how bad of a housing crisis is in the netherlands?
Wherever I look in europe there is a housing crisis for a reason or another.
Wherever I look in europe there is a housing crisis for a reason or another.
The government introduced various policies to remedy this, but all has failed. A few years ago they made it easier to fund young people, e.g. by allowing parents to gift 100k EUR to their children in a tax-free manner as long as it's used for buying a house. This resulted in higher housing prices because more people can afford higher prices, and it also disproportionally benefits people who have rich parents.
Now they've backpedalled on that, and the focus is now on disincentivizing investors. They raised ownership transfer taxes for people who buy a house for the purpose of renting it out. They also raised rent taxes. This works a bit better, but not enough. The core problem is just not enough housing. Also, renting out has become less profitable, so some landlords are selling those houses. This has raised concerns that we'll have too few rental housing.
It's not even just a matter of not building quickly enough. The electricity grid is full (not enough capacity), so there are more and more places where new houses can't even be attached to the grid.
This cannot be solved with just one trick or just in a few years. You need strong, resolute, long-term actions. But that doesn't fit in an election cycle.
Problems can be either solved in a constructive way (we see that's not going to happen) or in a nonconstructive way (societal explosion or breakdown of some sort). Or sometimes problems get superseded by bigger problems. Like when recently the home prices went down just a little bit, it was because of ECB's hand forced into fighting inflation with higher interest rates, which made mortgages less accessible.
It's common for Dutch universities to only accept international students on the condition that they (i.e. the student) manage to find housing themselves, because there have been many cases where they enrolled but just couldn't get housing anywhere. You don't see that in other countries.
And it's been this bad for more than a decade.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrogen_crisis_in_the_Netherl...
Though it still felt downright easy compared to Ireland, where we came from.
Rents are horrendous. House prices the same.
The problem is kicking out those dirty foreigners who sweep your streets and raise rent prices won't lower rents. At best they will plateau for a little while.
The east and south of NL are more doable IMO. But I rather work remote and live somewhere else. I’m not a fan of how NL is developing.
I imagine things will go down the same way as it did in the UK.
Here is a page the Netherlands government with more specific numbers [1]. In 2022 there were roughly 250k immigrants from the former Soviet Union, Ukraine, or Poland, and the next three biggest sources were Syria, Turkey, and India, combing to maybe 50k combined.
[1] https://www.cbs.nl/en-gb/dossier/asylum-migration-and-integr...