The Role of Subleasing in the Housing Careers of the Immigrant Population: The Case of the Barcelona Metropolitan Area

Abstract

The subleasing of rooms is a widespread reality in large urban areas, however, the absence of statistics in this regard makes its analysis difficult. A large part of the immigrant population accesses to a dwelling through this modality. Therefore, in this study, 27 semi-structured interviews are analyzed to evaluate the role of subleasing in the housing career of this group in the Metropolitan Area of Barcelona. The results confirm the increasing difficulty that immigrants who have recently arrived have to advance in the housing scale and, more specifically, the prominence of subleasing as a precarious residential resource for said population, particularly in the early stages of residential insertion, although not exclusively, since the existence of reverse residential trajectories has also been detected. The presence of roomÍ€™s submarkets that are accessed exclusively through migratory chains is also verified.