In the Netherlands 95 per cent of all rents are regulated. The Housing Minister announced in her Rental Letter of November 2004 that this would be reduced to 75 per cent. At the same time she wants the housing associations to contribute €250 million a year to the increasing public expenditure...

The new European Reform Treaty, which was agreed politically in 2007, includes a separate protocol which allows European member states considerable freedom to organize and run their social amenities - including social housing. It appears that housing associations are eligible for state support,...

Recently, the Netherlands has been pursuing a new policy of urban renewal. Old urban renewal concentrated on pre-war urban districts and had a technical orientation. The predominant shift in tenure was from commercial to social rented housing. New urban renewal focuses on post-war urban...

The most recent population forecasts tell us that the number of people living in the Netherlands will decrease after 2030, and the number of households after 2035. A long period of housing surpluses may be expected to follow the post-war era, a period marked by housing shortages. According to...

The size of the Dutch social housing sector, with a 32 per cent share of the housing stock, has prompted concerns over the 'level playing field' of competition between social and commercial housing providers. In 2007, this concern culminated in a complaint from the Dutch Association of...

Housing markets are essentially regional. We observe a differential territorial segmentation of housing markets: for high-income groups and expensive dwellings the search area is larger than for low-income groups and cheap accommodations. But there is also something like a national housing...

The increasing demand for space determines much of the approach to spatial planning in countries with a high population density like the Netherlands. In the next three decades more land will be needed for housing, work, traffic, leisure, nature and water. There is only one sector that will yield...