Since 2017, the Duisburg Model has been part of a statewide program in North Rhine-Westphalia. The program promotes antiziganism by helping municipalities evict residents and acquire and renovate properties. Since then, it has served as a blueprint for similar racist practices in other cities. As Lena Wiese demonstrates, this basic pattern has spread due to the ongoing normalization of the exclusion of ‘others’ in federal politics over the past ten years.
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Since 2014, the Duisburg Task Force has been clearing out ‘problem properties.’ These are almost exclusively residential buildings in Hochfeld and Marxloh where Roma from Romania and Bulgaria live. These evictions would not be possible without an institutional discourse that is interwoven with this practice and portrays a specific population group as a ‘security risk.’ The following analysis examines the structural mechanism behind the ‘security risk’ discourse, its spread at the federal level, and the political practices of those who oppose it.
Institutional mechanisms of displacement
In particular, older buildings in precarious neighborhoods such as Duisburg’s Hochfeld or Marxloh end up on a municipal review list due to neighborhood complaints. Under public order law, these complaints are interpreted as fire safety deficiencies, with historic wooden stairwells cited as the primary deficiency. The legal basis for prohibitions on use – introduced in 2014 as the Housing Supervision Act of North Rhine-Westphalia and expanded in 2021 under the name Housing Strengthening Act – was established in the same year that full freedom of movement for workers from Romania and Bulgaria took effect. According to Section 9, Paragraph 4, Sentence 3 of this law, an immediate eviction without the provision of replacement housing requires an immediate danger to life and limb – a condition that the city administration explicitly denied applied to wooden stairwells in existing buildings in response to an inquiry from the Die Linke parliamentary group in February 2022 (Drs. 22-0152).
Those who are evicted lose access to basic income, child benefits, health insurance, and school enrollment along with their registered address. In the case of Gravelottestraße on May 4, 2022, the Job Center had already notified the affected households in writing of the loss of their social benefits two weeks before the eviction operation, meaning that the on-site risk assessment was merely the retroactive formalization of a decision that had already been made at the institutional level. Étienne Balibar refers to such mechanisms as “de-citizenship” – a gradual disenfranchisement in which formal rights remain intact, but de facto participation is systematically undermined.
The economic logic of this cycle is not uniform. Some property owners view substandard housing as speculative investments and rent them out at inflated rates to people who, due to their precarious legal status, can hardly take legal action against the owners. The cross-financing model works as long as there is no government intervention. For other property owners, however, a prohibition on use spells economic ruin because they cannot finance the required renovation measures while burdened by existing debt or lacking reserves.
Bernd Belina describes urban security governance as a practice that manages social problems through control and displacement. The task force follows this logic, at least in cases where state-sanctioned displacement results in the eviction of tenants from buildings whose subsequent modernization would have been unfeasible while they were occupied.
From the Duisburg model to government policy
Since 2017, the Duisburg model has been part of a state-wide program in North Rhine-Westphalia that supports municipalities in evicting tenants, acquiring properties, and renovating them, and has since served as a blueprint for comparable control practices in other cities. The fact that this basic pattern has been able to spread is the result of a normalization process that has been underway in federal politics for at least a decade.
Yet the available data reveal a significant discrepancy between political discourse and empirical reality. Immigration from the new EU member states increased employment subject to social insurance contributions by 1.42 million between 2010 and 2025, while the number of SGB II benefit recipients from the same group rose by only 113,000, as documented in the position paper by the Federal Working Group on Homelessness Assistance (BAG W 2026). The net contribution to the social security systems is positive. The narrative of a ‘pull effect’ of welfare state benefits is not supported by the available data.
Furthermore, the Federal Constitutional Court ruled in February 2020 (1 BvL 1/20) that the automatic exclusion of EU citizens from SGB II benefits is, in certain circumstances, incompatible with the fundamental right to a minimum standard of living worthy of human dignity, whereupon the legislature formally repealed the exclusion provisions as of January 1, 2021. Through the basic income reform and the tightening of sanctions in 2024/2026, these regulations were gradually reintroduced under different names, so that what is currently being presented as a fight against abuse amounts to the active withdrawal of legal rights that the court had deemed constitutionally mandated.
Ines Scharrenbach (North Rhine-Westphalia Minister for Home Affairs, Municipal Affairs, Construction, and Digitalization) and Federal Minister of Labor Bas are pushing for further restrictions on access to social benefits for EU citizens. Access requirements formulated in universally applicable terms – such as the obligation to provide proof of employment history – disproportionately affect precisely those groups working in informal, low-wage jobs, who are structurally less likely to be able to provide such documentation.
This policy shift is taking place against a fiscal backdrop obscured by the term ‘Zeitenwende’ (turning point). In March 2025, the Bundestag passed a constitutional amendment that permanently exempts defense spending from the debt brake and establishes a special fund of 500 billion euros, while no comparable exemption was granted for social and cultural budgets.
In this context, the narrative of social benefit abuse by EU citizens serves to legitimize exclusion as an austerity measure and obscures the fact that the fiscal leeway for social security has been politically redirected. What would have been classified as openly racist ten years ago is today labeled ‘understandable,’ as Sydow/Kroppenberg (2026) document through discourse analysis of Bundestag debates and high-reach media.
The gap between policy and practice
The affected families who come to counseling after being evicted by the task force are predominantly employed in the construction, cleaning, logistics, or hospitality industries. For them, Duisburg is not a place of passage but the center of their work and lives, with children attending school and social networks rooted in this community. A large majority of the evicted families remain in Duisburg, simply because their livelihoods are here. However, the logic of eviction creates and perpetuates precisely those conditions – namely, precariousness, informality, and lack of accessibility to government agencies – that it purports to combat.
This experience has historical roots. Nineteenth-century municipal poor relief tied eligibility for support to proven residence and economic activity in a given location – a formally neutral regulation that, in practice, became an instrument of exclusion because Sinti and Roma were stigmatized as homeless, and municipalities sought to prevent their settlement from the outset. Today’s requirement of a verifiable employment history as a prerequisite for accessing social benefits follows the same institutional logic of a formally neutral requirement that structurally affects those whose employment is least well documented.
For Rom*nja, state institutions can be experienced as a threat – an experience rooted in a history of persecution and extermination and reaffirmed by every eviction. At the same time, narratives of abuse shape the actions of case workers in job centers and social welfare offices, as documented in the position paper by the BAG Wohnungslosenhilfe (2026) using the example of Duisburg, where job center staff accused Romani applicants across the board of organized benefit fraud before their applications had even been reviewed.
Self-organizing and asserting legal equality as a political practice
Romanian Romani women in Hochfeld are organizing themselves and developing their own counter-narratives to this institutional framework. The Romani Forum Duisburg e.V. was founded in late 2025 as the first women’s association of Romanian Romani people in Duisburg and, under the motto ‘Vocile femeilor rome,’ is demanding public visibility in a discourse that speaks about the community without letting its members have a say, while protests following the evictions on Gravelottestraße addressed the city as the responsible actor and maintained this capacity for action even under acute pressure.
Institutional pressure is designed to pit groups against one another, as EU citizens, people living in poverty, and people with asylum status in Hochfeld compete for the same scarce housing stock under different legal conditions, rather than acknowledging their shared experience of exclusion. Where cross-community solidarity emerges, it demonstrates that this division can be politically transformed.
In December 2024, the Association for a Society of Solidarity Among the Many submitted a petition to the Petitions Committee of the North Rhine-Westphalia State Parliament, which decided in June 2025 not to recommend any measures to the state government, basing its decision largely on the City of Duisburg’s account of the situation. Freedom of Information Act (IFG) requests submitted by the association to the city revealed a contradiction: While the committee assumed that the city was continuously evaluating its measures, the city stated in its July 2026 response that evaluation reports, effectiveness analyses, and internal metrics for measuring the task force’s success were not available. The lawsuit challenging the prohibition on use in the case of Fröbelstraße 33, filed in April 2026, is the first judicial review of a task force measure; the plaintiffs are the affected residents of the building.
A blueprint for other cities?
For ten years, the Problem Properties Task Force has been causing homelessness, disrupting educational trajectories, and depriving people of their entitlement to social benefits, all while describing these actions as a regulatory necessity in response to conditions that it itself creates. What makes this system so effective is not its centralization, but its fragmentation. Every institution acts in accordance with the rules, and none is held accountable for the outcome. The costs of this practice are borne by those affected and by civil society support structures.
The position paper on the legal regulation of housing management in North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) states that the use of housing oversight to indirectly control migration or to displace residents along social and ethnic lines is impermissible, and that evictions carried out without affording those affected a right to a hearing and without providing alternatives violate the Basic Law. Against this backdrop, the Association for a Society of Solidarity Among the Many (SGDV) calls for the consistent application of existing sanctions against landlords who fail to meet minimum standards – including expropriation as a last resort – housing oversight that serves to protect residents and is accompanied by a municipal obligation to provide housing, as well as, in the long term, the socialization of housing stock as a structural response to market failure managed through regulatory policy.
Meanwhile, the Duisburg model has become a blueprint for other cities and federal legislation, reflecting a political will to limit access to the welfare state along ethnic lines and to deploy the regulatory apparatus to that end.
Note from the editors: Read more about these issues in the BG text, “Ten Years of the Same Script: Anti-Romani Eviction Policies in Duisburg,” also by Lena Wiese.