The Colour of Housing, by Afroféminas – 1 October 2026

By the morning of 27 September, the Puerta del Sol was covered in tents. Thousands of people had marched through Madrid under the slogan “Ni una Maricarmen más” (“Not One More Maricarmen”), called out by the Sindicato de Inquilinas (Tenants’ Union) after an elderly woman was evicted from the rented flat where she had lived for seventy years. The march and the encampment have forced into the open a truth many of us have long known in our bodies: housing is costing us our lives.

We watch those images with a tightening in the chest and with a question that never leaves us. How many Black, Roma, Arab and Latin American Maricarmens have walked out of their homes carrying just a plastic bag, with not a single camera there? How many racialised women never reached seventy years in a tenancy because they were never granted one in the first place?

This text means to join the struggle. It also means to say out loud something the placards rarely name. The housing crisis hits the whole working class, and it hits hardest those of us whose body, surname or accent the market has learned to punish.

Looking for a flat as a Black woman is an act of resistance that begins before you have crossed any threshold. It begins with the phone call. You dial the number in the advert, you say hello, you give your name. On the other end comes a small, almost imperceptible silence, and then the line you already know by heart. “It’s just been let.” “We’ve already had a lot of viewings.” “We’ll call you back.” Nobody calls. The next day the advert is still up.

We learn to read those silences early. We learn to ask a white friend to make the first call, to send emails under a neutral name, to rehearse an accent that will not give away where we come from, or where our mothers came from. Some people turn up to the viewing with their payslip, their permanent contract, their employment record and their guarantor’s papers all printed out in a folder, like someone getting ready for a trial. And some, even so, watch the landlord’s eyes settle on their hair, their skin, their children, and understand that the decision was made before they even opened their mouth.

This is neither a mere subjective perception nor an exaggeration. The association Provivienda has spent years measuring this racism through the methodology of testing: calling estate agencies with identical profiles that differ only in national origin. In 2020 its report ¿Se alquila? Racismo y xenofobia en el mercado del alquiler (“Is It for Rent? Racism and Xenophobia in the Rental Market”) found that seven agencies in ten were willing to discriminate openly against foreigners when the owner asked them to. In its second edition, published in 2025, the figure jumped. In Madrid and Barcelona almost every agency contacted agreed to those terms, thirty points more than five years earlier. The shortage of flats and the historic surge in prices have not brought more justice. They have handed more power to whoever decides who gets let in.

When the door does not shut completely, it opens a crack, with conditions. The same Provivienda study documented how agencies go along with foreigners being shown the pricier flat, being asked for a residence permit, a larger deposit and more paperwork, being offered shorter contracts or damp, mouldy flats that no one else would take. This is the racial tax on renting. We pay more for less, and we pay it on wages that tend to be lower, because the same racism that shuts us out of housing locks us into the worst-paid work: care, cleaning, the fields, hospitality.

The result shows up in the figures and is lived out in the corridors. Drawing on Eurostat data, Provivienda reports that overcrowding affects nearly one in five migrants, against a national average of around five per cent. Rooms shared by whole families. Pisos patera (flats packed with people, named after the small boats migrants cross in) where a bed is let in shifts. Unwritten sublets that leave people off the municipal register (padrón) and therefore without access to healthcare, to schooling, to regularisation. A perfect chain in which the lack of a home produces a lack of papers, and the lack of papers produces a lack of a home.

Housing racism also draws the map of our cities. The 2025 report warns that discrimination now decides which areas we are offered housing in and which we are not, producing residential segregation. For us they keep the neighbourhoods the city forgets, until speculation arrives. And when it arrives, with its tourist flats and its investment funds, we are the first to be driven out of the very neighbourhoods we built with our networks, our shops and our music. Gentrification has a colour, and it is almost never ours that gets to stay.

An eviction is never just the loss of a roof. For a racialised family it is the loss of the address that holds up the padrón, the padrón that holds up the roots-based residence claim (arraigo), the claim that holds up any chance of working with a contract. It is the loss of the children’s school place, of the health centre where the staff already knew their grandmother, of the neighbour who used to mind the kids. For many migrant women an eviction order is the start of a slide that can end in the loss of legal status, because without a home and without a contract the papers come undone.

The eviction arrives freighted with suspicion, too. The seventy-year-old white woman is recognised by the city as a victim, and rightly so. The Black woman with three children is read as a problem. The talk is of okupas (squatters), of “trouble”, of “mafias”, and that story lays the ground for the eviction to be felt as a matter of public order rather than injustice. When it is the police who open the door, we know the uniform does not look at us the same way. We know that an ID check on the landing can end in a deportation file. That is why so many families leave before the date, in silence, without asking for help, without showing up in any statistic.

And then there are the consequences that appear in no report. The girls who change school three times in a single year. The mothers who sleep with the phone in their hand, waiting for the burofax (the registered eviction notice). Mental health that breaks under a life lived always on borrowed ground. The shame, which is not ours, and which the system makes us carry as if it were. Precarious housing is also a form of violence against our bodies, and racialised women take it in the front line, because we are still the ones holding the home together when there is no home left.

Black women know about lost homes. Our grandmothers’ memory knows it, driven from their lands on the Pacific coast of Colombia, in the Caribbean, across so many geographies of the diaspora and the continent. Our mothers know it, who came to this side of the ocean and rented rooms where they could not hang a single photograph. So when the cry goes up in Sol today that housing is a right, we hear an old debt in it too.

We celebrate the strength of the housing movement, and we want to be inside it with everything we are. We ask our comrades in the union to take housing racism up as a central part of the struggle. To demand real penalties for the agencies that discriminate, because today discrimination is free. To treat the regularisation of migrants as housing policy. To see that neighbourhood assemblies have Black, Roma, Arab and Latin American faces at the table where the decisions are made, and not only on the landing where the eviction is fought.

Not one more Maricarmen. Not one more Fátima. Not one more Yolanda, not one more Aminata, not one more Mercedes. The struggle for housing will be anti-racist or it will shut out precisely those who need it most. We do not intend to be shut out.

The Spanish original of this article first appeared in Afroféminas. This English translation first appeared on the Left Renewal Blog. Translated and published with permission.

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