According to a majority of the municipalities polled by the NOS and regional broadcasters, the main cause of the housing crisis is the fact that the elderly do not move from large to smaller homes. The reasoning is that if the old people ‘just’ move to small apartments, the housing market would be in a much better position.
The investigation by the NOS and the regional broadcasters reveals a huge problem. No municipality dares to name the immigration problem. Instead, they put the blame for the housing crisis on the elderly. For the municipalities, the housing crisis is almost a purely bureaucratic affair. Something that prevents solutions from being proposed due to regulations and slow decision-making. ‘Too little throughput of older residents’ is mentioned as the main reason, followed by ‘housing corporations have too little money for construction’ and ‘too little agricultural land’.
So 191 of the 352 municipalities are actually just burying their heads in the sand. If there is a policy for public housing that makes the elderly feel compelled to live in smaller homes, most municipalities would prefer to just go along with it. Should some farmers be expropriated so that their farmland becomes available for the construction of new homes? The municipal officials are already getting excited! They just don’t feel like sacrificing nature reserves, but destroying just about the best agricultural land in Europe is no problem at all.
It could become interesting during the upcoming municipal elections, because it is difficult to imagine that local parties of (small) municipalities would just want to fill up the whole lot. It is also hard to imagine that a majority of residents would feel like giving seniors the to kick out of the house for immigrants, status holders and students. Yet it seems that way to go out, especially if small municipalities were given more powers.
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As it stands, it seems very likely that agricultural land will be sacrificed and several outlying areas will be filled with small homes. The housing crisis is something that needs an immediate response and this government has never heard of the word ‘long-term strategy’.
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