A study by the City Council has found that people with names of Arab origin have more difficulty accessing rental housing. Specifically, people with local-sounding name receive 18% more responses to queries about rental housing compared to people with names of Arab origin. These differences are also reflected in the prices of rents for flats, as people with names of Arab origin receive more responses from those offering flats with more expensive rents.
The study A name can hold the key: Detection of evidence of discrimination in access to rental housing in Barcelona, commissioned to the Broll social consultancy cooperative, consisted of sending 2,000 requests to 500 housing ads published on property websites. The goal was to make a statistical assessment of the responses according to the sender. Half of the requests were sent using a name of Arab origin and the other half using a local-sounding name, based on the most common names according to Idescat.
The results of the study demonstrate differences between the requests sent with names of Arab origin and those from local-sounding names. For every ten requests sent with local-sounding names, six replies were received (56.6%), while for requests sent using Arab names the response rate was four (37.8%).
Gender differences were also detected, with every ten requests from women with local-sounding names getting seven responses while those from women with Arab names got five. Among men, the figures for responses were five and three respectively.
Another factor detected by the study is a social class bias: the average rent for properties where people with names of Arab origin got responses was 1,384,27 euros a month, while the average for properties where only local-sounding names got a response was 1,093 euros, nearly 300 euros lower.
The study was commissioned to the Broll cooperative within the framework of the Barcelona Discrimination Observatory to further analyse and objectively assess the dimension of discrimination in access to rental housing.