Sustainable Communities and Urban Housing: A Comparative European Perspective by Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway & Nessa Winston

Author:Montserrat Pareja-Eastaway & Nessa Winston [Pareja-Eastaway, Montserrat & Winston, Nessa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780367736569
Google: 1eT1zQEACAAJ
Goodreads: 55835259
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2020-12-18T00:00:00+00:00

Barriers, drivers and challenges for sustainable communities in the Netherlands

As in many other countries, the GFC has reduced the prospects for achieving sustainable communities in the Netherlands. Several budget cuts and welfare state reforms are not only crisis-oriented, but also due to the government’s determination to comply with the ‘3 per cent rule’ of the European Commission. The Netherlands has complied with this rule since 2014, but this does not mean that the government has money to spend on creating or maintaining sustainable communities. A clear and relevant example is the fact that the Rutte I government (2010–2012) cut all funding for the Priority Neighbourhoods Approach, the backbone of Dutch neighbourhood regeneration policy. From a sustainability point of view, this programme was relatively successful in creating more variation in housing sizes, types, quality, tenure in target areas, improving public spaces, increasing housing career opportunities for middle-income households, and de-concentration of high shares of deprived residents (see Kleinhans, 2012). Its termination created substantial barriers with regard to the management and financing of area-based approaches towards achieving sustainable communities. In the same vein, housing associations played a fundamental role in terms of restructuring the social housing sector and increasing its energy efficiency, in particular through improving insulation, smart heating systems (e.g. heat pumps) and the use of sustainable energy through solar panels. Research has shown that some modest progress has been made by housing associations in this respect (Filippidou et al., 2014). Further progress is significantly hindered by the lack of investment opportunities for housing associations.

Other barriers are related to legal changes. The functioning of housing associations has come under scrutiny as a result of allegations of illegal state support (Priemus and Gruis, 2011) and the disclosure of fraud and financial misconduct among large housing associations in the Netherlands. The most infamous example was Vestia, the largest housing association in the country, which came close to bankruptcy in 2012 as a result of investing in risky derivatives. Consequently, public opinion turned strongly against the housing associations, partly because their CEOs tend to receive huge salaries and drive expensive company cars (see Boelhouwer and Priemus (2014) for a detailed discussion). A Parliamentary Inquiry on Housing Associations documented all of the abuses in the social housing sector and issued several recommendations (Van Vliet et al., 2014), some of which were included in the new Housing Act (Woningwet).

This act, established in July 2015, has significantly limited the tasks, competences and investment capacities of housing associations. First, the legal core business of housing associations is (again) limited to building and managing social rented housing for low-income households. Commercial project development is out of their scope. The only exceptions are efforts to regenerate deprived neighbourhoods and population shrinkage areas (krimpgebieden) by means of urban restructuring – that is, the demolition of social rented housing and construction of more expensive rented and owner-occupied housing. Housing associations may still try to improve the liveability (leefbaarheid) of neighbourhoods through social investment, but the scope will be strictly limited by performance agreements with local authorities.

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