Racialized housing injustice. The case of environmental racism against Roma from Romania  

In both my academic work and housing activism, I am addressing housing inequalities produced by uneven development, class exploitation, racist oppression and patriarchal domination. When I am dealing with the housing crisis in Romania, the concept of racialized injustice always stays at the core of my approach. Housing injustice is product of a political economy that creates laborer classes who cannot afford to pay for the increasing costs of homes on the residential market, while it transforms housing into a financial asset and source for capital accumulation.

In the case of racialized minorities such as Roma in Romania, housing injustice is manifested in extreme forms: impoverished Roma are victims of forced evictions, they are pushed into the ghettoized margins of the localities, they are performing underpaid informal or formal jobs, and, constrained by spatial dislocations and precarious economic conditions, they live in inadequate homes that many times happen to be placed in toxic environments. In these instances of housing injustice, the racialization of Roma ethnicity and of poverty goes hand in hand with the stigmatization of both the territories where poor Roma live and the labor they perform. At the end of the day, these processes justify the criminal stance of environmental racism according to which Roma life does not matter and the infrastructurally underdeveloped or even toxic environment in which they are enforced to live is their natural world, it fits their supposedly inferior biological disposition or cultural choices.

Broadly speaking, housing injustice in Romania is a result of housing politics that played an important role in the transformation of state socialism and centralized economy into neoliberal capitalism and market economy. Processes of privatization via the right-to-buy and the retrocession measures, paralleled by the lack of public investment in public housing or differently put by the prevalence of private housing development, resulted in the over-commodification of housing and in its financialization. The fact that housing became predominantly a commodity and a financial asset, while peoples’ right to housing is violated and their social need for housing remains unsatisfied, is related exactly to how urban and housing development serves the interests of capital and not of people, and definitely not of low-income people. The changing political economy of housing leads to persistent housing crises, which includes phenomena such as the increase of housing prices and private rents, the rise of the rate of households overburdened with their housing costs and of the over-crowded households. But housing crises also creates diverse instances of extreme forms of housing dispossession, like forced eviction, homelessness, living in inadequate and unsecure homes, or being enforced into housing arrangements in toxic environments harshly disconnected from the rest of the locality.

The Pata Rât neighbourhood of the developed Cluj-Napoca from Romania is an example that cumulates all the dispossessions and deprivations related to poor and unsecure housing, but it is not a singular case in the country that displays all the big inequalities and uneven developments created by late capitalism. The residential areas in Pata Rât have been formed over five decades (the vast majority of them, however, in the last 20 years) under the impact of several structural causes. People who worked in the city did not have sufficient financial resources to pay for housing costs elsewhere due to the large discrepancy between their low income and housing prices in the real estate market. All this is happening in the conditions in which the Romanian state and the local government do not offer them adequate and affordable social housing in other areas of the city. This case displays the broad spectrum of responsibility of the local public administration for the formation of residential areas near the landfills of toxic waste:

• in relation to the oldest colony (Dallas), formed since the 1970s, whose tenants select garbage on the ramp for the benefit of all the people of Cluj, the authorities practice a policy of indifference, from time to time hidden under the pretext of a passive tolerance;
• in relation to the informal housing area set up on Cantonului Street, the responsibility of the Cluj City Hall is indirect but active, because starting with the second half of the 1990s it evicted and directed to this territory smaller or larger groups of Roma from other areas of the city, accepting the placement of temporary homes by humanitarian organizations or offering them the alternative to build a makeshift home on their own in this territory;
• the responsibility of the local public administration towards the inhabitants of Pata Rât is the most direct and active towards those who live in the modular houses that the town hall built in 2010 with dedication to the Roma near the landfills, so in a toxic industrial area.

All of the above would not have happened if the Romanian state and local authorities had complied with international treaties on ensuring the right to adequate housing for all, as well as banning and preventing evictions. The formed residential areas would not have become more acute and permanent if the city government with an annual budget of over 400 million euros had the political will to invest in moving the residents of Pata Rât to adequate social housing in the city. The existence of the Pata Rât housing area near the landfills has also become possible due to institutional racism against Roma and poor people, an act that not only inferiorizes, dehumanizes and stigmatizes people, but also endangers their lives. Marginalization and territorial segregation in this case, and in similar cases, means vulnerability to life-threatening diseases and reduce people’s life expectancy.

Therefore, among the principles that an adequate housing and environment policy should respect, the following should be necessarily part:

• ensuring access to adequate housing for all in a healthy environment;
• ensuring in fact adequate social housing to all those eligible according to the housing law, and giving priority to the poorest with precarious living conditions, by building a necessary number of public social housing and using a fair allocation system;
• prevention of forced evictions through integrated housing and social measures (social assistance and benefits);
• a ban on the relocation of Roma and other poor or homeless people near toxic platforms (such as landfills, water treatment plants, and industrial sites);
• ensuring that each urban regeneration project has a housing program, because such projects do not only change the built environment but also the social structure of the population in areas undergoing major urban changes, therefore there would be a need to protect the vulnerable victims of these transformations and provide them, as appropriate, with suitable housing alternatives.