I can’t speak for other countries, but the main problem it always loops back to here is housing. People wouldn’t be nearly as angry at asylum seekers, international students and wealthy tech workers if housing demand wasn’t so severely underaddressed at the moment.

Just to give two examples:

- a friend of mine is looking for single-person housing. Subsidized housing appartement have 500-700 people responding to them on each ad

- ASML has started to underwrite a housing project for subsidized housing. Homes created: 130, of which 40 in the subsidized category. Unaddressed demand for subsidized housing in Veldhoven? 25 000. Even with 20 of those projects a year it would take 31 years to address the need..

I have less knowledge of the student housing market, but I assume it is a similar bloodbath.

As far as asylum seekers go, they are a small but significant (~7%) part of the subsidized housing market.

When supply gets that constricted, and you, your elder parents or your kids can’t get any housing, crab mentality takes over. You desperately try to find housing, and any other also-lookers become adversaries.

None of this is the fault of those other people. The Dutch government basically tried to completely neo-liberate our housing market. Predictably, 15 years later it has ended up in absolute tatters, with special thanks to Stef Blok, a gaping asshole that glibly commented “I’m the only politician that can lay claim to having disbanded an entire ministry![1]”

[1] Ministerie van Volkshuisvesting (Housing)

Edit: there is a whole secondary shit sandwich of it having become virtually impossible to get a mortgage ever since the ECB raised interest. But the Dutch government has made having a mortgage financially much more attractive than renting. And our pension funds are deep into the real estate market, meaning the government can’t just decide to build massively to make housing prices implode.