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The Dutch government has named five cities where it wants to see large-scale housebuilding, with 30,000 new homes to be built at an accelerated pace by 2035. The chosen locations are Deventer, Haarlem, Leeuwarden, Maastricht and Weert.
What has been announced
The five sites will receive support from central government, the housing minister, Elanor Boekholt-O’Sullivan, wrote in a letter to parliament. That support is mainly about speed rather than money: “By issuing more permits and issuing them faster, the shovel can go into the ground sooner,” the minister wrote. The aim is to remove the bureaucratic delays that have held up construction.
The five new locations come on top of 21 other large-scale housebuilding sites designated earlier, where the national government is likewise meant to help construction along. Later this year, the minister, who is from the D66 party, intends to name a further five places. The cabinet’s overall ambition is to build 100,000 homes a year, and to keep doing so for years, in response to the country’s severe housing shortage.
No extra money for infrastructure
The most telling detail is what is not on offer. There is no extra money to make the new homes accessible, no additional funding for the roads and railways that a large new district usually requires. Instead, the government says it deliberately looked for places where that would not be a problem. “Locations were explicitly chosen where no additional resources are needed” for infrastructure, the ministry said.
To understand why that matters, it helps to know what happened just weeks ago. It emerged that building on four large housebuilding sites designated by the previous cabinet cannot begin, precisely because there is no money to lay the roads and rail connections needed to reach them. In other words, homes had been planned in places that could not actually be connected up.
Seen against that backdrop, the new approach, choosing only sites that do not need extra infrastructure spending, looks like a way of avoiding a repeat of that failure. But it also points to an unresolved problem: rather than finding the money to make difficult locations work, the government is steering towards the locations that are cheapest to service. That may get homes built faster, but it does not solve the underlying shortage of infrastructure funding that stalled the earlier sites.
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Checked against the usual obstacles
The minister sought to reassure parliament that the five sites had been properly vetted against the many constraints that now complicate building in the Netherlands. The locations were assessed, she said, for water and soil suitability, electricity grid congestion, nitrogen emissions, drinking water and existing business activity, the tangle of environmental and practical limits that has made large-scale development so difficult in a crowded country.
One consequence is that some of the land now earmarked for housing is currently set aside for businesses. The minister said she wants to make “further agreements” with the municipalities involved to find new space for those companies elsewhere.
Why it matters
For a country in the grip of a long housing crisis, any concrete plan to build at scale is significant, and 30,000 homes across five cities is a meaningful addition. The emphasis on faster permits addresses a genuine bottleneck. The open question, underlined by the fate of the previous cabinet’s four sites, is whether choosing the easy locations will be enough, or whether the harder problem of paying for the roads, rails and grid connections that new neighbourhoods need will eventually have to be confronted. For now, the government is betting that speed, and picking its sites carefully, can get more homes built without more money.