New research on housing discrimination initiated by Luca Varadi during Faculty Short Visit
07-08-2024
Luca Varadi is an Assistant Professor in CEU’s Nationalism Studies Programme, whose research focuses on ethnic prejudices as well as prejudice reduction and anti-discrimination.
In March, Varadi spent one week at the Hertie School in Berlin through CIVICA’s Faculty Short Visits programme, which promotes mobility among faculty researchers across the alliance of ten social science universities in Europe.
Varadi’s visit resulted in the development of a new research project with the Hertie School and the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE) called Combating Housing Discrimination Against Roma People in Hungary (EqualHome). It seeks to improve understanding of how to combat housing discrimination against Roma people in a context where democracy is under threat: Hungary. The project was recently awarded research seed funding through CIVICA.
CEU spoke with Varadi to hear more about the development of the new research project and the value that mobility can offer CEU researchers in shaping collaborations.
Why did you want to go to Hertie School and what did you work on during your time there?
I decided to apply for the Faculty Short Visit because I met Ruth Ditlmann, my Hertie School host, at a conference previously, and we realised that we had many shared research interests and that both of our universities are part of the CIVICA alliance. We had an idea to start a project together, but we needed the time to sit down for an extended period to really think about what this project should look like. This is exactly what the Faculty Short Visit was meant for.
We also took the opportunity of me being there to give a public lecture at the Hertie School about all of my new research results related to Roma discrimination in Hungary. Ruth also invited me to give a workshop to PhD researchers about research methods as well as research career opportunities.
Most of the time, we did focused brainstorming about this new project. Some of our meetings were attended by Ruth’s PhD researchers and a visiting researcher from the the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, Liora Morhayim. Morhayim was involved in my research, so she came with me to Berlin and participated in some of our meetings to contribute ideas. This was also a nice opportunity for the PhD researchers to get a little extra time to understand how research projects are formed.
By the end of the short visit, we had a pretty detailed outline of the project idea. This was our goal. We realized that it's just much easier to do this rigorous work together in the same space in addition to our many Zoom meetings.
What was the research you presented in Berlin?
The research I presented is somewhat of a predecessor to the new project, which is called EqualHome. It looks at anti-Roma discrimination in the rental housing market in Hungary. I've been collaborating with colleagues from CEU, including Gabor Simonovits from the Department of Political Science, and Hungarian institutions on various studies. First of all, we were using a film directed by Jeremy Braverman from CEU’s Visual Studies Platform where young Roma people share their experiences with unsuccessful home searches for rental units. We were curious to find out if this film could make an impact in encouraging landlords to give an opportunity to Roma tenants or at least enable them to have a viewing of the homes.
Starting with that, we partnered with a relatively small but interesting platform, similar to Airbnb but in the Hungarian context, which advertises long-term rentals. They were interested in doing something against discrimination. You don't have many market organisations that have this on their agenda in Hungary. They allowed us to run our studies on their platform, so we tested this film and measured the effects on reducting discrimination among the landlords registered there. We found very promising results indicating that the video helped.
We also developed another type of tool that aims to reduce discrimination, but even more importantly, to give Roma home seekers a better experience and a higher success rate. That is something we are writing about currently. Running these studies, I realised that there wasn't reliable data about the extent of this problem. Therefore, we ran a large study, the first of its kind in Hungary. We contacted 2,000 people who were advertising homes for rent, and we measured discrimination against Roma people. The results were beyond our expectations in revealing a staggering level of discrimination, really shocking, but we needed to know what's going on in order to address the issue.
These were the studies that I presented at the Hertie School, and it was this last study that gave the push for the EqualHome project that we are now going to start.
What will you be doing with your collaborators from the Hertie School and LSE in the EqualHome project?
The motivation to do the EqualHome project was the data indicating tremendous discrimination. Ruth, being at the Hertie School, is very focused on public policy. I explained that in the Hungarian context, there aren't significant institutional mechanisms that mitigate or prevent discrimination. From my work in Hungary, I understand that the national government is not interested in tackling this problem. They have actually abolished the institutional framework that was supposed to at least make sure that the anti-discrimination legislation can be enforced. Ruth, therefore, wanted to think about the public actors who could actually do something against this.
We started thinking about local governments and decided to approach the municipality of Budapest by reaching out to the mayor to share our findings and propose a collaboration. That same week, we presented the findings on housing discrimination to the mayor and to all of the representatives at the municipality responsible for housing and social issues. They were receptive to a collaboration that would aim to mitigate this problem.
Together with those involved in housing in Budapest, we developed an approach for how this project could be implemented. Ruth had some strong ideas, and at that point, we invited Ilka Gleibs from LSE to work with us as a very knowledgeable social psychologist. Then, the three of us started to develop the theory and whole framework for the project. It was a very fruitful process working together with Ruth and Ilka, and I’m looking forward to having more time for us to collaborate.
For EqualHome, we will be conducting a survey experiment with landlords and a field experiment to test the effectiveness of different communication strategies for reducing discriminatory behavior. The project is expected to identify the most effective strategy and then implement it at scale in collaboration with the municipality of Budapest.
What was most valuable to you about the Faculty Short Visit?
I think the visits are a great opportunity to have time to really think together and come up with ideas. They also provide a platform to share research in a community outside of your own department or institution in a way that is different from the environment at conferences. The best part of my experience was definitely the dedicated time to develop the project idea without interruption, and I think it really paid off.
Article credits: Julie Potter (CEU).
Photo credits: CEU.