Haven’t found room yet? Then you should stay away. This is roughly the message several universities, including Leiden, are offering foreign students. Whereas the University of Amsterdam is considering imposing an admissions quota on international students, Leiden continues its foreign student recruitment campaigns, with great success: the past few years, Leiden has welcomed more and more students with a non-Dutch nationality. Provided they can find a room, that is.
Desperation is setting in among those in need of a room. Requests on Facebook housing pages look like Tinder profiles, complete with a carefully compiled selection of photos (nice and casual on the beach, lots of sunglasses) and a charming bio, in the hope of finding a match.
That is not surprising, because the student housing market is like a never-ending game of musical chairs: there are too many people and not enough places. And while the municipality is building more, the number of students just keeps growing and growing. It is impossible to keep up.
To put it in numbers: The Netherlands has a shortage of 26,800 student residences, according to the National Student Housing Monitor, which was published last Thursday. In the coming eight years, this number will rise to 44,800 – an additional shortage of 18,000 student residences.
Also read: Students struggle in their desperation to find a home: ‘I’m at my wits’ end’
Last week the Dutch government presented a plan to deal with the housing shortage. Minister for housing Hugo de Jonge en education minister Robbert Dijkgraaf presented a plan to create 60,000 new student homes in the next 8 years. To achieve that, government aims to use newly built homes more efficiently and wants to stimulate students to live in with a landlord.
New deals with surrounding municipalities have also been made, the press release announces. The government is investing 37 million euro from a support fund in the new plans.
Minister Dijkgraaf also responded positively to the request of Dutch universities to limit the influx of new (international) students. As of yet, there are no legal means to achieve this. Early next year Dijkgraaf wil present a proposal with which universities will be able to 'manage the influx, with out diminishing the advantages of internationalisation.'
SCAMMERS AND DODGY LANDLORDS
And universities will continue to grow, the Ministry of Education has predicted: by 2.7 percent, which is almost eight thousand students a year. A considerable number of them – 5,100 – are from abroad. The National Monitor claims that 95 percent of the increase in room shortage is due to internationals, because they are in far more urgent need of a room than Dutch students: commuting from their parents’ place is not an option for them.
And it is precisely for these students that the room search is particularly difficult. Partly because Dutch students reject them pre-emptively in their advertisements (‘NO INTERNATIONALS!’), partly because they cannot plan visits to view the residence because they are abroad, and partly because there is simply not enough room.
Scammers and dodgy landlords take advantage of this. The scarce selection on popular accommodation sites no longer consists of ‘normal’ rooms or apartments. For example, you will also find Budget Hotel on there: a hostel in Hazerswoude-Rijndijk where you can also book rooms by the month.
In a WhatsApp group with almost three hundred people in search of housing, screenshots recently emerged of a man offering a room in his apartment. He did not really care about the rent, he wrote. A small note: he used to occasionally share his bed with his previous housemate, and he would like to continue doing so with the next one.
2,700 STUDENT RESIDENCES
It is virtually impossible to keep pace with the housing shortage. In 2017, the municipality of Leiden set the ambitious target of supplying 2,700 residences by 2024 to alleviate the housing shortage, which was already a pressing issue back then. That would more or less resolve the shortage, according to the estimates at the time. The problem: those estimates have changed in the meantime, but the plans have not. Leiden is still on schedule for those 2,700 homes, but the need for residences has increased: 3,900 by 2028, as calculated by the National Monitor last year. This is assuming that all building plans will go ahead as planned – gas wars, energy crises and socially disruptive staff shortages were not yet topics of concern at the time.
Remarkably, the university did not agree with this view. ‘The university does not recognise this growth curve’, the councillor wrote to the municipal council at the time. The university expected ‘no exponential growth in Leiden for new English-language master’s programmes’, and predicted that the housing shortage would only be 400 in 2028 – a difference of 3,500 in comparison to other predictions.
The issue is still ‘a topic of discussion’ between the municipal authorities and the university, according to the most recent municipal councillor’s letter on the matter, dated last April.
Still, clear expansion plans are in place, especially for The Hague: in 2020, the university presented a strategy for the The Hague campus, adding two additional study programmes and three thousand extra students. Vice-chairman Martijn Ridderbos said at the time that the Executive Board would discuss the increased housing shortage with the municipality of The Hague.
Doubling
There is little sign that this growth will abate. The number of university students in the Netherlands has doubled in the past twenty years. In ten years’ time, the number of students rose from just over 20 thousand to almost 35 thousand.
However, the National Student Housing Monitor reports that while we are experiencing a university boom, the growth of universities of applied sciences is stagnating. The tipping point will be around 2029, at which point there will be more university students than students enrolled in universities of applied sciences; and that is a first.
25 percent of all students live in studio apartments. In 2014, this was only 12 percent. Studios are more profitable, because the residents can apply for rent allowance and are therefore able to pay higher rents. This is not just profiteering, it is also a necessity, says Kences, the cooperation organisation for student housing providers such as Duwo. The maximum permitted rent for rooms is too low to enable the construction of new rooms.
Nevertheless, it is a negative development, writes the organisation. ‘Living in rooms contributes to students’ socio-emotional development’, says director Jolan de Bie in a press release. ‘Another advantage of rooms is that they tend to remain available to students because they are less attractive to other target groups. We see this in practice: after a few years, studios that were built for students are rented out for higher prices to other target groups that have more to spend. And that costs students dearly.’