The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake | Hacker News Reader

The Dutch community where people live on strips of land in a lake

core77.com

142 pointsBowes-Lyon63 comments

People don't really live there, these are holiday/recreational homes. My family owns two of those islands with a holiday home.

Typically you use them for the weekend. My mom for example lives in a busy city and has a small garden, she uses the holiday home as a weekend getaway and a place to keep the sailing boat.

The Netherlands are small and this area is very central, about 20 minutes drive from Amsterdam or Utrecht. So most owners use it in the same way.

You're not allowed to live there officially, but some people do.

Yes but those mostly live landside, there are holiday homes at the edge of the lake as well. There was a plan to allow permanent use, but I think it now changed to only allowing it for people that already live there and no new cases.

Seems a shame in a housing crisis.

There is a reason for it. Infrastructure, access roads, public transit stops, build quality, utilities. The Netherlands has very high standards for homes and the direct surroundings and these homes do not meet those criteria. You would also have significantly more emissions if people started living there which would go against the emission limits for nearby nature.

Let me guess, no sewage disposal.

Imagine the postman every day…

The housing crisis in the west is largely not a lack of land or places to build, but an issue of building being too onerous for a variety of reasons.

Inaccessible lake homes being allowed to be used as a primary residence will not fix it.

Yeah earlier this year I biked from Utrecht to Amsterdam, and there are huge empty lots in the southeast part of Amsterdam. I don’t mean “charming natural areas,” I mean wide open lots next to gas stations and shopping malls.

> You're not allowed to live there officially

why not?

Because they're meant for recreational purposes, and those places usually don't adhere to strict guidelines the NL has for "living homes". But since the housing crisis, they have been actually allowing it in some places.

Curious, how does it smell? Living in an old dredged peat bog sounds like smell could be a challenge.

With standing water yes, but this is not standing water.

I saw some photos with ladders from the water. Does people go swimming there, is the water clean?

Yes lots of people swim in both the lake and the narrow parts. The lake also has a few sand beaches that are popular in the summer. And designated swimming areas with shallow water for kids like this: https://share.google/5bko4Xpb0tzkfEChJ

There is an app to check water quality. In general it's fine to swim in, but at high temperatures sometimes algae form. That's common in lots of these kinds of lakes in the Netherlands.

Are they connected to the sewer system? Or do they discharge their effluence into the lake?

> Or do they discharge their effluence into the lake?

Given this is the Netherlands and this appears to be a wealthy area, I'm quite sure they don't. Guessing they either have septic tanks or holding tanks that need to be pumped regularly.

I have a degree which allows me to work in few fields, but wastewater management is one of those fields (which I have worked in, front-line (directly) >gross<): no water is "clean" — it's varying shades of "acceptable"

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There is a running joke (hundred+ years now) that the famous "Ruby Falls" on Lookout Mountain is in fact better named "Poopy Falls" – since the primary water source are the few hundred septic drainlines higher-up the mountain's-top.

<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_Falls>

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If you have any open cuts/sores, do NOT swim in any outdoor water.

So this is the Dutch equivalent of a cottage?

I read these properties are actually some of the most expensive properties in The Netherlands ($ million dollar).

But no electricity (need generator) and you cannot drive your car to your lakehouse.

Plus, I bet the mosquitos are horrible, it is a former swamp.

Easily over a million for the ones without neighbors. The most expensive one was listed for 13 million.

These are holiday homes for wealthy elites in Amsterdam. You either go there straight from Amsterdam by helicopter or you have a chauffeur drive/boat you there. These people don’t drive themselves.

But probably not for long with non-primary real estate being taxed at 2.2% a year.

> The most expensive one was listed for 13 million.

This one [1]? It's a huge villa (not on an island) plus 2 islands for that price, so not really comparable.

I found a more representative example of an island with a house that is currently for sale [2]. It is listed for €1.5 million.

[1] https://www.quotenet.nl/vastgoed/qasteel/a62799798/joop-drec... [2] https://www.funda.nl/detail/koop/loosdrecht/huis-drecht-16/4...

Found another one at 8 million and is on an island:

https://www.quotenet.nl/vastgoed/qasteel/a62814634/luxueus-p...

This was in 2024 so likely valued around 9 million by now.

The home you listed at Funda comes in at €42000 per square meter which is unheard of for The Netherlands. Not even Amsterdam Center comes close. These homes are one of the most expensive pieces of real estate in the country.

Note that for the second, that's not really a house, it's a boat (woonboot). It floats. The page lists the legal requirements for any replacement boat new owners may want to put there.

According to the description, that second one is connected to water, electricity and sewage, so that answers that question. No need for a septic tank.

There is electricity now, but it's quite new. Before that ours used to run on solar + batteries, you don't want a noisy generator in the middle of a nature area. A holiday home doesn't need that much electricity, warm water and heating use gas.

Prices are typical for this side of the country.

I was gonna say the same about the mosquitos. Also, the mosquito-borne diseases in Europe are increasing and one definitely don't wanna catch dengue fever

You may find this area on google maps at https://www.google.com/maps/@52.1792241,5.0288801,516m

Obnoxious cookie banner with no "reject all" button. Too bad, it sounded interesting.

Isn’t that actually illegal under GDPR? There’s a reason all the other sites allow you to opt out and it’s not because they want to do that.

Violating gdpr is apparently legal. But even having opt out instead of opt in is in violation

Yes. But it is not enforced. The largest Dutch tech website is not GDPR compliant.

Core77 doesn't do any business in the EU, so it probably isn't a concern. There's a few states in the US with cookie banner requirements, so it was probably designed around that.

Good luck trying to get the cookie laws enforced in any way. The Dutch DPA, for example, only lets you submit a GDPR complaint and get a response on things that directly relate to your own data. Otherwise, you can only submit a "tip-off" that they'll "review" but won't respond to.

GDPR/ePD also requires "reject all" to be a single button, and asking the user to click a billion separate "reject" toggles is against the law, but many sites don't care.

With UblockOrigin blocking all Javascript by default there was no cookie banner, just the article and photographs.

And on iOS? Which is maybe what they're using

I googled peat so you dont have to

Peat is a soft, spongy material made from dead plants that did not fully rot. It forms very slowly in wet, swampy places called bogs

It is used as fuel as well as fertilizer

It usually holds many times its solid weight in water. If you add load to it by building something on it (without designing around the ground conditions) it can compress to a fraction of its volume, resulting in ground settlements that can be very large.

pre-industrial peoples in some parts of the world used this material extensively.. some still do

I’ve started referring to the industrialized majority as peoples too

“the South of Market peoples”

It is also a fantastic carbon sink.

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2022/02/21/headway/peat-...

"Although peatlands make up just 3 percent of land on Earth, they store twice as much carbon as all the world’s forests combined."

Nice it was historically just dug up and the leftovers turned into expensive holiday homes.

If you add enough heat, pressure and (geological) time it becomes coal!

Unfortunately the reverse is also true: polderization and exposing the peat to the air reverses that sink process. Single digit percentage of Dutch greenhouse emissions come from this. Fortunately, they are depolderizing and hopefully much of the Netherlands is given back to the sea so that environmental interests are preserved.

It takes a very long time to form, however. It's mostly another source of carbon that gets added to the atmosphere.

It is also used to give whisky a smokey taste.

Anybody whose done any amount of gardening or has houseplants is probably familiar with peat. Though its harvest is destructive to the unique peat bog environments it forms

There's a huge push to go peat-free, and I agree 95%.

There are just a few uses for peat that don't have an alternative. I mention this to fellow gardeners because if you go 100% peat-free, you'll end up with an expensive disaster and, out of frustration, may go back to peat entirely.

I think it's not productive to ignore the small corner cases where peat is almost a requirement.

Say more? I've heard coconut coir can sometimes contain salt and has less nutrients but that can be fixed by buying properly processed coir and mixing in something like finished compost. What's irreplaceable about peat?

Can also be used to build a home. Up to 1940 that is how the lowest class in The Netherlands lived. Plaggenhutten, homes made out of peat, straw, manure.

Likely very comfortable on a thermal basis.

Next, google "bog butter" to see one of their more interesting uses.

Most of Netherland used to be peat, but there's almost nothing left now. From about the 10th century onward, it's slowly all been turned into farmland or lakes. Sometimes both. This is the process that really created the country, both geographically and politically.

Some areas used to be strips of water / land, but too much peat was dug out, storms washed the remaining land strips into the water beside it, creating a regular lake. For example some lakes in Giethoorn area were formed like this.

Like most lakes in the NL these tend to be shallow (~1.5-2m depth is common, even the biggest lake -Ijsselmeer- is only about 5..6m in deepest areas).

Ijsselmeer is a different kind of lake; not created by digging out peat, but a (violent) sea inlet that was closed off. The many peat lakes didn't start out as strips of land, but as endless peat swamp. Much of that was drained through drainage ditches and turned into agricultural land. Other parts were dug up for fuel, creating those massive lakes. In the latter case, they sometimes left those strips of land to transport the fuel.

> Ijsselmeer is a different kind of lake; not created by digging out peat, but a (violent) sea inlet that was closed off.

Hmm yes, 'everybody' in the NL is aware of that.

> In the latter case, they sometimes left those strips of land to transport the fuel.

Not really. The turf blocks would be stacked in piles & left to dry for a while. But then often transported by boat (through the newly created channels). The leftover strips of land could be used to have men, or a horse, pull such boats on a rope.

I wonder how they're doing right now with water levels reaching critical low points.

Water levels in this area are tightly managed by pumps. Also in normal times they pump water in and out to keep a specific level. All of this is lower than the Amsterdamrijnkanaal, so without pumps it would flood, water doesn't naturally flow out of this place only from evaporation.

Is this area the inspiration for the Gyptians in The Golden Compass?

Ahh, the Netherlands… strips of land through their water and strips of water through their land…

I wish I could live there, seems like the perfect spot.

Looks lovely. I wonder if it has good fishing.

With a boat, as far as I know the sides aren't good fishing spots. There is a website about it: https://www.vissenoploosdrecht.nl/fotos/

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