The Netherlands' Rent Control Disaster

Meh, we'll see what happens. For context: I'm a rental owner in NL, so this is a potentially biased take.

The situation has gotten quite out of control in terms of the shortage of availability of housing given the abject failure of government to permit and encourage building where people actually want or need to live as well as current demographic trends (much smaller households is a much bigger driver over the last generation than even net immigration IMO).

It's not just making it so, so hard to build (very slow processes for planning approval, incorrect balancing act on nitrogen dioxide emissions between home building and intensive - and gross - animal factories who have captured the political narrative recently and are using more trad farmers to push their narrative) but also the almost terminal failure of the semi-state woningcorporaties who are chartered to build and manage affordable housing stocks in exchange for insanely cheap capital and other benefits - instead not building, selling off their stock to private landlords and providing luxe BMWs with chauffeurs to their directors and VPs.

What building seems to happen is aimed at the top 5% in (sale price) value of the market in the big cities. It's interesting to rich Syrians and Chinese and Americans, but doesn't solve the urgent housing availability problem.

Private landlords have then behaved rationally, but badly, with very hefty increases of rental amounts, in a society that expects that renters should be able to establish themselves for long durations - possibly even generations - even in rental accomodation.

The shortage of affordable housing has resulted in politically-unsustainable situation due to the terrible impacts on low and middle income earners, especially young people expecting to be able to have a job and live away from their parents.

Thus, a very correct tightening up of the rules about landlord behaviours and especially pricing to decrease the political pain. But it's a band-aid, and only takes part of the sting of the problem away.

Without a huge campaign of home building infill, brown-field construction and mandating - yes, regulation - income-segment representation on what is built occurs (ie if there are five rough income bands, then the type, size, finish, and price of what is built in a region in a year should match the percentage of folks in those bands), the problem is going to get worse and not better.

Fire the woningcorporatie CEOs every year if they don't hit provincial house-building and tenant growth targets. They and their gravy-train pals won't like it and will lean heavily on local government for permitting improvements.

And really, let's shaft the intensive animal factory owners and build houses instead.