‘Everything’s just … on hold’: the Netherlands’ next-level housing crisis

It started maybe 10 years ago, says Tamara Kuschel. Since the 1970s, the charity she works for in Amsterdam, De Regenboog, has run day shelters for homeless people – typically, people with serious addiction and mental health issues.

Then, in about 2015, a new kind of client began to appear. “They didn’t have the usual problems of homeless people,” Kuschel says. “They had jobs, friends. In every respect, their lives were very much together. But they couldn’t afford a home.”

Some are not young, she says. The oldest, last year, was 72. They have, typically, recently been involved in a relationship break-up, had a small business fail or been unable to afford a rent rise.. “We can help some,” she says. “But we’re just a sticking plaster, really.”

In a pan-European housing crisis, the Netherlands’ is next level. According to independent analysis, the average Dutch home now costs €452,000 – more than 10 times the modal, or most common, Dutch salary of €44,000.

That means you need a salary of more than twice that to buy one. Nationwide, house prices have doubled in the past decade; in more sought-after neighbourhoods they have surged 130%. A new-build home costs 16 times an average salary.

The rental market is equally dysfunctional. Rents in the private sector – about 15% of the country’s total housing stock – have soared. A single room in a shared house in Amsterdam is €950 a month; a one-bed flat €1,500 or more; a three-bedder €3,500.

Competition among those who can afford such sums – such as multinational expats – is so fierce that many pay a monthly fee to an online service that trawls property websites, sending text alerts seconds after suitable ads appear.

Meanwhile, the waiting list in the social housing sector, which is roughly double the size of the private, averages about seven years nationally – but in the bigger Dutch cities, particularly in Amsterdam, it can stretch to as long as 18 or 19.

For young people the task of finding – and keeping – a home can be all-consuming. A 28-year-old PhD student, who asked not be identified, said that in her first three years in the capital she had moved seven or eight times.

“The shortage is so acute, and people are so desperate,” she said. “Tenants’ rights are supposed to be strong, but in practice … I’ve had landlords come in while I was out, take pictures. I’ve been bullied to get me to move out, physically threatened.”

She knew no one under 30 living on their own, she said; many were still moving twice a year. She was now in a shared apartment, and would like to live with her partner – but neither dared move out because they might not find a place.

“That’s the worst,” she said. “All these next steps we’re supposed to be taking at our age, as young professionals, they’re just not possible. Everything’s just … on hold. Relationships are being determined by the housing market, and that’s obscene.”

Others are luckier. In a peaceful neighbourhood 30 minutes’ walk from Amsterdam central station, Lukas and Misty are among 96 tenants – half of them young refugees with residence permits – of a so-called Startblok, one of five around the capital.

Some Startblokken are much bigger, housing more than 550 young people in purpose-built “container houses”, some metal, some of wood and sustainable materials, stacked four or five atop each other. Others, like this one, are permanent, brick-built residences.

For a monthly rent averaging €400-500 after housing benefit, every tenant – who must be aged between 18 and 27 when they move in – is entitled to their own 20-25 sq metre studio, with its own kitchenette and bathroom, for up to five years.

There is bike storage, a bright communal lounge with table football, a laundry room and a small garden with a greenhouse. When one studio became free earlier this year, said project manager Jesse van Geldorp, the Startblok received about 800 applications.

“It’s about allowing young people to stand on their own feet, establish a life, build a network in a fundamentally broken housing market,” said Karin Verdooren, director of Lieven de Key, the housing foundation that launched the Startblok concept.

Lukas, a German tutor, moved in last November. He greatly appreciates paying half – or even less – the rent that many of his friends on the outside have to find, and loves the community spirit. Misty, 22 and nearing the end of her undergraduate degree, agrees.

“You’re not alone,” she said. “You learn so much. The multicultural side is brilliant; I’ve made friends from Syria, Eritrea … I’m really thankful. And knowing that I won’t need to look for a home at the same time as I’m looking for a job is such a big relief.”

But the Startblokken – like the multiple temporary accommodation programmes for “economically homeless” people in Amsterdam run by Kuschel’s De Regenboog – are drops in the ocean of the vastness of the Netherlands’ housing crisis.

Quite how the country got here is a subject of complex and heated debate. The Netherlands was short of an estimated 390,000 homes last year; it is already falling behind on a pledge to build nearly 1m – two-thirds of them affordable – by 2030.

Some factors, such as historically low interest rates and more – often smaller – households, are beyond government control. But experts say successive administrations have consistently stimulated demand while failing to boost supply.

“The key features of the housing crisis – rising prices, increasing inequality, shortages of affordable homes and foreign investors infiltrating the market – are the result of decades of dubious housing policies,” said Gregory Fuller of Groningen University.

In the early 2010s, a pro-market Dutch government in effect abolished the housing and planning ministry and freed up sales of housing corporation stock. Partly as a result, about 25% of homes in the country’s four big cities are owned by investors.

Further driving up prices are measures such as mortgage tax relief for buyers and others, meant to aid young buyers, that have ended up helping existing owners invest in more property. At the same time, subsidies for housebuilding all but dried up.

In the rental market, the crippling lack of homes and large numbers of tenants who – for want of an affordable alternative – remain in social housing despite earning more than the maximum allowed have contributed to sky-high private rents.

The European Commission’s independent social policy advisory group has said the Netherlands in in the grip of a “severe housing crisis”, with a “critical shortage of affordable housing resulting in social exclusion and increasing economic inequality”.

Politicians including Geert Wilders, whose far-right Freedom party (PVV) finished a shock first in November’s general election, have blamed asylum seekers, foreign students and environmental laws.

But in a damning report published in February, the UN special rapporteur on adequate housing said, after a two-week visit, that Dutch government policy choices were to blame for the country’s “acute housing crisis,” not asylum seekers or migrant workers.

“An alternative narrative has emerged in the Netherlands that an ‘influx of foreigners’ is responsible,” Balakrishnan Rajagopal said. The crisis – of both affordability and availability – had, he added, been “two or more decades” in the making.

Among multiple other factors, the rapporteur blamed a lack of regulation of social housing providers, an absence of rent caps in the private sector and “insufficient attention to the role of speculation and large investors in the real estate market”.

Some of the more recent government moves aimed at easing the crisis may even have had the opposite effect. Several cities have implemented a 2022 law banning buyers of homes below a certain value – in Amsterdam, €530,000 – from letting them out.

According to at least one academic study, however, the measure, intended to boost first-time buyers, benefited middle-income buyers – but also hit lower-income tenants by pushing rents up by 4% as the number of rental properties fell.

Similarly, government efforts to extend rent controls, restricting more homes to social tenants earning less than €44,000 a year and capping their rents at €800, have simply prompted more landlords to sell – thus driving up remaining private-sector rents.

Whatever the causes, for those caught up in it the crisis it is tough. Luna, a primary school teacher, has been staying in a friend’s flat while their flatmate was away, but recently found a more permanent room after a six-month search.

“It’s just very … frustrating,” she said. “To have been born here, signed up for social housing since I was 18, doing a socially useful job with a huge shortage – and still paying a rent I can only just afford, for a room in a shared flat, aged 33.”

More than 1,200 people applied to De Regenboog last year, Kuschel said. It helped 535, finding them homes in apartment blocks awaiting renovation, houses families had recently inherited but do not yet want to sell, empty schools, even spare rooms.

One was Iris, 47, an artist and night-club worker who last year had to move out of the Amsterdam flat she had lived in for several years because developers had bought the whole building. At around the same time, she split up with her partner.

“I stayed with friends, I couch-surfed, but it was impossible,” she said. “Now I’m sharing, in a place that won’t be developed for a year. I’m safe for 12 months. I think this is what happens when people see properties as investments, not as homes.”

Kuschel, though, said none of it was a solution. “We are just trying to prevent people getting into the negative spiral that comes with not having a secure home,” she said. “We can’t provide a permanent one. After a year, they’re on their own again.”

It was hard to exaggerate the importance of a secure home, she said: “Without it, people stop building families, building futures, putting down roots, developing, flourishing. They lose all perspective. Their lives are frozen. That’s the tragedy.”