Netherlands needs to build another 1 million homes after 2030: Housing Minister

The Netherlands will have to build another 1 million homes in the ten years after 2030, even if immigration slows down significantly, outgoing Housing Minister Hugo de Jonge told De Telegraaf. He is mainly looking at areas outside the Randstad for these homes.

De Jonge’s current housing construction goal is 981,000 new homes up to and including 2030 to solve the housing shortage. That is increasingly looking like an impossible task. And the work won’t stop there, the CDA Minister told the Telegraaf. “We already know that the assignment could be of the same size between 2030 and 2040,” he said.

De Jonge wants to focus more on large-scale housing construction. In the coming period, he will identify potential sites. He is considering the area between Groningen and Assen, with an extension towards Emmen, the Gelderland city triangle of Apeldoorn, Zutphen, and Deventer, the Eindhoven region, Twente, and Zuid-Limburg. The fact that there are no Randstad locations in that list is deliberate, De Jonge said. “We can’t all continue to live in a huddle in the Randstad.”

Last week, the Economic Institute for Construction (EIB) urged De Jonge to stop focusing solely on large-scale construction because these projects are hard to get off the ground, especially in the current economic climate. The EIB suggested letting municipalities add a street or two to their town or city and build up to 50 homes on their outskirts. According to the EIB, that could achieve up to 200,000 homes within four years.