The telegraph
Denmark will limit the number of ‘non-Western’ residents in poor neighborhoods
Denmark’s center-left government plans to reduce the number of “non-Western” residents in housing areas across the country to 30% or less in ten years, at the latest in a succession of tough immigration proposals. The “mixed neighborhood” bill proposed by the Social Democrats gives municipalities the right to create “prevention areas” where they can refuse rent to anyone who is not from Denmark, the EU, the EEA or Switzerland. “For many years, we closed our eyes to the development that was underway and only acted when the integration problems became very big,” said Kaare Dybvad Bek, the country’s interior minister, in a statement explaining the change. Municipalities and organizations housing, he said, in the past they have failed to intervene in time, as large areas of public housing have entered a “negative spiral.” The project also gives municipalities the right to deny rent to unemployed or with a criminal record. the right to public housing in some areas, the bill aims to project “a large-scale and targeted change in the current composition of residents in many of the country’s public housing areas.” To do this, it will also give municipalities the power to force private landlords with 20 or more apartments to rent to “non-Western” immigrants so that they can move to predominantly Danish areas. erno also plans to stop using the term “ghetto”. dictated by the previous government to refer to housing areas with a large proportion of immigrants, which the bill describes as “stigmatizing”, replacing it with the terms “transformation area” and “parallel society”. “The term ghetto is misleading,” said Bek. “I don’t 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 meet at least two of a list of four criteria: that more than 40% are unemployed; that more than 60% of people aged 39-50 are not in high school; that crime rates are three times higher than the average; and that the residents have an average income 55% lower than that of the region. Currently, 15 Danish neighborhoods are classified as “ghetto areas” and 25 others are considered “at risk”. In ‘ghetto’ areas, some crimes carry double the legal penalty and parents are required to send their children to kindergarten from 1 year of age, among other measures. The ‘ghetto’ law has also led to controversial forced evictions from many of the areas, with some of the public housing areas demolished. Even the parties to the left of the Social Democrats widely supported the new policy, with Halime Oguz, a spokesman for the left-wing socialist party, telling the Altinget website that he hoped the break-up of “parallel societies” would free Danish immigrants from “control” Social”. It was an “excellent idea”, she said, to empower municipalities to place immigrants on private rentals and called for the construction of new areas of public housing “in the areas where many rich people live today”. On the right, Alex Ahrendtsen, a housing spokesman for the populist Danish People’s Party, complained about the decision to withdraw the sentence from the ghetto. “In the past, they have been experimented with ‘socially challenging housing areas’,” he said. “Now they are trying with ‘parallel society’ and ‘areas of transformation’. We, the Danish People’s Party, will continue to call them ‘ghetto areas’.”