When Sunil first moved to Singapore, he had trouble finding an apartment.
“I called up several landlords who had listed rooms for rent,” Sunil, a Sri Lankan who spent eight years living in the UK, said.
“Things would start out OK, maybe because of my [Western] accent – but the moment they heard my name, they’d blank out. Many said ‘sorry, we don’t rent to these people’, or ‘sorry, no room for Indians’.”
Sunil, a civil engineer who arrived in 2012, said he was rejected by at least four landlords.
“I told them that Sri Lanka was not India, that I wouldn’t eat or cook in the apartment, and that I would be outside all day. But still, they wouldn’t offer me a room,” he said.
“At that point, I got fed up and decided to only try Indian landlords. I was invited to viewings right away.”
‘Cleanliness and culture’
Sunil is not alone. A quick glance at online rental listings shows many that include the words: “no Indians, no PRCs [People’s Republic of China]”, sometimes followed by the word “sorry”.
A count on 24 April found that there were more than 160 housing adverts on the website PropertyGuru that clearly stated that the landlord did not wish to rent to Indians and/or mainland Chinese.
The issue appears more common with less expensive properties and on sites where content is posted directly by users, such as Gumtree.
It is not clear how many foreign workers have been affected. However, several expatriates have described experiencing varying levels of discrimination.
One Indian expat said his agent told him that many landlords would refuse to rent to him because “Indians always cook smelly curries”. Another Briton of South Asian descent did not experience any direct discrimination, but was warned by his agent that some landlords could be difficult.
It was something I experienced too, albeit indirectly. When I searched for a flat, my housing agent received a phone call from one landlord who was worried that I was from mainland China, presumably after they learned about my Chinese ethnicity.
I listened to them discussing my background for what felt like an agonisingly long time. After she hung up, I asked her if it would reassure the landlord if they knew I was British.
“It doesn’t matter,” she said. “They may still think you’re a PRC who obtained a British passport.”
Mathew Mathews, a senior research fellow at the Institute of Policy Studies, says: “There are stereotypes that people have about different immigrant groups and how responsible they are in terms of the upkeep of a rented apartment.
“There are notions of which groups take care of their homes better, and what cooking supposedly leaves permanent smells in the house. People have notions about what would devalue the property.”
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