The Netherlands invited a top UN official to investigate the Dutch housing crisis. His findings? The crisis is a result of poor housing policy, not immigrants.
Last month, a shockingly large proportion of Dutch people voted for the far-right, anti-immigration PVV party leader Geert Wilders in the Dutch national elections.
Wilders’ policy is largely anti-immigration, and he likes to justify this by blaming immigrants for the country’s problems — including the current housing crisis.
However, UN special rapporteur Balakrishnan Rajagopal has laid this myth to rest.
A failure in policy
Speaking at a press conference on Thursday, Rajagopal explained, “This housing crisis is not due to migration and refugees but due to the failure to recognise and protect housing as a human right.”
According to his findings, the Dutch housing crisis is a result of poor housing policy that has been left to fester for years:
“This crisis has been building over a couple of decades through an active policy of encouraging the market to replace the government in the provision of housing,” Rajagopal said.
*Flashback to when the Dutch housing minster told a woman to get a boyfriend to afford a house.*
Immigrants are not to blame
A popular narrative in the Netherlands right now is the claim that over-immigration is to blame for the current housing shortage, Rajagopal disputes this.
Many like to point to overcrowded asylum centres and make the claim that the Netherlands is falling victim to insurmountable waves of refugees and immigrants.
The claim popularised by Wilders is that these people are then taking homes from the Dutch.
However, Rajagopal has found that the overcrowded centres are “not due to hordes of new arrivals in the country” but instead come down to a backlog at Dutch immigration services, which leaves people stuck in the centres.
On top of this, he explains that the housing crisis is “as much a crisis of unaffordability of housing” as it is a crisis in the number of homes available.
Rajagopal will present his full report along with recommendations to the UN Human Rights Council in March.
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Hi Sarah,
As a foreigner, I question the view of the UN in the article entitled “Internationals do NOT cause the Dutch housing crisis, says UN official: Here’s what is to blame.”
First, there are two types of foreigners in the country – immigrants/expats and refugees. The UN official is looking solely to refugees on the impact.
First, without immigration, the Netherlands would have fewer people year over year and the housing crisis would not be as deep. As a result, immigration clearly has a connection with the increase in prices.
Second, your article provides that “However, Rajagopal has found that the overcrowded centres are “not due to hordes of new arrivals in the country” but instead come down to a backlog at Dutch immigration services, which leaves people stuck in the centres.” This is false logic. The fact that there is a backlog at Dutch immigration services seems to indicate that there are too many refugees for the Netherlands to process. Thus, it is a false premise to say that immigration is not an issue when there are overcrowded centers. There would be no backlog if immigration were not an issue.
Third, expats/legal immigrants clearly have some impact on housing prices. Most of us rent/buy mid-sized apartments/houses in the country which would otherwise sit empty (given the number of immigrants as a percentage of the population). Empty houses lead to lower prices.
Fourth, your wrote that Mr. Rajagopal explained “that the housing crisis is “as much a crisis of unaffordability of housing” as it is a crisis in the number of homes available.” If you build new homes, then houses become more affordable. There is a clear correlation. Further, the more regulations on how homes can be built increase the prices of homes because costs to build them increase. As the Netherlands is one of the more regulated countries in the world, houses naturally are more expensive to build and thus need to be priced higher. Unless you look at all components that affect housing prices – supply (# of houses) and demand (# of people wanting them) of houses in a given location with the regulations it takes to build new ones, then you have the housing prices. Other factors that impact housing prices include interest rates / the money supply and government regulations/taxes.
Governments can try to influence the housing prices by further regulating them as it seems to be doing with rentals or taxing them in various ways – however this tends to reduce the supply of building new houses and dries up the number of units available as rentals.
To be fair, I don’t know if you discussed this article directly with Mr. Rajagopal or whether this was pulled from other news sources. However, it is always better to question what anyone says when what they say makes no sense.
Best regards,
Dan