Housing Pathways of Immigrants in the City of Athens: From Homelessness to Homeownership. Considering Contextual Factors and Human Agency

ABSTRACT

Against the background of the so-called “new immigration” to Greece starting at the beginning of the 1990s, this paper explores the housing experience of immigrants in the city of Athens and reveals housing pathways that have been overlooked or deliberately concealed. Through the processing of data from the Athens Mortgage Office and through interviews with migrant homeowners, it is shown that despite serious difficulties raised against their spatial and social integration, immigrants managed to escape homelessness, gradually upgrade both their housing conditions and occupancy status, and gain access even to homeownership. Special emphasis is given to key factors that allowed immigrants to achieve upward residential mobility and that relate to specific aspects of the local context and to immigrants’ individual strategies. Urban space emerges as an “opportunity framework” and immigrants as “active agents” who set up successful housing strategies and reverse the supposedly vicious circle of poverty, delinquency and marginality.

KEYWORDS:

• Housing pathways
• homelessness
• homeownership
• immigration
• Athens

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the reception conditions of immigrants in Greece back in the 1990s and 2000s, see indicatively (Mousourou 1991; King, Lazaridis, and Tsardanidis 2000; Marvakis, Parsanoglou, and Pavlou 2001; Pavlou and Christopoulos 2004; Emmanuel 2006; Emke-Poulopoulou 2007; Varouxi, Sarris, and Fragiskou 2010; Kasimis and Papadopoulos 2012).

2. For the racist public discourse (re)produced by the Media, politicians, public administration employees etc. in Greece during the 1990s and 2000s, see indicatively (Triandafyllidou 1999; Pavlou 2001; Golfinopoulos 2007).

3. The research in the archives of the Athens Mortgage Office was conducted during the academic years 2010–2011 and 2013–2014 under special permission from the Department of Mortgage and Land Registry Offices of the Ministry of Justice, Transparency and Human Rights, as well as from the Head of the Athens Mortgage Office, provided that research findings will be presented anonymously.

4. At first, migrant homeowners to be interviewed were contacted through personal networks of friends and colleagues while, later, conducting interviews continued through snowball sampling until the described experiences start being repeated. The aim was – and was partly achieved – to have a representative and proportional sample of interviewed migrant homeowners in terms of their ethnic origin. Interviews were conducted between March and December 2013. One year later, some of the interviewees were interviewed again in order to describe how things had evolved in the meantime.

5. For the immigrants’ quite commonly shared (upward) housing experience, see indicatively Table 1, an overview of the main demographic characteristics of and housing conditions information about the (20) interviewed migrant homeowners.

Table 1. Main characteristics of and information about the (20) interviewed migrant homeowners.

6. To calculate the Concentration Index (CI): CI = TI/AI, where TI is the total number of immigrants by census tract and AI is the average number of immigrants by census tract if they were evenly distributed. The last is calculated by dividing the total number of immigrants by the total number of census tracts.