiftachel refers to displaceability as ‘a framing condition of urban citizenship’, this study finds no statistically significant association between displaceability and the degree of urbanisation. This does not necessarily mean that displaceability is not intrinsically linked to the urban, but it does suggest that, in the aftermath of the Spanish housing crisis, it was not disproportionately experienced in high-density municipalities. Instead, it was distributed across municipality types, varying foremost by household tenure, income and citizenship status.

Insofar as they share strong and similar associations with the same set of covariates, displaceability and housing precariousness are found to be deeply intertwined. It is not unreasonable to infer that it is precisely displacement pressure which structures differential exposures to housing precariousness and facilitates the rent extraction experienced by different types of citizens. This supports Baker’s (2020) notion of ‘eviction as infrastructure’, wherein the law, bureaucracy and the use of force construct a ‘disposition towards displacement’, developing differential capacities-to-act and diminishing the ability of some people to resist. For Palomera (2014), this exploitative dynamic is rooted in the dispossession of migrant workers’ citizenship rights through immigration law, mainly as a result of their dependence on a formal labour contract (of any quality) to secure legal residence and the benefits of homeownership in demonstrating the local rootedness necessary to avoid or delay deportation when legal residence expires.

For Lund (2017), property and citizenship are ‘intimately related in their constitution’, with the ‘core element’ of these rights being recognition. While struggles over the property relationship seek the recognition of rights to access resources, those over citizenship seek recognition of the very right to have rights in a body politic, with formal national citizenship being just one of many configurations of socially constructed collective subjectivities. Nevertheless, our findings suggest that recognition is hardly a binary question of inclusion or exclusion. The stepwise inclusion⁴ of factors such as tenure status, income and the presence of arrears in our regression models yielded varying magnitudes of association between citizenship, displacement pressure and housing precariousness, reflecting a structure of differential inclusion that ‘gradates the space of national citizenship’ (Mezzadra and Neilson, 2013). Considering the perverse lending practices and conditions described by Palomera (2014), one might even argue that large subsets of non-EU migrants were the objects of predatory inclusion (Taylor, 2019) during the housing bubble in Spain. Though Taylor developed the latter notion in relation to Black homeownership in the United States, our findings on the differential exposure of non-EU citizens to excessive rental burdens and higher rental costs for similar properties suggest the presence of this dynamic in Spain’s private rental market.

Nevertheless, displaceability can be disputed through acts of citizenship. García-Lamarca (2017) highlights the insurgent practices of the PAH, who challenged a massive wave of mortgage-related evictions and the model that created it through horizontal, assembly-based politics. Tracing out the movement’s roots in earlier attempts to address housing problems during the bubble, García-Lamarca points out that, though successful in organising youth, the PAH’s precursors were unable to reach the immigrants and low-income households who were facing the bulk of housing distress at the time. Yet Gonick (2015, 2020) recounts how Andean migrants in Spain challenged evictions and abusive mortgages, organising the first anti-eviction protests in the wake of the housing crash and catalysing social mobilisation on a broad scale. 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’, thereby challenging not only housing precariousness and displacement but existing notions of citizenship. Indeed, Mezzadra and Neilson (2013) have pointed out how crucial the agencies of ‘strangers, outsiders and aliens’ are to the development of citizenship, reshaping, contesting and redefining its borders by acting as citizens independently of their administrative status and exercising their right to claim rights.

The differentially precarious citizenship status of non-EU citizens in Spain facilitates housing practices that not only multiply and thicken urban borders and facilitate rent extraction, but are ultimately extended to Spanish citizens. Yet the broad socialisation of differentially experienced social problems and the subsumption of migrant demands by a national movement carries the crucial risk of obfuscating the oppressions specifically faced by immigrants in Spain. This risk is most evident in the discursive strategies of housing movements when they demand enforcement of Article 47 of the Spanish Constitution, which guarantees the right to decent housing for all Spaniards, who are defined specifically in Article 11 by their nationality. Thus, any attempt to guarantee equal housing rights through legal reform must either extend the right to housing beyond Spanish nationals or redefine the notion of Spanish citizenship.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 – Supplemental material for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash by Carlos Delclós in European Urban and Regional Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-2-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 – Supplemental material for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Supplemental material, sj-docx-2-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash by Carlos Delclós in European Urban and Regional Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-3-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 – Supplemental material for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Supplemental material, sj-docx-3-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash by Carlos Delclós in European Urban and Regional Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-4-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 – Supplemental material for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Supplemental material, sj-docx-4-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash by Carlos Delclós in European Urban and Regional Studies

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-5-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 – Supplemental material for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash

Supplemental material, sj-docx-5-eur-10.1177_09697764221136092 for The burden of the border: Precarious citizenship experiences in the wake of the Spanish housing crash by Carlos Delclós in European Urban and Regional Studies

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: This article is part of the Property and Democratic Citizenship project, which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (Grant agreement No. 771795).

ORCID iD

Carlos Delclós

Supplemental material

Supplemental material for this article is available online.

Notes

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