When did the time come to organize a trip to the Netherlands for The duty, it seemed that renting an apartment on a short-term basis was the most appropriate solution. After a first contact, the owner of a beautiful accommodation in downtown The Hague advertised on a rental platform asked not to reveal the commercial agreement to the neighbors. The lady explained that it was recently prohibited to offer rental housing in the city where the government sits and that this deceptive ploy should therefore be used. Uh… No thanks, but thanks for the info! The stay finally happened at the hotel, and basta for the Airbnb thieves.
The community business platform is accused of disrupting the rental market in Dutch cities. Amsterdam had 7,000 listings on Airbnb in 2011 and 30,000 in 2018. The tourist service offer removes apartments for permanent residents, pushing the remaining rents upwards at the same time. The postcard town was the first in the country to restrict short-term rentals in certain neighborhoods to a minimum and limit it to 30 days per year everywhere. The Hague has therefore followed recently.
With the pandemic, the housing crisis remains one of the major problems in the Netherlands. Prices have been inflating for a decade (+ 8% in 2019), and construction slowed down during the health crisis. The average price of a family home hovers around $ 450,000, with peaks exceeding $ 600,000 in Utrecht.
Nikki, manager of the organic salad bar Sla, located in the center of The Hague, bought her first apartment at the start of the pandemic. She paid 400,000 euros for it and took advantage of the confinement and closure of her restaurant to renovate it. “The richest buy apartments in order to rent them out. It is not normal to speculate on such an essential good, ”she said.
Prices have been inflating since the recent liberalization of the sector. Rents are no longer controlled. An apartment that rented 600 euros a month a few years ago can now cost three times as much, even if wages haven’t kept up.
Montreal is in the same galloping category, with its average price for a house of $ 570,000 in October, a jump of 16% in one year. A house selling for $ 10,000 here 50 years ago can now cost a hundred times as much, a ratio that is equivalent to 15 times inflation.
Soaring prices affect almost the whole world. Whole sections of societies are excluded from access to property, and rent becomes a factor in the growing impoverishment of the masses. A German trade union official said recently that the rent becomes at the beginning of XXIe century what bread was in history: a potential trigger for insurgencies.
Residential resistance
In any case, there were a few dozen people in mid-November to demonstrate in The Hague, first in Koekamp Park, then in the streets, to demand housing for all. “People who blame the housing crisis on the weak and marginalized in society are invited to stay at home,” warned a document calling for mobilization which finally drew a motley crowd dominated by red or green flags and posters. leftists (” Kapitalism? Basta! “).
The protests moved from Amsterdam in September to Rotterdam and other major cities in October. “We are living in tragic situations: everyone knows someone affected by this crisis, either to find accommodation or to find one with affordable rent”, explained Pim van der Heiden, designated spokesperson for the Woonverzet movement. , which can be translated as “residential resistance”.
For him, housing is a constitutional right. “We demand housing security,” said the young student, who began to campaign as a squatter. We must stop this madness of short-term leases. We need to build a lot more affordable rental housing. “
We are living in tragic situations: everyone knows someone affected by this crisis, either to find housing or to find one with affordable rent.
The glaring shortage has forced the University of Amsterdam, a quarter of whose enrollments come from abroad, to rent spaces in a campsite south of the city. There was a shortage of at least 22,000 student housing in the country at the turn of the decade, and the figure could more than double by 2025. Other universities are fitting out temporary rooms in containers.
Political leaders are more or less trying to find solutions by capping rents, taxing landlords or converting vacant spaces. The topic of access to housing, by buying or renting, was the second in terms of the scale of discussions during the election campaign earlier this year in the Netherlands. All parties agreed to build a million residences during the decade.
The vein of Eindhoven
The city of Eindhoven has just started the construction of Buurtschap te Veld (literally the district in the fields), the result of an agreement reached with the central government at the end of the last decade to build low-rent residences. Some temporary, others for students, downtown. The town (the fifth in population in the country) hopes to build 3,000 new homes per year.
“Temporary houses can be built much faster,” explains Stefanie Gijsbers, project manager for the municipality of Eindhoven, whom she met on the site, north of her city. She points out the wooden facades of the few houses already erected. “Normally, in Holland, we build in bricks, and there are a lot of constraints that slow down the sites. “
The prefabrication requires only one day of assembly, as in the days of the houses of war in the 1940s in Montreal. The modular spaces allow for solo or family occupancy. Ultimately, Buurtschap te Veld will include around 670 small houses scattered in a green environment to the north of the city. The new district is expected to be completed around 2023.
The green program provides for the conservation of community gardens, the planting of hundreds of trees and natural storage of rainwater. As we are in the Netherlands, kingdom of active and community mobility, there is no space for individual cars in front of residences.
The city leases the land for up to 30 years, but the residences and infrastructure will be able to hold up much longer. The tiny, densely populated country does not have a surplus of vacant land. A third of the land is below sea level, sometimes five meters downhill. More than half of the 17 million people live in flood-prone areas protected by a 17,000 km long dike system, three times the distance between Vancouver and Halifax.
The high-rise construction makes it possible to stack new popular spaces. Several towers to be built in the center of Eindhoven are at the planning stage. It sometimes takes two or three years to find a home, often bought well above the suggested retail price.
The rents in Buurtschap te Veld will not exceed 1000 euros per month, the price of the larger family spaces. The vast majority of apartments will be much cheaper. Future residents are chosen according to their file. In particular, they must explain why they want to join this community.
Certain sites on the site are reserved for self-construction projects, sometimes at very, very low prices. Mme Gijsbers speaks of a residence of the same type as those planned, built on another place in the city with recycled materials. It only cost 5,000 euros. The price of renting an apartment on Airbnb in The Hague for a month …
This report was partially funded thanks to the support of the Transat International Journalism Fund–The duty.