Dissertation Research: Housing Insecurity and Citizenship in Amsterdam

Yale University, New Haven CT

Investigators

Abstract

The majority of people on the planet lack housing security, which means they rent without tenancy protections, live in vastly expanding slums, or squat (defined as residing in a space without legal entitlement). This dissertation research by a cultural anthropologist will explore housing insecurity in contemporary urban life by investigating how low income people find housing in Amsterdam, a wealthy Western European city with a serious housing shortage and a highly structured social housing system. The project studies how race and citizenship affect the way people find housing. Amsterdam has a severe housing shortage, a constant influx of low-income new arrivals in need of housing, and state-subsidized low-income housing, which new arrivals cannot access for reasons that vary with their citizenship status. Recent arrivals thus must engage in the extra-legal housing options of squatting, anti-squatting, and subletting. This study's objectives include understanding characteristics of illegal households; determining if residents' race and citizenship impact which tactics they use to find housing; and understanding how housing seekers' personal networks impact their decisions to sublet, squat or anti-squat. The broader impacts of this project include the value of the new knowledge to be produced for housing policymakers in the EU and in the Netherlands; in addition the study will contribute to the social science training of a female minority PhD candidate in Anthropology.