Friday, December 10, 2004

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"There is so much demand for good housing in Amsterdam that the number of applicants exceeds the number of new appartments. So they will have a lottery."

I recall feeling chilled, literally, by these words in your earlier post. The notion of applying for housing, rather than shopping for it, is foreign to me. Love to know more about it works. Who mediates between supply & demand, if not a voluntary marketplace?

Glad you started publishing in English, incidentally. You have a comfortable vernacular style that, compared to USA bloggers, reminds me of a cross between James Lileks and Andrew Sullivan.

John Piper (ip:68.13.246.13) 10 December 2004 - 23:59 uur

Hmm. I just finished a college course on urban and regional planning. There are some cosmic differences between urban planning in the US and Northern Europe. Almost nowhere else are the differences between the two more stark and far apart.

But I was curious, are there rent controls and price controls on housing in the Netherlands?

Anondson (ip:209.98.144.184) 10 December 2004 - 0:58 uur

Well, there is a marketplace. Trouble is, the supply of space in the Netherlands is rather limited, and if you want to live near the city center, like I do, space is just plain rare. In that sense, it's comparable to living in the city center of NYC or San Francisco. There's more to it than money. I could buy a huge house in the suburbs at any given time, but that's not where I want to be.

Houses that have already been built are not subject to any sort of pricing controls, as you can see at http://www.funda.nl (site for real estate in the Netherlands). Houses that haven't, are usually sold at a fixed price rather than through an auction system. I'm not exactly sure why it's done this way.

A number of the houses in the project I wanted to live in, are sponsored by the government. It's not one of those I applied for; my bad luck is purely due to the fact that demand greatly exceeds supply.

And yes, there are rent controls on some houses (not the one I rent), but those will be liberalized in 2007 to encourage the free market.

Arjan Dasselaar (ip:82.161.93.35) 10 December 2004 - 10:26 uur

Heh.

Speaking of NYC and San Francisco, both are among the tiny handful of municipalities in the US that use rent controls. Rent controls has had a severe effect upon the condition (amount and quality) of housing there. :) And you've seen just what it is.

Of course corruption is also a factor in New York City. ;)

Anondson (ip:209.98.144.184) 10 December 2004 - 20:23 uur

Back in the 1990's a couple living in the Hague told me that there were laws limiting how large an apartment they could rent. (X square feet for a single person, more for a couple, and so on.) These laws were enacted after WWII to deal with the emergency housing shortage due to the devastation of the war, but had never been repealed. Are any such laws still in effect?

pst314 (ip:67.184.49.8) 10 December 2004 - 16:32 uur

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