@mathlete We already have ultra-dense developments in my country, and especially in my city, but one big issue is that ultra-dense building is extremely expensive. High-rise buildings are expensive to build, and it's also very expensive to custom design homes that exactly fit a certain space (instead of basically adapting a template) and to build it with only small tools and equipment, because there's no space for the larger equipment. Recently they built 250 new homes (a mix of terraced houses, apartments and studio's, both for rent and for sale) in my area in a location that used to be a factory. But very few of those units were for sale for less than 400k and it wasn't exactly a luxury development. We have no other choice in my country because there's not much open space left, but building a suburb is certainly much cheaper.
So what is the solution here? It sounds like you live in a pretty desirable place if there's not much space left. It sucks that things are expensive, but how else do you decide who gets to live in desirable places?
Well, it's not so much this specific location, the Netherlands is just a really tiny country. I live in one of the main cities, but the situation is the same everywhere. The housing market is even worse in my hometown than it is in the big city. We had the same issue in the post-war period. We were just crossing the 10 million inhabitants threshold and the birthrate was 4. So we did the following:
- we exported our problem and encouraged 5% of our population to emigrate to the US, Canada and Australia. We paid people to leave.
- we drove the birthrate down
- we created extra land (we reclaimed the province of Flevoland from the sea)
In the 60s we first found out that due to our emigration policy we lacked young people of working age, so we started to encourage immigration. Ever since our economy has been dependent on immigration: permanent immigrants, mainly from muslim countries, highly-skilled expats and migrant workers from Eastern Europe who are planning to return home at some point. All those people need to be housed, so this creates even more pressure on the housing market. This creates a negative feedback loop: as more adults move here, we need more housing that we don't have, our population becomes more unbalanced because young people don't have families due to the housing shortage, so we need more adults to move here, etc. The massive housing shortage has pushed the birthrate down to about 1,5 now. It's much more difficult now to emigrate to countries where Dutch people can easily assimilate: the US, Canada and Australia now have much more strict immigration policies. And for environmental reasons we don't want to reclaim more land or build over the last few spots of nature that we still have.
So I guess we're basically stuck in the same situation, except we now have a population of nearly 18 million, and unlike back then, our population is now mostly adults, so less people per housing unit. Most political parties see one of two solutions:
- Give up on economic growth, let the big companies and expats go away, our economy will take a hit, but we'll accept a lower standard of living.
- Accept that we're dependent on immigration, encourage immigration, housing will continue to be a problem until the babyboom generation dies, accept that due to large-scale immigration our language and culture will eventually change. In my city this is already happening, English is becoming the main language spoken in public instead of Dutch and more and more schools are teaching exclusively in English.
Neither of those solutions is particularly appealing to me. I guess the third option is to encourage people to leave again. But maybe this time not the young families like in the 1950s. Maybe people like me, childless people without close familie ties, would be the best candidates to emigrate. But in most other locations, my job prospects would be extremely low (since I don't speak the language and my skills are hard to transfer) so that's why so few people want to leave. A girl from my school moved to the Ukraine to start a farm. Can't really see myself doing that.
A fourth option for the short- to medium term would be, changing laws so it's easier for unrelated people to share a home.
@seattlecyclone is right about that. There's this moral judgement that a family should be a man, a wife, two kids and a dog. Two men or two women with kids and a pet is also acceptable in my country these days. But several unrelated adults, living in one house, that's something weird that we don't want to encourage. It would also help a lot if subsidies were granted to individuals and not to households, like
@Morning Glory said. In my country "stacking" of several subsidies/benefits in one house is a big political issue. We feel that people need to take care of everyone who live under their roof without help from the government. But that's not how it works with roommates.
RE: renting in Germany (and most of Europe). The reason why renting is so popular is exactly
because of tenant protection laws. People know that once they've secured a rental, they can stay there and raise their family and don't have to uproot them. It's also normal here that homes don't come with floors, curtains, kitchens, appliances etc so renters have to invest quite a lot in a property. They don't want to do that for a property that they might have to leave in a year. In my country, we changed tenant protection laws a couple of years ago to allow yearly short-term rental contracts. The idea was that this might increase the supply of housing, that people would rent their properties out for the short term instead of leaving them empty. Well, that didn't work out. Almost every new rental contract from a for-profit landlord is a limited term contract now. Now rentals have become uncertain, an increasing amount of people are looking to buy, so they can get certainty. They would have been fine living in a regular rental for a long time, but they feel uncomfortable starting a family in a rental that they could be kicked out of within a year.
I think that's one major difference between my parents (Babyboom) generation and mine (Milennial). When our parents were young adults, in the 70s and 80s, there were also lots of challenges. Life wasn't easy back then either. But all jobs and all rentals were long-term, so once they got a job and a rented place, they knew they were fairly secure. They didn't have to buy a house unless they really wanted to for some reason. They could only be fired from their job or kicked out of their home for cause. In my generation, we have luxuries that our parents didn't have (like internet, foreign travel and more access to education) but a lot more people are in a precarious situation where their house and their job could diseappear any moment.
@Bloop Bloop Reloaded I don't agree with those laws either but that's the way it is in many locations. In my city, you need a permit to live with roommates (3 bedrooms or more, with two people in two bedrooms you can pretend you're a couple). Existing permits can't be revoked, but there's a blanket ban on new permits in almost all cheap neighbourhoods (including mine) and there needs to be a minimum distance of 30 meters between each unit with a roommate permit. It's not hard to find a room in a shared house, but as I said in one of my earlier posts, all of those situations are illegal. So the renters have 0 security, can't vote, can't renew their passport, etc. I agree that's totally ridiculous but these are the laws in many places around the world. Homeowners don't want to live next to roommates and they are the people that vote. Low-income people aren't a big political priority.
