August 1, 2013

Gated community ‘not only for whites’ in Rotterdam

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 10:30 am

For many a bad sign, for a selected few, no more riffraff, as Rotterdam gets its first gated community, called Ringvaartstaete (PDF in Dutch). It’s only 12 villas of which 6 have already been sold, according to the real estate agent, with prices ranging from 900,000 to 1.5 million euro.

When I think of gated communities, I imagine inside them a scene out of the American movie Pleasantville, with its idealistic American 1950s. Then, there’s also South Africa with its compounds, clearly separating powerful white people from anybody not fitting that description. And then there’s the ones I flew over some 10 years ago when landing in Moscow, which separated the nouveau riche from the hopelessly poor.

What bothers me the most is that Quote magazine felt the need to caption their photo of the community “Not only for whites”, which I find it scary. The article also ‘reassures’ us, as the real estate agent claims they’ve had the honor of welcoming “their first ‘coloured’ buyer”.

See also Police arrest gardener in rich area because he’s African.

(Link: www.quotenet.nl, Photo by Kai Schreiber, some rights reserved)

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July 19, 2013

No wonder Dutch students live in containers

Filed under: General by Orangemaster @ 12:10 pm

It’s not too much of a surprise that student rooms in Amsterdam are the most expensive in the Netherlands at 100 euro a week, but maybe a little surprising that Dutch student housing is the second most expensive in Europe after the UK at 139 euro a week. Belgian and German neighbours are lucky, paying respectively 66 euro and 57 euro a week.

The typical ‘I’m looking for a room ad’ shows that people are willing to pay just as much and even more than people renting an entire flat to get a room. I also know a lot of Dutch adults who still have roommates, but then the amount of British television shows where adults share flats taught me as a non-European that it’s perfectly normal in Europe.

A few weeks ago I was part of a Canadian documentary about Amsterdam North’s NDSM dock area and both cameramen were stunned by the container village (see pic) that students have to live in, first thinking it was some sort of elaborate artwork. When I told them it was student housing, we talked about the differences between Amsterdam and Montréal were the entire crew and myself are from.

Amsterdam style:

– I actually know rich Dutch parents who bought a second house so that their daughter could have a room and share the house with friends.
– There used to be parties in Amsterdam where students could win a room in a house, not rent-free of course.
– Some adults stay in their student room years after graduation because there are very tough laws about throwing people out of their homes.

Montréal style:

– Student housing provided by universities is overpriced and usually full of foreigners who don’t know better. They usually wise up really quickly and get a normal flat.
– Renting a flat is easy, so there is no need for students to live in student housing. They live in flats just like normal people.
– The idea of renting a room in a house is weird. People rent a flat or share a flat, but don’t usually go looking for a room with the assumption that renting a flat is very difficult like it is in Amsterdam.

(Link: www.iamexpat.nl, Photo of Multi-storey container housing by Rory Hyde, some rights reserved)

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June 20, 2013

Nijmegen to let people choose the model of their home

Filed under: Architecture by Orangemaster @ 4:03 pm

Nijmegen plans to let potential home buyers pick from 30 different models that have a DIY look to them. Buyers must meet a lot of financial conditions, as the Dutch have very strict rules related to housing.

“The scheme is modeled on the self-built success of another Dutch city, Almere, where hundreds of new homes have been built since 2006 by individuals given free reign to do with plots of land as they wish.” Wired magazine, who picked up the story, also picked the most extreme model that does look like a shack made of discarded Eur-pallets, giving way to snarky comments.

In 2008 we claimed that anything went in Almere when it came to architecture because it was a ‘planned city’ built on a polder, which means urban planners had a field day. And we also told you how cool housing can be in Nijmegen as well.

It is true that ‘affordable’ housing has a reputation for being of poor quality, something I can vouch for personally after being forced to move out of a flat with cement rot in Amsterdam and seeing an entire neighbourhood of badly built flats destroyed in Rotterdam.

Let’s see how this project in Nijmegen pans out.

(Links: www.ugenda.nl, www.wired.com. Photo of Nijmegen and the Waal river by Rein Ketelaars, some rights reserved)

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December 10, 2011

Prime minister Rutte misleads Wall Street Journal about Dutch debt problems

Filed under: General by Branko Collin @ 2:30 pm

Debt to income ratio (%) for households in 2010. Source data: Eurostat.

Last week the Wall Street Journal published an excellent article by Matthew Dalton titled Mortgage Burden Looms Over Dutch. Us Dutch have an average debt of 2.5 times our yearly income, which makes us the heaviest lenders of Europe.

We got into this position because of the way we structure our mortgages. We borrow heavily, then let that debt stand for decades. Interest is deductible from our income tax.

Asked of Prime Minister Mark Rutte (VVD party) whether this is a problem he told Wall Street Journal:

“It’s not a big issue…if you look at the whole picture,” he said, noting that the Dutch have saved as much in their pension funds as they have in mortgage debt—”and we have huge private savings.”

Financial news website Z24 sorta-kinda calls Rutte out on that. “Staat genoteerd”, (duly noted) writes Jeroen de Boer, i.e. “whatever“. What the Wall Street Journal doesn’t know, and what somebody who is such a great fan of “the whole picture” should have told them, is that mortgage interest deductions are one of the core political wedge issues in the Netherlands. Both Rutte’s party VVD and their coalition partner CDA have told their constituencies time and again that they will never abandon the tax deduction.
(more…)

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May 7, 2011

What have the Nazis ever done for you?

Filed under: History by Branko Collin @ 11:48 am

I grew up in Blerick, a town with a town hall but without the political body to inhabit it. See, in 1940 the town was added to the neighbouring city of Venlo by the Nazi occupier, which made the possession of a town hall moot.

Interestingly the previous municipality that Blerick belonged to, Maasbree, once had three different town halls, and the council would rotate among them until in 1904 the Blerick town hall was made the permanent one.

In celebration of Liberation day, daily De Pers summed up 6 of the changes the Nazis made that stuck:

  1. Child support (the Nazis wanted the Arian race to flourish)
  2. Corporate tax (funnily enough, these days our low corporate taxes make us a tax haven, according to the Berserker of Abbottabad)
  3. Central European Time (before that, we had our own sliver of a time zone)
  4. The Frisian islands of Vlieland and Terschelling (formerly of Noord Holland)
  5. Rent control and renter protection (including the right to live in a house forever)
  6. Job protection (including the right to keep a job forever)

In a number of these cases the occupier made into law what was already on the books. In other cases the law was kept because it made sense. For instance, with housing shortages being rather prominent after the war, it made eminent sense to protect renters from price gouging. In such cases the Germans had unwittingly produced both the diseases and the cures.

(Photo of the Blerick town hall by Wikimedia user Torval, some rights reserved)

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February 16, 2011

Banks make 125,000 homes unsellable

Filed under: Architecture,General by Orangemaster @ 1:48 pm

Dutch television news show EenVandaag gave me a new reason to be scared to ever buy a house in the Netherlands. Since 10 February 2010 Dutch banks have decided not to approve any mortgages to people buying a house built on ground owned by a private person. This means that some 125,000 home owners are now stuck in their homes forever, unless they leave it empty and move, or rent it.

Homes in the Netherlands are often built on ground that is leased from someone else, usually a local government or a housing corporation, a very common practice in big cities like Amsterdam. In fact, real estate agents in Amsterdam, where most homes are built on leased ground albeit owned by the city, are now refusing to sell any houses built on ground owned by private persons.

Why would banks pull this? Acccording to De Telegraaf, the regulatory body of Dutch banks has a duty to assess the risk of the loan, and find it too difficult when the ground is privately owned. The legislation on ground leasing is said to be “complete chaos” and deals with “forced contracts” (I like the Dutch ‘wurgcontract’, which literally means ‘strangulatory contract’). These private ground owners are basically mimicking the government who also ask for “mafia-like amounts” when ground leasing. Fighting the government for unfair practices is one thing, but you can’t do that with a private person who can apparently do what they want.

(Links: ad, telegraaf)

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September 5, 2010

Temporary reduction of sales tax on renovations

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 12:03 pm

Government ministers De Jager (Finance) and Middelkoop (Housing) have announced a temporary lowering of the sales tax on home make-overs from 19% to 6%.

The reduction is to take effect on October 1, 2010 and will last until July 1, 2011, Telegraaf reports. The care-taker government hopes that this will soften the blow of the crisis for the building sector.

Some of the rules for the lower tax are:

  • Only for houses of two years and older.
  • Only for labour costs.
  • Only for improvements that will raise the resale value of your house.

(Photo by Yola de Lusenet, some rights reserved)

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August 10, 2009

Floating apartment building in Westland

Filed under: Architecture by Branko Collin @ 9:31 am

citadel_waterstudio

This floating apartment building called Citadel was designed by Waterstudio architects of Rijswijk and will be built in the Nieuwe Water area of the Westland region, West of Rotterdam a municipality in the Western Netherlands.

Westland is mostly known for its greenhouses (see a Google satellite image and you will know what I mean). The Nieuwe Water area (Dutch) is a low point in this polder and therefore suffers minor floodings every time there are heavy rains. New trends in water management have led to the belief that it is good to make room for water, and that is what is being done here.

The Nieuwe Water area West of the town of Naaldwijk, traditionally full of greenhouses, will be flooded artificially, after which houses will be built in it that somehow will have to be able to deal with the fact that the water level can rise up to 36 centimetres, stowing 75 million litres of excess water. Another housing solution by Waterstudio for this area are these stilt houses. The Citadel will have 60 apartments.

Construction of Het Nieuwe Water will start this year.

Update: Orangemaster tells me she translated a good book that can give our readers further insights about the new ways of Dutch water management called Atlas of Dutch Water Cities. A San Franciscan bookstore summarizes it as follows:

Illustrates the relationship between urban development and water engineering, and portrays a vast number of projects integrating the infrastructure of waterways and flood deferences in architectural concepts.

(Source photo: Waterstudio. Link: Trendhunter)

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January 20, 2009

Squatters driven out by thugs, police puts them back in

Filed under: Architecture,General by Branko Collin @ 3:29 pm

Last Sunday a group of thugs who were sharing a building complex in the Kinkerstraat in Amsterdam with a group of squatters drove out the latter with the use of force, wounding three of the squatters. At the end of the fight, the police installed the squatters back in the building, and arrested 14 members of both groups. One of the squatters was taken to a hospital with a double fractured jaw.

The squatters told Parool (Dutch) that the thugs spoke Russian with each other and partly consisted of builders that were staying nearby. Quote thinks (Dutch) that the owner of the Vinkzicht buildings, Cornelis Komen, may have paid the thugs to drive off the squatters. Komen denies the allegations.

The buildings have had no designated use since 1972 until Komen bought the six buildings in 1999 for 1.6 million euro each, with the plan to wreck them and build a hotel in their stead. That plan came under heavy fire from the neighbourhood, which managed to convince city hall to declare the gables monuments.

The top floors of the buildings are rented out in so-called anti-squat constructions where a tenant gets a short-term lease typically at a low price. Sometimes, you can score magnificently large housing this way for a price way below the going rate of the average shoebox an Amsterdam resident calls their castle, though I hear that with the housing shortage in the city even the anti-squat rates have gone up.

Squatting is mainly legal in the Netherlands (albeit often frowned upon) because of a constitutional right to domestic peace. The police may not invade your home, even if your means to acquire the home may have been less than legal. The house owner must then go to court and prove they have a pressing need with their property to get the squatters evicted. Neighbours tend to prefer squatters over slowly decaying houses.

It’s been a while since I’ve heard of thugs being used to evict people. The university grapevine in Nijmegen had stories of students being evicted this way, but I cannot remember a single proven one.

This is one of those stories that spawns two new questions for every answer you find, so I’d rather field any actual questions our readers have.

Totally off-topic: many congratulations to Orangemaster for getting her Dutch driver’s license! Wootalicious!

Link: Radio Netherlands, the only medium I could find so far that thinks the fight was between two groups of squatters.

(Photo of the Kinkerstraat by Wikimedia user Ilonamay, some rights reserved)

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August 19, 2008

Every new house an outdoor space and a bike shed

Filed under: Architecture,Bicycles by Branko Collin @ 8:11 am

Ella Vogelaar, Minister for Housing, Neighbourhoods and Integration, wants to force builders to produce an outdoor space (balcony or garden) and bike shed for every apartment built. An earlier obligation to do so was dropped in 2003. Vogelaar claims the market insufficiently provides the need for outdoor living space and bicycle storage, and so she is making the provision of this part of the building code, the complex set of rules governing the construction of buildings.

The ministery’s press release refers to an extensive study into how the Dutch live, the Woningbehoefte Onderzoek (Study into Living Needs), suggesting that this research was somehow the basis of the minister’s decision. Although I could not find anything about a shortage of bike sheds or balconies, I did find this interesting little pie chart (with small typos original typos introduced by me, now removed) on page 11 of the results of the Woononderzoek Nederland 2006, entitled “Types of outdoor spaces that houses have”:

Balcony plus garden 15%
Garden 58%
Balcony 23%
Communal garden 1%
No outdoor space 3%

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