Threats to the Dutch Unitary Rental Market

Abstract

Social rental housing has once again captured a strong position on the Dutch political agenda. This has happened especially since the European Commission sent a letter to the Dutch government indicating that the Dutch social rental sector was not considered EU-proof from the viewpoint of the European Union's competition policy. The letter coincided with criticisms from Dutch politicians that housing associations had not been performing well enough for some time, given their abundant resources. However, in an international context, the Dutch social rental sector is often regarded as a good system for providing affordable housing to those who need it, without the sector being marginalized and stigmatized. Jim Kemeny has classified this market as one in which the social rental sector in due course competes with the private rental sector on equal or almost equal terms as a unitary rental market. The starting point of this paper is whether the achievement of a unitary rental sector is threatened by the EU's competition policy. It will also discuss two other possible threats to the future of the Dutch unitary rental market: the threat to take surplus capital away from housing associations and have government decide on what to invest; and the attractiveness of home-ownership to households. We conclude that the character of the Dutch unitary rental sector is indeed under threat, although mostly by stealth.EU competition policy, housing, social rental housing, the Netherlands, unitary rental market,

Two Types of Rental System? An Exploratory Empirical Test of Kemeny's Rental System Typology

“…at Bibliotheek TU Delft on January 13, 2009 http://usj.sagepub.com Downloaded from Do these correspond with the mechanisms predicted in Kemeny's theory or are there different processes at work? Some research has already been carried out in this domain by Hoekstra (2003) and Elsinga et al (2005 and2008b) but only in relation to the Netherlands. Broadening this research to other countries is therefore desirable.…”

Housing and positive European integration: permissible state aid for improving the urban environment

“…However, some state aid is compatible with the common market, and there is scope for interpretation by the European Commission (Blauberger 2009b). Policies on urban redevelopment and the production of new affordable housing environments are significantly affected by negative integration since they involve state aid policies (Adair et al 2003;Korthals Altes 2006;Elsinga et al 2008;Priemus and Gruis 2011;Colomb and Santinha 2014;Taşan-Kok et al 2013). In this light, it is therefore remarkable that in the Apeldoorn case, as we will see below, the Commission ruled that state aid was permissible because it was deemed to be in line with the agenda of positive integration in the field of urban redevelopment and inner-city housing production.…”

Why housing wealth and welfare?

“…'Bricks and mortar' subsidies were replaced by demand (and increasingly means-tested) subsidies, with private landlords housing an increasing number of lowincome households on housing allowances. Similar transfers of statemarket responsibilities were later adopted in other Western European economies, such as Sweden (for example, Turner and Whitehead, 2002;Holmqvist and Magnusson Turner, 2014) and the Netherlands (for example, Priemus and Dieleman, 2002;Elsinga et al, 2008), as the logic of marketization began to take hold. Housing was a particularly vulnerable element of social policy and, unlike most other social services, markets remained influential to the provision and allocation of housing, with policies often correcting rather than replacing the market in ensuring broader access to decent and affordable housing (Bengtsson, 2001(Bengtsson, , 2012.…”