Long-term housing challenges: the tenure trajectories of EU migrant workers in the Netherlands

Abstract

Finding a new house is an essential but challenging undertaking for migrant workers. Current understanding of these migrant housing trajectories is rudimentary, contrasting migrants with non-migrants, or looks at the housing situation at a certain point in time. This article presents a fine-grained and longitudinal perspective on housing trajectories including less-studied alternative tenures. Using sequence and clustering techniques on Dutch register data, it identifies patterns in tenure registrations of EU migrant workers in the Netherlands, over time. In the first years, alternative private rental arrangements are common, after which some migrants move on to more secure accommodation, while others leave the Netherlands or continue to stay in precarious and/or shared-housing arrangements. A distinction is made between relatively progressive improvement (leading to social rental or homeownership) and stagnating trajectories (long-term private rent, long-term informal registration and long-term shared housing). Regression analyses show how these housing trajectories are differentiated across socio-demographic variables and the structural conditions of the arrival city, as well as by employment sector. The findings contribute to the literature on migrant housing careers and underline the wide diversity of housing challenges. Although migrant workers play a crucial role in the economy, especially lower-income, older and single migrants have limited access to permanent and secure housing.