Short-Stay Sedentarism: The Local Battle over Migrant Workers’ Housing in The Netherlands

Abstract

This article investigates the housing precarity of EU migrant workers in the Dutch–German border region, focusing on the Venlo Greenport area. Drawing on documentary analysis, 28 interviews, field observations, and stakeholder engagement, it explores how local governance, market dynamics, and framing practices shape housing outcomes. While EU law guarantees free movement, housing remains excluded from the EU rights frameworks, leaving workers dependent on employer-linked or agency-controlled short-stay facilities. These arrangements—often overcrowded, surveilled, and formally temporary—become long-term solutions, producing what we term short-stay sedentarism: prolonged residence in housing designed to deny permanence. The study conceptualises the local “battleground” where municipalities, employers, housing providers, NGOs, and residents negotiate competing interests. Seven interpretive frames—nuisance/disorder, cowboys, human rights, NIMBY, shadow power, integration, and unwanted accumulation—structure these debates, legitimising certain strategies while obscuring structural deficiencies. Findings reveal that certification and enforcement, while intended to improve standards, often entrench precariousness by sustaining the short-stay model. Emerging integration-oriented policies signal a shift but remain fragile amid economic imperatives and spatial constraints. The paper argues that addressing housing precarity requires structural reforms: expanding access to regular housing, reducing employer dependency, and recognising migrant workers as long-term residents rather than temporary labour inputs.

1. Introduction

For past decades, the dire working and living conditions of migrant workers in the global north have raised concerns. Housing is a recognised social determinant of health and lack of housing stability can lead to social inequity (Forst et al. 2025). This paper contributes to the growing body of literature on the precariousness of migrant labour in the workplace and beyond. Precariousness captures a condition marked by instability, insecurity, social and economic vulnerability, and a lack of protection (Schweitzer 2024; Ridgers and Rodgers 1989, p. 5). While precarity has long been associated primarily with labour market positions or migration status, scholars increasingly highlight housing arrangements as a central—yet understudied—dimension of migrant precarity (Forst et al. 2025; Hung et al. 2024). Recent empirical work documents poor and unsafe living conditions (Finn and Mayock 2022), limited access to homeownership (Christophers and O’Sullivan 2019), and the ways in which housing trajectories are shaped by migrant status (Usman et al. 2021). Yet, despite this expanding interest, housing remains comparatively marginal in studies of precarity, while precarity itself remains relatively undertheorised within housing scholarship (Lombard 2021). As (Lombard 2021, p. 321) notes, “theoretically, a precarity lens has much to offer the field of housing studies, where it remains relatively incipient”.

Within housing studies, traditional theories have centered on spatial assimilation models, which assume that migrants will gradually move upward in the housing market—typically toward homeownership—as their socio-economic status improves (Manting et al. 2022). Only recently have scholars begun to highlight the nonlinear housing trajectories of migrant workers, which may involve extended or repeated periods of sharing rooms or homes with non-related others (Lombard 2021). Such nonlinear experiences remain underexamined (Loomans 2023), and the role of alternative tenures, including shared or informal housing, is still poorly understood (Loomans 2023).

A growing body of research shows that shared housing has become a crucial coping mechanism for migrants facing rising housing costs, a lack of suitable rental options, and unstable employment (Lombard 2021). Manting et al. (2022) demonstrate that, for many migrants, shared accommodation functions as a long-term housing solution rather than merely as a temporary landing point—a consequence of their structurally precarious labour conditions. Although shared housing is often framed as an “in-between phase”, it is frequently associated with overcrowding, insecurity, and unhealthy living environments. In the aforementioned literature, it is also presented as a coping mechanism, a choice made by migrants. However, as we will demonstrate, this is not necessarily the case in the Netherlands, where migrants have little choice but to accept the housing strategies of temporary agencies.

Consistent findings from research across the world identify overcrowding, inadequate facilities, employer-tied accommodation, informal or makeshift housing, and other arrangements that are structurally unsafe or unhealthy, e.g., (Caxaj et al. 2023; Finn and Mayock 2022; Weiler and Caxaj 2024). These studies provide valuable insights into the lived experiences of migrant workers, revealing forms of accommodation characterised by insecurity, limited autonomy, and lack of privacy. Related research links these outcomes to broader processes of labour market flexibilisation, welfare retrenchment, and the restricted legal status of certain migrant groups, illustrating how precarious work and precarious housing are mutually reinforced (Chávez et al. 2024; Weiler and Caxaj 2024).

In many accounts, poor housing is presented as an almost inevitable consequence of low-wage labour markets, restrictive migration regimes, and broader structural inequalities. However, the ways in which specific configurations of policies, economic interests, and governance arrangements generate and reproduce precarity in particular places remains underexplored. Schweitzer (2024, p. 21) explains precarity not merely as a state or outcome but as a dynamic process shaped by institutional decisions, power relations between different types of employers and unions, as well as competing interpretations of responsibility and legitimacy. However, this insight has only recently begun to be applied to the context of migrant worker housing.

To address this gap, we adopt an analytical lens that centers on the local battleground: the specific arena in which municipal authorities, employers, employment agencies, housing providers, NGOs, local citizens, and migrant workers negotiate, contest, or enforce the terms of housing provision. The central question guiding this paper is how local actors’ frames and strategies interact to produce and sustain migrant workers’ housing precarity in the Venlo Greenport region. Understanding migrant workers’ housing precarity requires close attention to local contexts, because the production of inadequate housing is not merely an outcome of national labour or migration policies, but of specific constellations of local political, economic, and institutional dynamics.

Municipalities often serve as the primary arenas in which conflicting interests collide; local governments must balance regulatory enforcement, economic development, employer interests, and residents’ concerns, often within the constraints of national policy frameworks. Employers, temp agencies, housing intermediaries, local NGOs, and migrant workers themselves interact in ways that shape daily realities on the ground.

Localities are therefore active battlegrounds where rules are interpreted, negotiated, stretched, or strategically ignored. Studying these battlegrounds allows us to understand why similar national policies produce very different outcomes across regions, and how local actors either reinforce or challenge systemic forms of precarity. Moreover, local-level tensions often reveal the underlying political choices and trade-offs that shape access to housing—choices that are typically obscured in national-level analysis. For this reason, a local case study offers critical insights into the structural conditions that generate and sustain housing precarity for migrant workers.

Within these battlegrounds, actors mobilise distinct frames. A frame is understood here as a way of organising and interpreting reality that highlights certain aspects of an issue while downplaying or omitting others, thereby shaping how problems, actors, and possible solutions are perceived. Frames operate as interpretive schemata (Goffman 1974): they provide meaning, orient action, and guide decision-making by specifying what is at stake, who is responsible, and what kinds of responses are desirable. In other words, a frame is an interpretive lens through which social actors make sense of complex issues thereby shaping both public understanding and institutional responses.

At the same time, actors pursue strategies. Strategies are understood as those specific choices and actions taken by actors among different possible alternatives (sometimes related to specific trade-offs) affected by the legal, economic, and social context. Strategies are about who does what. After all, employers, migrant workers, state actors, and non-state actors are not necessarily groups that pursue consolidated action. Bringing together frames and strategies within an analysis of the local battleground provides a dynamic and relational understanding of how precarious housing for migrant workers is produced. Rather than treating poor conditions as an inevitable by-product of low-wage migrant labour, this perspective highlights how they are actively shaped, negotiated, and contested by the actors involved.

This paper examines these processes through an in-depth case study of the Venlo Greenport region in the Netherlands, in the southern Dutch–German border region. Large numbers of mobile EU citizens work in agriculture, food-processing, and related industries, such as distribution. They are primarily recruited through temporary employment agencies and frequently housed in employer-linked or intermediary-controlled accommodations. The region is experiencing severe housing issues, including overcrowded shared housing, large-scale temporary housing parks, and shortages of properties in the private rental sector hence the majority of housing facilities are employer-tied. These conditions unfold within a governance environment characterised by decentralizsed regulatory responsibilities, strong economic dependence on flexible labour, and persistent ambiguity over the responsibilities of public and private actors for migrant workers’ living conditions (De Lange et al. 2023).

By analysing this local battleground, the paper demonstrates how frames and strategies deployed by state actors, employers, intermediaries, NGOs, and concerned citizens shape the production of precarious housing. This perspective moves beyond structural explanations to illuminate the political and institutional choices that perpetuate housing precarity. At the same time, it contributes to broader debates on the governance of migrant labour and the localised processes through which precarity is enacted and reproduced.

2. Materials and Methods

2.1. The Agrifood-Sector in The Netherlands

The Netherlands provides a particularly relevant case study for examining the living conditions of migrant workers. Since the EU enlargements of 2004 and 2007, the country has experienced significant labour migration from Central and Eastern Europe (Engbersen 2018). This migration is closely tied to the flexibilisation of the Dutch labour market and the dominant role of temporary employment agencies in recruitment, placement, and housing provision (Been and de Beer 2022). At the same time, extensive liberalisation of the housing sector has produced persistent affordability and accessibility problems (van Gent and Hochstenbach 2020). Within this context, migrant precarity has effectively been institutionalised. Siegmann et al. (2022) argue that insecurity has become structurally embedded in the highly flexibilised labour regime. The invisibility of migrant workers—and the ability to externalise responsibility for their social reproduction—has become integral to the functioning and public image of Dutch agriculture.

The Dutch agrifood sector is characterised by four widely noted structural features. First, despite its small territory, the country is one of the world’s largest and most productive agricultural exporters. Second, it operates within a dense agro-logistical chain encompassing horticulture, industrial processing, packaging, and (inter)national distribution. Third, the sector is shaped by strong buyer power: a handful of large supermarket chains exercise significant influence over pricing, working conditions, and labour practices. Fourth, low-skilled positions are predominantly filled by EU migrant workers, mostly citizens from Central and Eastern European countries, who are frequently employed via temporary staffing agencies and other non-standard employment arrangements (Timmerman 2025; Siegmann et al. 2022).

2.2. Local Case Study: Venlo Greenport Area

This empirical study focuses on the Venlo Greenport area in the northern part of the Dutch province of Limburg (Noord–Limburg). The region is home to one of largest concentrations of agrifood businesses in the Netherlands and is a major logistics–horticulture hub. Several features make this area particularly suitable for analysing the local “battleground” surrounding migrant housing.

First, Limburg has one of the highest and fastest-growing shares of migrant workers in the Netherlands: their number increased from 39,860 in 2017 to 82,895 in 2022, and projections suggest it could reach 112,000 by 2030 (Gedeputeerde Staten van Limburg 2024). These growth rates significantly exceed national averages (van Gent et al. 2024). A substantial proportion of these workers live and work in and around Venlo Greenport. Second, Greenport Venlo is the country’s second-largest horticultural area, covering 54 km². Third, Noord–Limburg is located on the German border and near Belgium, making cross-border mobility and housing practices an integral part of local labour dynamics. Fourth, unlike the more extensively studied Westland region, Noord–Limburg has received limited scholarly attention despite its structural dependence on migrant labour. Like the rest of the country, the area faces long-standing housing shortages and restrictive, mostly municipal, planning regulations are in force.

In the Netherlands, including the Greenport Venlo area, 95% of migrant agricultural workers are EU mobile workers from Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria (Heyma et al. 2020). In 2019, one third of directly employed agricultural workers and an estimated 90% of temporary agency workers in the sector were EU migrants (Heyma et al. 2020). Despite the prevalence of “temporary” contracts, many positions are year-round and structurally necessary. EU citizens have a right to work in the Netherlands under the intra-EU free movement of workers regime, as set out in EU Directive 2004/38/EC (Citizens Directive). According to this Directive, EU citizens should enjoy equal treatment with nationals of the host state in areas covered by the EU Treaty and secondary law. Housing is not mentioned as one of these rights. This omission aligns with the notion of housing as a “wobbly pillar” of the welfare state, e.g., (Malpass 2008). EU mobile workers, like migrants (worldwide) are granted access to a (limited) bundle of welfare rights, housing not always included. In our case, the temporary and highly commercial accommodation can hardly be called housing, let alone a pillar of welfare state arrangements. As many of the workers perform seasonal work, it is presumed that they reside temporarily or semi-permanently in the region, though an unknown number also live across the German border. While many migrant workers leave within six years, approximately half stay longer (Heyma et al. 2020), highlighting the discrepancy between policy framings of temporariness and actual settlement patterns. Furthermore, the exact number of individuals and their duration of stay is unknown due to inadequate registration (Böcker and De Lange 2023). Although there is political debate over the restriction of EU workers’ arrival, this is legally speaking not an option. However, restricting employers’ dependency on their labour could be “managed” better through, e.g., better enforcement of workers’ rights, stimulating automation, offshoring, or even closing production facilities such as greenhouses (Interdepartementaal Beleidsoverleg (IBO) Arbeidsmigratie 2025).

2.3. Local Governance Actors

Housing governance in Noord–Limburg involves a dense network of state and non-state actors. Institutional actors include the Province of Limburg, Regional “Care and Security-House” North–Limburg (Zorg-en Veiligheidshuis Noord-Limburg) which coordinates complex cases concerning labour migrants, municipal aldermen responsible for social and spatial affairs, municipal coordinators of labour migration (e.g., inter-municipal cooperation platforms), and national and local inspectors (labour and spatial planning). Civil society is present but unevenly organised. National NGOs operate in the region, and Horst aan de Maas hosts an active volunteer group, some of whom are former migrant workers, who provide community support. Labour unions have a history of performing housing visits to offer information and representation services (Berntsen and Lillie 2014), but they were less visible on the ground often only assisting “clients” (Palumbo et al. 2022).

Another group of actors constitutes the “migration industry”: temporary work agencies, recruiters, housing companies, auditors, and consultancies that assist employers with administrative procedures. Although regulatory reforms since COVID-19 formally separated the roles of employer, staffing agency, and housing provider, economic and organisational links remain. Local residents (“neighbours”) also play a role, particularly by objecting to the typical temporary housing facilities for migrant workers through legal procedures, thereby influencing municipal decision-making and the framing of migrant housing as a planning and public-order issue, as well as a human rights issue.

2.4. Data Collection and Analysis

The data collection was performed within the context of a larger HorizonEurope research project DignityFIRM and draws on multiple qualitative data sources. This included documentary analysis, semi-structured interviews, field observations, a stakeholder focus group, and a review of complaint data. The study began with an extensive examination of academic and grey literature, policy documents, relevant case law, and investigative journalism, with a particular focus on housing governance and labour practices in the agrifood sector in North–Limburg. This exploratory phase provided a foundation for mapping key actors, identifying regulatory tensions, and contextualising the local dynamics surrounding migrant labour and housing.

The qualitative core of the study consists of 4 exploratory interviews followed by 24 in-depth interviews with 31 local actors conducted between March 2024 and March 2025. Interviews conducted industry representatives included farmers (n = 2), food processors (n = 1), temporary staffing agencies (n = 3), housing companies (n = 1), auditors (n = 1), and farmer’s cooperatives (n = 1). Government actors included municipal and national civil servants (n = 5), and labour and spatial-planning inspectors or prosecutors (n = 2). Interviews conducted with respondents representing civil society included local residents who had actively engaged in debates about migrant housing (n = 2), NGOs (n = 1), union or worker’s cooperations (n= 2), legal aid providers (n = 1), business associations (n = 1), and advisors (n = 2).

Interviews were held online or in person, recorded with consent, transcribed using noScribe, and manually corrected. The interviews were crucial for reconstructing how different actors conceptualise housing problems, negotiate responsibilities, and frame their own and others’ roles within the local governance landscape.

Field observations provided an additional empirical layer. The two authors carried out a 10-day stay in Horst aan de Maas, residing in the “Californie” migrant housing park operated by Kafra, which accommodates approximately 800 workers. This stay allowed for informal conversations with residents and first-hand observation of everyday practices in and around the housing facilities. During this period, the researchers also participated in a local NGO meeting attended by former migrant workers, volunteered for half a day harvesting pears alongside Polish workers and local youth, accompanied street-corner outreach workers in Venlo, and visited additional sites such as regenerative farms to better understand the agricultural labour context. During our ten-day fieldwork period, we produced extensive fieldnotes on everyday practices, interactions, informal conversations, and observations within the lodging park and the surrounding places we visited. These fieldnotes were written daily, structured into descriptive and analytical components, and treated as primary data.

Further insights were generated through participation in a stakeholder focus group in Horst aan de Maas. The field lab gathered approximately 30 participants, including Dutch and German researchers and representatives of municipalities in the region. It included visits to migrant worker dormitories and a policy update by a representative of the Association of Municipalities. These interactions illuminated policy debates, inter-municipal coordination, and the tensions between regulatory ambitions and local implementation. Extensive notes were taken during and after the fieldlab which were also treated as primary data.

In addition, 26 complaint summaries from a legal aid agency were analysed. They included information on migrant workers from Hungaria (n = 8), Romania (n = 7), Poland (n = 10), and Chile (n = 1) who had sought legal aid for housing- or work-related issues. All the empirical materials described, including interview transcripts, field notes, policy documents, the focus group and complaint summaries, were analysed thematically using an iterative inductive–deductive coding approach. The analysis specifically focused on identifying frames and strategies articulated by different actors in relation to migrant workers’ housing in the Venlo Greenport region. For the purpose of this study, a frame was understood as an interpretive construction through which actors make sense of the local housing situation. In the coding process, a statement was considered to express a frame when it contained at least one of the following elements: (1) a characterisation or definition of the “problem” or situation, (2) an attribution of responsibility for the problem (e.g., which actors or structural conditions are seen as causing or sustaining it).

In addition to frames, the analysis identified strategies, understood as the concrete actions or courses of action pursued by actors in response to their interpretation of the problem. Strategies include, for example, regulatory enforcement practices, policy measures, and housing development initiatives. A statement was coded as a strategy when it contained an indication of what types of responses would be appropriate to better the situation or help solve the problem. This operationalisation was informed by framing scholarship and by Bacchi’s “What’s the Problem Represented to Be?” approach, which highlights how problem representations allocate responsibility and shape policy responses (Bacchi 2025). Analytically linking frames to strategies allowed us to examine how actors’ understandings of the problem shape the types of responses they pursue within the local governance arena.

Coding proceeded iteratively. In an initial phase, the researchers conducted close readings of the empirical material to identify passages in which actors articulated interpretations of the local situation. Through successive rounds of comparison across actors and data sources, recurring interpretive patterns were grouped into broader categories, resulting in the identification of seven dominant frames. While this stage was primarily inductive, it was informed by sensitising concepts from the literature on the framing of migrant labour and housing governance. Once these frames had been identified and analytically stabilised, the coding process moved to a more deductive phase, in which the seven frames were systematically applied to the corpus. This allowed the researchers to verify the presence, variation, and distribution of frames across actors and data sources, and to ensure consistent interpretation of the empirical material.

3. Results

This section presents the empirical findings of our study. Section 3.1 describes the housing conditions of migrant workers in the Greenport Venlo area, demonstrating how regulatory and market dynamics jointly produce structural precarity. Section 3.2 examines the interpretive frames and strategies employed by local actors demonstrating how these discursive and political practices either reinforce, justify, or contest precarious housing arrangements.

3.1. Migrant Precarity in Housing

The precarious nature of migrant housing in the area has become sharply visible in recent years, often through tragic incidents. In 2023, a migrant worker who had lost his job was immediately evicted from his employer-linked accommodation—a shared room in a so-called “Polish Hotel”. Unable to secure alternative shelter, he slept in nearby cornfields, where he was fatally struck by a harvesting machine the following morning. During our final day of fieldwork in Horst in August 2024, a migrant worker was found drowned in a water basin at his employer’s premises and remained unnoticed for days. The fact that no one reported him missing illustrates a defining characteristic of the local agri-food sector: migrant workers are structurally “unseen”, dispersed across housing facilities that produce invisibility rather than community oversight.

Municipalities have reacted to such incidents by increasing attention to migrant housing precarity. They now negotiate minimum numbers of emergency beds in short-stay facilities and remind employers of their duty—formalised in Article 49 of the Collective Labour Agreement for temporary employment agencies—to allow dismissed workers to remain in their room for another four weeks, for which they must pay rent. Yet workers without income often leave earlier, and many who cannot secure new housing end up on the street, in tents in the woods, or in informal shelter arrangements. These empirical observations signal structural vulnerabilities rather than isolated misfortunes.

Our research identified three distinct types of housing available to migrant workers in the Venlo Greenport area, each governed by different regulatory norms and embedded within specific institutional arrangements shaping short-stay accommodations. The first consists of employer-arranged “short-stay” facilities. These can be further subdivided into three types: housing on farm premises, large scale lodging parks, and company-rented family houses. The first are located on farm premises and remain a common form of accommodation for mostly seasonal agricultural workers. These facilities must comply with the Agriculture Quality Norms (AKF), a set of standards tailored to on-site farm lodging. Typically, such units consist of rooms shared by two workers and communal bathing and kitchen facilities. The larger short-stay lodging parks consist of rooms in holiday homes, former hotels, or purpose-built temporary lodging parks. These structures—often refurbished or constructed for a lifespan of 10 to 25 years under exceptional municipal planning regulations—must meet the Standards for Flexible Housing (SNF) or the stricter SNF+ norms. Many of these lodging parks operate on a large scale, housing hundreds of workers and offering on-site services such as shops selling products from workers’ home countries, launderettes, and sports facilities. Since these are short-stay facilities, migrant workers are forced to relocate regularly, irrespective of the duration of their work contracts. A third subtype of employer-arranged housing involves company-rented family houses, typically accommodating four individuals or two couples. These dwellings are leased by employers or employment agencies and assigned to workers as part of their employment arrangement.

The second category consists of independent housing. Some workers obtain independent rental housing, securing a family house on the private rental market without employer mediation. Although this option offers greater autonomy, it is often inaccessible to workers facing income insecurity or lacking formal rental histories. Furthermore, a smaller proportion of workers are able to transition into home ownership, though this remains rare given the financial barriers and labour market precariousness faced by many mobile EU workers.

The third category consists of homeless shelters and constitutes a last-resort form of accommodation. These facilities, available primarily in larger cities (such as Venlo), are open to workers who lose both their jobs and thus their employer-linked housing. However, not all EU mobile workers are eligible for overnight shelter, and municipal programs have increasingly resorted to securing temporary emergency beds with farmers or housing providers to address acute cases of homelessness. Crucially, to avoid homelessness, regional actors such as the Venlo-based Care and Security Home North–Limburg assist homeless migrant workers in finding a new job and a place to stay, or pay for a bus ticket home. This type of support is also offered by NGO Barka, operating across the country to help homeless EU citizens.

Across these arrangements, a consistent pattern emerges: almost all EU mobile workers begin in large scale “short-stay” housing facilities, and many remain in such facilities for years, despite its formal designation as “temporary” accommodation. To secure the availability of housing stock for Dutch citizens, municipalities with high numbers of migrant workers have come to commonly allow housing companies to build and offer “short-stay” accommodation (minimum 7 days, maximum 6 months) to migrant workers. As a result, migrant worker “parks” have mushroomed in the area. The regulation of short-stay can differ per municipality, and even within a municipality, per neighbourhood, per migrant group as well (e.g., for Ukrainian displaced persons separate rules apply), the rules may differ depending, e.g., on planning zones.

As migrant workers must move out of the accommodation every 6 months, only to move to another short-term facility, critical respondents argued that there is now actually a situation where migrant workers stay in different short-stay locations long-term. This is problematic because, according to Dutch standards, these places do not provide an acceptable standard of living for long-term stay. The “park” where we stayed looked like a holiday park with 200 small cabins. Each cabin houses four people who each pay EUR 125 per week per bed (EUR2000 a month per cabin, making it profitable to construct the park). People sharing a cabin do not necessarily know each other, while every bedroom has two beds, meaning you can share a room with somebody you do not know. This has led to incidents of violence and even death (De Lange 2024). The “park” is camera-surveilled, and inhabitants are subjected to weekly unannounced cleaning inspections. We have been told this also happens when residents are not present, which is an infringement of their privacy. While there are proper washing machines, recreational areas, a gym and a small supermarket, the lack of privacy and the short-stay character of the facilities is evident. It seems that the bulk of migrant workers in Venlo–Greenport area live in such short-stay facilities for a mid- or long-term period.

Short-stay facilities cannot be rented independently. They are rented out to temp agencies or are owned by temp agencies or farmers who invest in the building of the facility and subsequently house their own temp workers. Because the temp agencies have market power, it is difficult for companies to hire migrant workers directly if the workers do not also have access to independent housing. Furthermore, given the housing shortage in the Netherlands, it is difficult to find independent housing. Thus, steady, sedentary workers remain in short-stay housing, often having to move every six months, as living in the same place for more than six months is not permitted by municipal rules on short-stay housing.

In the Greenport Venlo case, standardisation and certification (SNF/SNF+) entrench precariousness because they define housing quality in narrowly technical terms and thereby legitimise the continued use of the short-stay model as a long-term solution. SNF/SNF+ norms predominantly specify physical and technical criteria, such as floor area, ventilation, hygiene, and fire safety, while leaving tenure security, rental protection, independence from employers, and protections against forced mobility entirely outside their regulatory scope. Municipalities consequently interpret compliance as evidence that short-stay housing is “adequately regulated,” which enables them to issue, renew, or expand permits for facilities formally designed for rotation but occupied for years. This reliance on certification also means that policy interventions are focused on regulating the quality of beds rather than the rights of residents, thereby normalising an infrastructure in which workers can legally be moved every six months without recourse. This practice has been challenged in court, which led to a settlement. However, rental protection for sedentary workers in short-stay facilities could have been the outcome (Schram 2025).

Historically, employers (including temp agencies) have provided housing for migrant workers in agriculture, as part of a so-called package deal (van Ostaijen et al. 2017). This was critiqued for the multi-dependency of the workers on their employers, for both work and housing, but also transportation and insurance. Rent would be deducted from their wage, which is still legally permitted at the time of writing, though much debated. Labour and housing rights reforms aim to reduce the possibilities for employers to control migrant housing (De Lange et al. 2023). To avoid multi-dependency, housing and temporary-agency work contracts formally need to remain separate yet in practice are still linked to the same agents. Thus, precarious job contracts create precarious housing situations; losing a job means losing a place to stay. Interestingly, employers are also constrained by the housing monopoly of temporary employment agencies. Employers who recruit internationally need their workers to have a house; they cannot hire them directly as this would mean circumventing the temporary employment agencies. The political slogan “no beds, no business” reflects this. Without municipal construction permits, progress in the development of housing for migrant workers and businesses is at a deadlock.

The national government enforces housing standards, while municipalities regulate employer-linked accommodation. However, some of our respondents argue that this division of responsibilities, coupled with the extremely tight housing market in the Netherlands, has created a lucrative market for temporary migrant housing. Municipalities, private individuals, and NGOs have identified certain entrepreneurs who have “invented” the profit model of housing EU mobile workers. These entrepreneurs have developed a business model making profit from migrant workers by providing short-stay beds in large housing facilities. Providing housing to these workers for free (once practice in the USA), (Martin 2017) is an anomaly in the Netherlands. However, a farmer who offered free housing was unjustly taxed (District Court ECLI:NL:RBGEL:2025:3138).

3.2. The Local Battle on Housing

The local battle of migrant housing in the Greenport Venlo area arises at the intersection of conflicting policy objectives, commercial interests, and the structural vulnerabilities of low-wage labour migration. Municipalities seek to balance economic growth with spatial planning constraints and also carry responsibility for social cohesion. Employers and temporary agencies pursue flexible labour and housing arrangements. NGOs and residents articulate concerns ranging from exploitation to neighbourhood quality of life. These competing interests converge around the governance of housing, producing an arena in which actors deploy distinctive interpretive frames that shape policy strategies and, ultimately, contribute to the production of housing precarity.

Several interpretive frames structure the local battle over migrant worker housing. The first is the nuisance–disorder frame, which centers on perceived disturbances and fears among local (non-migrant) residents and politicians. Within this frame, migrant workers are constructed as potential sources of nuisance, intimidation, or public disorder, even when these perceptions are not based on specific incidents. One civil servant explained how this unease often arises from everyday encounters rather than objective safety risks:

“When [migrant workers] have been working hard all day, they go shopping together as a group. On their way back, they walk along the bicycle path, because there’s no sidewalk, and suddenly you have ten people walking together. If you’re a 15-year-old girl cycling by, that can feel intimidating.”

(Intdignity_23_Mix)

This frame also appears among employers, who sometimes attribute homelessness or conflict to workers’ individual behaviour rather than to the structural conditions that shape their precarity:

“If someone is constantly bothering other people, using drugs, and so on, we’re not going to continue to put up with them for four weeks. We’ll tell them, “You can find your own housing, and it has to be arranged within a week.”

(Intdignity_14_Mix)

Such narratives deflect attention away from systemic drivers of precariousness—such as the tied housing arrangements, unstable employment contracts, or limited tenant protection (similarly, on conditional rental contracts, Boesveldt and Loomans 2024)—and instead individualise responsibility for problems rooted in institutional design (similarly, (Gottlieb et al. 2025) on health care and (Mantu et al. 2025) on living and working conditions). At the same time, state actors often downplay or challenge the nuisance–disorder frame. In policy documents, they argue that public discomfort is frequently based on misinformation, moral panic, or the influence of anti-immigration discourse rather than on actual safety concerns:

“Almost everyone agrees that we should treat the people who contribute to our economy with dignity. But when housing is located right around the corner, it often evokes a sense of discomfort. This is partly because media coverage tends to focus on negative stories. Rarely do we hear about the vast majority of the more than half a million labour migrants in the Netherlands, or the 6000 in Venray, who work hard and lead ordinary lives.”

(Municipality Venray 2024)

In this counter-framing, nuisance is reframed as a problem of public perception and media coverage rather than migrant behaviour, and local debates about housing are interpreted as symptoms of broader societal anxieties rather than grounded concerns.

A second frame centers on the figure of the “cowboy” landlord. Many municipal officials and employers insist that most housing providers operate responsibly, comply with the SNF+ norms, and that precarious conditions result from a small minority of exploitative actors. They view certified players who adhere to the rules as good landlords and argue that precarious housing situations are the result of a minority they label as “cowboys”. These cowboys should be the target of policies and inspections. The certified housing agencies are not the problem:

“It’s also noticeable that much of the housing emerges informally within neighborhoods, while larger housing facilities tend to face strong opposition. Yet it is often these larger, well-managed locations with proper amenities that cause little to no nuisance, and across the country, there are many good examples of this.”

(Municipality Venray 2024)

In other words, the municipality considers regulation and certification to be a viable solution to the housing issues of migrant workers. State actors see exploitative practices as a problem of what (Timmerman 2025) calls “a few bad apples”:

“Unfortunately, we also know that a small number of residents and businesses do not comply with the rules. This comes at the expense of others: the worker who is kept in a dependent position, the neighbors who experience nuisance, and the competitors who do follow the rules. That is why we are working toward a level playing field for businesses, with monitoring and enforcement where necessary, while maintaining our focus on adequate, quality housing and constructive cooperation.”

(Municipality Venray 2024)

In other words, there is nothing inherently wrong with the way the sector is organised, but exploitative excesses need to be combated:

“…there are companies where things are not properly arranged, and we need to intervene there. We need to say that exploitation is unacceptable. (…) Make sure that the abuses in horticulture are cleaned up as much as possible by establishing systems that allow us to keep control. And make a real choice to put those who cause chaos on a blacklist.”

(Intdignity_23_Mix)

This “a few bad apples” or “cowboys” frame, makes state actors call for increased enforcement, regulation, certification, and control, including through criminal law instruments to combat the—in their view—few landlords that cross the line. Employers have, however, been skeptical; they know of businesses with certifications who yet provide low-quality housing. Thus, the few bad apples frame masks the structural deficiencies of the short-stay model itself, which, even when compliant, caters to the continuous cycling of workers between temporary sites. Municipalities are happy to collaborate with housing facilities that abide by the rules. The rules, however, allow for shared and short-stay facilities.

Third, a human rights frame is used by residents and by NGOs who protest new large-scale housing facilities for migrant workers. They emphasise that migrants have an equal right to proper housing instead of short-stay facilities. A local citizen with a strong voice in the local public debate says: “We live in houses, they live in the barn…” (Intdignity_44). This respondent showed outrage on social media on the ways of local politicians. For example, a municipal Eldermen reluctantly “approved of a housing facility under wind energy turbines, on an industrial estate, alongside the railway and rail terminal: ‘They are only short-stayers’”. Within this frame, the central problem is not nuisance or non-compliance but the systematic denial of proper housing to a specific population. This approach confronts municipalities with the moral implications of treating migrant workers as temporary “hands”, who need “beds”, urging recognition of their status as rights-bearing residents.

In contrast, the Not in My Backyard (NIMBY) frame focuses on protecting residents’ quality of life, most times independent of the rights or needs of migrant workers. The NIMBY frame—which can be seen as democracy in action effecting affordable housing development (Scally and Tighe 2015)—is engaged by locals at municipal hearings and in court. They protest against migrant workers living in large scale facilities near their homes, primarily from their own “quality of life” interest, but sometimes also because of the human rights entitlements of the migrants. Some locals use the argument of societal disbalance, especially when more migrant workers will be living in the area than locals. For example, in one case, the claimant argued that the municipality had not taken sufficient account of the living environment and the interests of local residents because accommodating 150 migrant workers was inappropriate for a small village of approximately 145 inhabitants. Being outnumbered without any integration activities makes them feel insecure. By extension, local residents do not want to see the migrants. Municipalities and courts cater to this demand through building and management requirements. For example, in planning and exploitation permits they require a “natural wall” to be erected around a housing facilities to keep migrant workers out of sight.

Fifth, the framing of shadow power is used to describe groups or organisations that influence political decision-making behind the scenes. Businesses operate in numerous social spaces mobilising a wide range of strategies to exert power (Aguiton et al. 2021), e.g., through campaign funding, common in the USA, but less so in the EU, e.g., (Lindén 2021). Some respondents, locals as well as (former) politicians, and employers outside the inner circle of local power-players, feel that local politicians are under the influence of a few successful local entrepreneurs who have made a considerable fortune in the “business” of labour migration, in recruitment as well as housing. Respondents’ distrust of such business actors was fed by the fact that one such local entrepreneur—who also mediated our research stay—was sponsoring the campaign of the ruling Liberal Party (VVD) for the 2023 national elections. Moreover, in 2025 the interim VVD Minister of Social Affairs single handedly—after supposedly only consulting temp agency representatives—reverted a long-negotiated decision to prevent temp agencies from 25% reductions from salaries for rental payments, which caused a stir. Although these powerful actors are mentioned in many of the interviews, we do not have evidence of actual shadow-power. Uncovering such was also not the aim of this study. The framing of shadow-power, however, can undermine the legitimacy of democratic institutions and municipal administrative planning decisions.

So far, we have discussed frames and connecting strategies that have long been and still are prevalent in the Venlo Greenport area. In recent years, two newer frames have emerged that signal shifts in local governance. The sixth frame, that is slowly gaining traction, is the integration frame that is seen in how municipalities increasingly recognise that many migrant workers are there to stay and that it is important to invest in their social integration, for example by learning the Dutch language. In line with this frame, all kinds of initiatives are being set up for this. This implies that local state actors are increasingly seeing migrant workers as people, as local citizens, and less as “hands” for which “beds” are needed. Some municipalities aim at long-term integration, thus engaging the inclusion frame by organising gatherings and stimulating talent development, the latter so far with little success.

Following this development, the newest plans of the Province of Limburg articulate a clear turn away from sedentary migrants living in short-stay housing. Short-stay should be for no more than four months a year. A worker who stays longer should live in a house fit for long-stay (Province Limburg 2024). A local community articulates something similar:

“Through the Participation Plan, we also encourage active involvement in society, with specific attention to integration, language acquisition, and talent development—so that labour migrants are not only doing temporary work but can also build a future with perspective.”

(Municipality Horst aan de Maas 2025)

Seventh, local policymakers have recently articulated the unwanted business accumulation frame. They state that for years, municipalities have facilitated businesses that created jobs, even though those were not jobs for the local workforce. However, there is a growing perception that the increase in migrant workers that accompany these roles has led to a build-up of migrant worker precarity in certain localities, placing too much pressure on the local social system and communities:

“(…) it’s getting out of hand. We no longer have room for [the housing of migrant workers] in our spatial planning. I’ve placed the emphasis differently. Of course, there’s still room for economic development, but with a lower priority”.

(Intdignity_23_Mix)

Municipalities such as Horst aan de Maas and Venray have recently revised their policies and regulations concerning their care for migrant workers in the region.

“In various areas of our municipality, a large number of labour migrants reside, both in small- and large-scale housing locations. We observe that in some neighborhoods and streets, liveability is under pressure because the number of permitted beds is not in balance with what the area can reasonably support. This results in undesirable concentration […]. New housing requests are already being assessed for such undesirable concentration. Factors considered include traffic movements, routes to town centers, the availability of recreational facilities, building density, and pressure on open spaces. Concentration is deemed undesirable when these factors are not in balance.”

(Municipality Horst aan de Maas 2025)

From this quote we learn that they aim to balance the interest of three groups. Considerations to serve the interests of the second group, the local residents, seem to have two reasons. First there is a need to secure the livability, thus new housing requests are being assessed for undesirable concentration. More municipalities implement microlevel quota to restrict housing of migrant workers from their town centres. For example, municipality Peel en Maas has a quota whereby the number of licensed beds for migrant workers may not exceed 10% of the number of inhabitants of Peel en Maas (2021, p. 4).

Second, the perceived pressure on the area through increased traffic, building density, and general pressure on open spaces is mentioned. This municipality is trying hard to strike a balance between economic growth and providing housing for workers and addressing their other needs. In this frame, we can see that the focus is no longer just on uncontrolled inflow of economic activity but also on improving the living conditions of the main groups that the municipality caters to. Yet, we see a deeply dehumanising discourse when they speak of the number of licensed beds instead of workers’ housing.

It is not the number of beds that causes trouble, but it is, presumably, the people that will sleep in them. Aside from dehumanising, the narrative implicitly emphasising the temporariness of those who sleep in the beds; it is a common way of discussing the topic of migrant workers—to speak of beds and hands, not of people. Nevertheless, the municipality frames its activities to improve living conditions for migrant workers.

Thus, the strategies and frames reveal a local governance landscape in which partial consensus coexists with deep and persistent tensions. All actors believe housing infrastructure for migrant workers should be there. There is also broad support for certification, regulation, and more robust enforcement aimed at curbing the “cowboys” of the sector. Beyond this common ground, however, understandings diverge. While employers and municipalities view large, regulated short-stay facilities as a practical necessity, many non-state actors argue that such arrangements institutionalise dependency and long-term precarity, especially when workers remain for years in accommodations designed for rotation. At the same time, NIMBY concerns among residents sit uneasily alongside humanitarian and integration frames that demand equal treatment, privacy, and the right to settle. Municipalities increasingly recognise the presence of long-term residents and experiment with integration initiatives yet continue to expand short-stay capacity and frame migrant workers primarily as temporary “beds” rather than future citizens. Hence, our analysis revealed tensions between temporariness and settlement, between compliance and substantive responsibility, and between visibility and invisibility.

4. Discussion

This study set out to describe local actors’ frames and strategies to understand how they shape the production of migrant housing precarity in the Greenport Venlo area. By analysing the interaction between regulatory frameworks, municipal planning practices, market incentives, and the interpretive lenses used by employers, housing providers, residents, NGOs, and local officials, we show that precarious housing for migrant workers is not an accidental by-product of low-skilled labour migration. Rather, it is a socially produced and institutionally reinforced outcome that emerges from the dynamic interplay of local governance, labour market structures, and framing of migrant workers’ presence.

Our findings contribute to the emerging literature that conceptualises precarity not merely as an individual condition but as a process that is institutionally and politically manufactured (Ridgers and Rodgers 1989; Siegmann et al. 2022). Housing studies have only recently begun to incorporate such a processual understanding, particularly in relation to migrants (Forst et al. 2025; Lombard 2021). Much existing research emphasises poor housing conditions, overcrowding, or informal arrangements (Caxaj et al. 2023; Finn and Mayock 2022; Weiler and Caxaj 2024), while treating these outcomes as the structural result of low wages, market shortages, or restrictive migration regimes. Our analysis contributes to this body of literature by providing a detailed examination of how local actors interpret, negotiate, and institutionalise responsibility for these conditions.

The concept of the local battleground, which we mobilise in this study, helps to explain why similar national frameworks can produce distinctly different outcomes in different municipalities. In Greenport Venlo, the co-existence of multiple and competing frames—nuisance/disorder, cowboys, human rights, NIMBY, shadow power, integration, and unwanted accumulation—organises the political terrain on which housing decisions are made. These frames do more than narrate the problem—they shape what solutions become legitimate, and which forms of precarity are rendered acceptable, inevitable, or invisible. For example, the widely deployed “cowboy” frame encourages an interpretation in which structural deficiencies in the short-stay model are obscured by the narrative that only a minority of exploitative landlords cause problems. This not only legitimises reliance on certification schemes but actively strengthens partnerships between municipalities and large housing providers, even when the “rules of the game” themselves normalise lack of privacy, surveillance, and permanent temporariness.

Our findings also complicate assumptions in the spatial assimilation and linear housing trajectory literature (Manting et al. 2022). Rather than progressing towards more stable and autonomous housing, many EU mobile workers become locked into cycles of short-stay accommodation. This is not solely a function of limited income or labour market precarity, but also of municipal rules that enforce six-month rotation, the structural shortage of private rental housing, and employer-linked housing markets that reduce migrant workers’ autonomy. Certification systems that classify these facilities as “temporary” help legitimise a setting in which workers may live for years without achieving any form of permanence. In this sense, the local governance regime produces a form of what we call short-stay sedentarism: long-term residence in a housing system explicitly designed to deny settlement.

We conceptualise short-stay sedentarism as a distinct mechanism of migrant housing precarity that arises when institutional arrangements simultaneously deny permanence while producing de facto long-term residence. Unlike adjacent concepts such as forced mobility, institutionalised temporariness, or employment-tied precarious housing, short-stay sedentarism captures a specific configuration of conditions. It emerges when (1) institutionalised cycling practices (e.g., six-month limits on short-stay sites) (2) combine with structural barriers to independent rental housing, including discriminatory rental practices and extreme shortages, and (3) market power asymmetries in which temp agencies control access to both work and housing. These components are jointly necessary for the mechanism of short-stay sedentarism to arise. Whereas components two and three have been extensively discussed in the literature, it is the combination with component one—the municipal housing policies—that makes the mechanism of short-stay sedentarism unique. As such, the concept of short-stay sedentarism draws attention to municipal housing policies designing such accommodation, aware the work to be performed is not necessarily of a temporary nature.

Short-stay sedentarism therefore specifies the institutionally constructed paradox whereby workers remain in a regime designed to prevent settlement, distinguishing long-term sedentary workers trapped in short-stay cycles from genuinely seasonal workers or those able to transition into autonomous housing. By design, municipal policies organise forced mobility, putting migrant workers’ well-being at risk (Ong ViforJ et al. 2023). Short-stay housing policies are part of an overarching institutionalised temporariness of EU citizens as temporary workers both at national and local levels, as defined by the Act on Decent Housing Wet goed verhuurderschap, (De Lange et al. 2023). This design results in municipalities having fragmented budgets and policies to assist various groups of migrants in their midst (Pisarevskaya and Hesselmans 2025). The concept of short-stay sedentarism is therefore a distinct mechanism that creates housing precariousness, as conceptualised by (Debrunner et al. 2024).

These findings hold several societal and policy implications. First, our results demonstrate that even well-intentioned regulatory measures, such as certification and improved enforcement, can inadvertently entrench precariousness by legitimising short-stay arrangements rather than expanding access to ordinary, long-term housing. Second, the local emphasis on managing “beds” rather than supporting the people who sleep in them reflects a broader political economy in which migrant workers’ social reproduction is systematically externalised. Where local policy has shifted towards integration-oriented frames, these changes remain partial and fragile, often overshadowed by discourses on nuisance or unwanted accumulation. Third, the rise of market-driven housing provision via agencies has created powerful vested interests. These actors, framed by some as legitimate partners and by others as “shadow powers”, influence the direction of local policy in ways that maintain the profitability of temporary housing models.

Nonetheless, promising developments are emerging. Municipalities have introduced street-corner workers and street doctors to assist homeless or near-homeless migrant workers to safeguard public order and neighbourhood livability. A multilingual Legal Aid Office in Venlo helps workers understand their rights and intervenes in cases of acute vulnerability. These efforts reflect an increased recognition of migrant workers as residents with social and legal needs rather than merely as “hands”. Yet, we find legal expertise on EU mobile workers’ rights remains fragmented among professionals, limiting the effectiveness of these interventions.

This research also has limitations. Most notably, we did not interview migrant workers themselves, thus their direct frames of interpretation are represented indirectly through intermediaries or our observations. This gap reflects an important methodological and ethical challenge: the most precarious workers are often the least accessible. Moreover, cross-regional comparisons within the Netherlands could help identify which governance configurations reduce or intensify housing precarity. Additionally, longitudinal work could illuminate how policy changes, such as Venlo’s shift towards longer-stay housing, reshape the local battlegrounds over time.

5. Conclusions

To conclude, the case of migrant worker housing in Greenport Venlo illustrates with sharp clarity the tensions, contradictions, and vulnerabilities at the heart of the local agro-industrial success. The region’s economic prosperity in agriculture and food processing is built upon the labour of thousands of predominantly EU mobile workers, who face ongoing precariousness in housing. Although municipalities have implemented planning regulations and certification regimes to improve housing quality, these same policies have created a booming market for short-stay facilities that treat workers as temporary, interchangeable, invisible, “hands” and “beds” rather than as residents or rights-bearing individuals. The widespread use of temporary housing parks, governed by strict surveillance and short-term leases, reflects a broader governance approach that seeks to manage, rather than integrate, the migrant workforce.

The region’s governance strategies—whether through municipal planning, certification regimes, and collaborations with NGOs are caught between competing imperatives: economic development, spatial constraints, human rights, and social cohesion. Meanwhile, there are local strategies clearly aimed at reducing precariousness in migrant housing. Municipalities are for example reverting from their short-stay housing plans, preparing for longer-stay housing for migrant workers. Moreover, on top of the national certification requirements, local state actors have added a few additional ones, such as that workers should have their own private room (except for couples). However, while some local actors are taking steps toward more inclusive approaches (such as integration policies, language programs, and participatory frameworks), these remain partial and often fragile.

Overall, the Greenport Venlo case underscores the need to rethink the institutional foundations of migrant worker housing. Policies that continue to conceptualise EU mobile workers as temporary, interchangeable labour will inevitably produce precarious living conditions, regardless of improved enforcement or certification. Addressing housing precarity requires confronting the underlying governance logic that privileges economic flexibility over social sustainability. This means expanding access to regular rental housing, reducing employer dependency, and recognising the long-term presence of migrant workers as a structural—not temporary—feature of regional labour markets. Without such structural changes, local governance will continue to oscillate between managing symptoms and reacting to crises, while the root causes of precarious housing remain intact.