The Telegraph
Denmark to limit the number of ‘non-Western’ residents in poor neighborhoods
The center-left government of Denmark plans to reduce the number of “non-Western” residents in housing areas across the country to ten percent or less within ten years, following a series of difficult proposals on immigration. The Social Democrats’ proposed bill on ‘mixed housing’ gives municipalities the right to set up ‘prevention areas’ where they can refuse to rent to those who are not originally from Denmark, the EU or the EEA or Switzerland. “For too many years, we have closed our eyes to the development that was going on, and only acted when the integration problems became too great,” Kaare Dybvad Bek, the country’s interior minister, said in a statement. housing organizations, he said, had not intervened in time in the past, as large public housing areas entered a negative spiral. The bill also gives municipalities the right to deny rent to the unemployed or those with criminal records. European immigrants have the right to public housing in some areas; the bill aims to design a large-scale and targeted change in the current composition of residents in many of the country’s public housing areas. ‘To do so would also give municipalities the power to force private landlords with 20 or more flats to rent to’ non-Western ‘immigrants so that they can move to predominantly ethnic Danish areas. The government also plans to stop the term “ghetto” intro. led by the previous government to refer to housing areas with a large proportion of immigrants, who describe the bill as ‘stigmatizing’, and replacing it with the terms ‘transformation area’ and ‘parallel society’. “The ghetto term is misleading,” Mr Bek said. “I do not use it myself, and I think it overshadows the important work that needs to be done in public housing areas.” The label is used to refer to areas with more than 1 000 people of which more than half are of non-Western origin and who meet at least two of a list of four criteria: that more than 40% are unemployed; that more than 60 percent of 39-50-year-olds do not have a high school education; that the crime rates are three times higher than average; and that residents have an average income of 55% lower than in the surrounding region. Currently, 15 Danish neighborhoods are classified as “ghetto areas” and 25 others are considered “at risk”. Within ‘ghetto’ areas, some crimes carry the double penalty, and parents are forced to send their children from the age of one, among others. The ‘ghetto’ law also led to controversial forced evictions from many of the areas, and some of the public housing areas were then demolished. Even the parties to the left of the Social Democrats have broadly supported the new policy, with Halime Oguz, housing spokeswoman for the Socialist Left Party, saying on the Altinget website that she hopes the break-up of ‘parallel societies’ immigrants Denes of ‘social control’ would be liberated. It was an ‘excellent idea’ to empower municipalities to place immigrants in private rent, and called for new public housing areas to be built in ‘the areas where many rich people live today’. On the right, Alex Ahrendtsen, spokesman for housing the populist Danish People’s Party, complained about the decision to abandon the ghetto term. “In the past, they were tried and tested ‘socially challenged housing areas,'” he said. “Now they are trying with ‘parallel society’ and ‘transformation areas’. We in the Danish People’s Party will still call them ‘ghetto areas’.”