After repeated attacks, Ahmad Zubair became convinced that he knew why his house in Middlesbrough was attracting so much vandalism

Ahmad Zubair had been living in Middlesbrough for more than a year, waiting for his asylum claim to be processed, when he first came up with his theory.

In every grubby terraced house he was placed by G4S, the outsourcing company contracted by the home office to provide shelter for asylum seekers, the 21-year-old Afghan experienced the same problems: stones thrown at the windows and abuse hurled in his face by youths in tracksuits who would pedal away on bicycles when challenged.

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His neighbours, asylum seekers from the most troubled corners of the globe, complained of having eggs thrown at their windows, phlegm gobbed through their letterboxes and dog excrement left on their thresholds. A few streets up, a woman from the Congo returned home with her six-year-old son one day to find the initials of the National Front carved into her front door.

Zubair, who has now been given refugee status in the UK and is studying at university, noticed that almost all of the houses used to house asylum seekers in Middlesbrough had one thing in common: all had the same maroon-red door.

“I started to think that the colour had a meaning, to mark that asylum seekers lived there,” he told the Guardian. “Maybe there’s some policy with immigration enforcement to make it easy for the police to spot where they live in case there’s trouble?”

Just before Christmas in 2014, Zubair became convinced the colour of his front door was inviting unwanted attention. He persuaded his reluctant housemates to pool together enough money from the £5 daily living allowance given to them by the Home Office to buy some little paintbrushes and some white paint. “I chose white because it is the colour of peace,” he said.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Red doors on rental properties of refugees in Middlesborough. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

It took him and his Iranian housemate four hours to do two coats. They soon noticed a difference, he said.

“When we painted the door I felt it changed after just a few days. There were no more disturbances from the kids. I thought that maybe they saw the white front door and assumed we had moved on and other people had moved in, non-asylum seekers, because the door wasn’t red any more.”

Two weeks later a Jomast employee came round when Zubair’s housemates complained about a leaking pipe, he claimed. “They couldn’t even find the house at first – probably because it didn’t have a red door,” he said. “They were cross when we said we’d painted it, and two days later they sent someone along to paint it back red.”

Regardless of what colour has been used and why, spend a few hours knocking on red doors in the dilapidated inner city terraces, some half demolished, and it becomes clear that many asylum seekers and refugees have suffered a lot of abuse while waiting to start their new lives in Britain.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Fasica who bedroom window still has egg yolk on it, after she had been targeted as a refugee because her door was red. Photograph: Gary Calton/The Observer

Fasica, 30, from Eritrea, lives in a shared house with a red door, paying £68 a week for her room. Her landlord is not Jomast but Open Door North-East, a Christian charity. There is still egg yolk on the pane of her first floor window, dating back to November. It was two teenage girls, she said, “perhaps aged 14 or 15”. After they’d thrown the eggs and she shouted at them, they jumped in a waiting car.

Fasica was often abused in the street, she said: “They’d call ‘fucking black’, ‘doggy’, tell me to ‘leave our country’. I got used to it, it was normal. Thing is, I know I’m black, they don’t have to tell me. I’m proud of who I am.”

She spent five years in London and never once was abused, she said.

On her way back from the shops, Linda Dennison, 55, a local resident, said “everyone” in Middlesbrough knew that houses with red doors were where asylum seekers lived. It was daft, she said: “Why don’t they just paint them white so they look like everyone else’s and they don’t get picked on so much?”

Asked why asylum seekers were disliked, she said it was envy as much as anything else. “They get jealous, they see these people come into the country and immediately get given a house, furnished. I’ve seen it myself: new cookers, fridges, furniture. It causes a rift. That’s why people throw eggs.”