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.
Lange et al. (Fri,) studied this question.