Paper short abstract:

Debates around social housing are increasingly conflated with claims of who deserves what and why. This paper analyzes how the new Flemish social housing policy legitimizes migrant exclusion and shows the incommensurability of an emancipation discourse with the lived realities of migrant households.

Paper long abstract:

Debates around public and social housing have increasingly become conflated with claims around who deserves what and why. In 2023, the government of Flanders, Belgium, introduced a fundamental restructuring of its social housing policy. A key feature of the reforms is a renewed set of allocation criteria. The Dutch language requirement has been increased, and ‘local ties’ to a neighborhood afford people priority on wait-lists. New rules also apply to current tenants: all adult family members are required to register as job seekers. According to the minister of housing, the policy reforms will “contribute to the emancipation of the social tenant."

This paper interrogates two aspects of the new Flemish social housing policy: the ideological underpinnings of its renewed allocation criteria, as well as its impact on migrant households. I first discuss how the new criteria reframe ‘migrant undeservingness’ – the perception that people with a migration background are less deserving of access to social services – through the construction of a category of ‘the deserving local’. Tracing the romanticized idea of ‘the local’ as distinct from yet intimately connected to notions of citizenship and belonging, I argue that the legitimization of migrant exclusion is solidified by a moral appeal to a ‘more deserving’ class. Next, I discuss the impact of the reforms. Based on ethnographic research with two women’s groups in a social housing cooperative for migrants, I discuss the incommensurability of a discourse of emancipation with the women’s lived realities in the face of racialized and gendered discrimination.