Accommodation for profit, not for refugees: Racial capitalism and the logics of Berlin’s refugee accommodation market

Abstract

In response to the difficulties refugees face in finding housing, Berlin’s government has developed new housing-like shelters that offer longer-term accommodation. Drawing on literature concerning racial capitalism and urban migration governance, I explain how these shelters represent a multilayered business opportunity for revenue extraction, resulting in the ongoing displacement, spatial fixing, and continued racialization of refugees. Notably, I reveal the prominent roles of Berlin’s government, city-owned housing, and public real estate agencies. They use the construction of new refugee shelters in an entrepreneurial way in order to revitalize their own fiscal budgets, as well as to put urban land into production. This allows them to develop and then turn refugee shelters into substandard, racialized, and highly profitable forms of new urban housing for refugees and other racialized and low-income populations. Expounding the ways the building of accommodation as substandard urban housing leads to race-based pursuit of profit, I argue that refugee housing serves as an urban migration fix and is developed within the logic of racial capitalism. This article contributes to attempts to use racial capitalism as a framework to scrutinize urban and migration processes, helping us comprehend the distinctly racial logics of urban and migration governance, and housing precarity.

Arrival Infrastructures: Segregation of Displaced Migrants and Processes of Urban Change in Athens

“…Significant policy studies have shed light on the controversial effects of dispersal policies and decentralised asylum systems in Greek, Italian, and German cities that received the bulk of migrants [16]. On the one hand, the inadequate supply or the poor-quality accommodation units in peripheral or deprived city areas, the hostility of local governments and local anti-migrant mobilizations, and the privatization and disassociation of support services from mainstream provisions combined with the deterrence of settlement and mobility restrictions to produce conditions of protracted displacement (e.g., for Italy, Ambrosini (2021), Annunziata (2020), Campesi (2018), Lumley-Sapanski (2022), Semprebon and Pelecani (2019) [17][18][19][20][21]; e.g., for Germany, Kreichauf (2023), Bernt et al (2022), El-Kayed et al (2020) [22][23][24]; examples from Greece are referenced in subsequent sections). On the other hand, the relative autonomy of migrant-friendly local authorities and their cooperation with international agencies and civil society organizations has had some success in integrating accommodation to support services, mobilising a variety of interethnic networks and offering opportunities for inclusion (e.g., for Italy, Ambrosini (2021), Boano and Astolfo (2020) [17,25]; e.g., for Germany, Kreichauf and Mayer (2021), Marci ńczak and Bernt (2021) [26,27].…”