Rent discrimination among Belgians with Moroccan roots almost far …

Discrimination among Belgian prospective tenants with Moroccan roots has almost doubled since the lockdown. Pieter-Paul Verhaeghe and Abel Ghekiere, two professors from the department of Sociology at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel, made this alarming observation in a study into ethnic discrimination in the rental housing market.

The researchers conducted a first series of 482 field tests between October 2019 and March 2020, the period before the corona outbreak. They responded to existing Immoweb advertisements, each with two fictitious prospective tenants: a test person with a Moroccan or Congolese sounding name and a control person with a Belgian sounding name. Both candidates had otherwise identical characteristics.

The first tests showed that Belgians with a Moroccan descent were discriminated against by real estate agents in 20 percent of the cases and Belgians with Congolese roots in 17 percent of the cases.

In the period just after the lockdown, between May 16 and June 30, 2020, a second series of 440 practical tests followed. The influence of the corona crisis became immediately clear, because the invitation rates had dropped sharply for almost all candidates.

‘Brokers were much more selective in their invitations’, clarify Ghekiere and Verhaeghe. “This may be due to the increased workload, fear of contamination or the limited possibility to organize home visits.”

The chances of invitation among Belgians dropped by a quarter, while Belgians of Congolese descent were still rarely invited. But among Belgians with Moroccan roots, rent discrimination almost doubled: in 36 percent of the cases there was discrimination, while the figure before the lockdown was 20 percent.

‘We suspect that this is because this community in particular was often stigmatized in the media with regard to a high percentage of corona infections and non-compliance with the corona measures,’ say the VUB researchers.

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