Housing corporation blacklists leaving people homeless
Housing corporations are allowed to keep blacklists of bad tenants to protect other tenants from extremely aggressive neighbors and landlords from notorious rent defaulters or drug labs. But more and more people are ending up on these lists for lighter offenses and some are ending up homeless as a result, NOS reports.
Researcher Nienke Boesveldt has followed a group of around 600 homeless people since 2018 and sees more and more people ending up on these types of blacklists. “People who don’t smash everything up and who, in my opinion, a housing corporation should be able to deal with.”
NOS spoke to two people who have been homeless for four years after ending up on Eindhoven housing corporation Trudo’s blacklist - a man in his seventies and his adult child. Formally, they’re considered undesirable tenants in Eindhoven and the surrounding area until the end of this year, but in practice, they also can’t find a home elsewhere in the country. Housing corporations all over the country require a positive statement from the previous landlord, and they can’t afford to get a home in the private sector. So for four years, they have been wandering around the Netherlands, staying in holiday parks, barns, bus shelters - over 110 locations so far.
The two compare their situation to the benefits scandal. “There, agencies had managed to label people as ‘fraudsters.’ And could then do whatever they wanted. With us, it happened with the label ‘nuisance maker.’”
Not all blacklisted tenants become homeless, but many do. There are eight in the group researcher Boesveldt is following. “You can always ask yourself: what’s the idea behind it?” she told the broadcaster. “What do you achieve with this? Has enough thought been given to it? Do people do better when they end up on the streets, does society improve in any way? My answer would be: no, of course not.”
It is unclear how many people are on these types of blacklists in the Netherlands because Aedes, the umbrella organization for housing corporations, doesn’t keep track. Trudo, which manages 5,600 homes, told NOS it had 66 people blacklisted. In Limburg, the blacklist consists of some 440 people this past summer. “That makes it very likely that we’re talking about thousands of people nationwide,” the broadcaster said.
