Amsterdam to mix students, refugees in 1,000 new apartments

The city of Amsterdam will soon start building a thousand new temporary apartments that will house refugees and students. The homes will be located spread over five locations and be used for 10 years, the municipality announced on Wednesday, RTL Nieuws reports. The municipality deliberately chose to house students and refugees together, in the hope that it will help integration for the refugees, alderman Laurens Ivens said. He hopes that a kind of buddy system will happen, where students help refugees get used to Amsterdam culture. "For status holders that is the recipe for integration", Ivens said to Trouw. The city is already looking at different sites for this project and have found four suitable sites so far. A study called Housing Vulnerable Groups revealed that Amsterdam will need a total of 9,900 homes between 2016 and 2018 to house various vulnerable groups, including refugees who received a residency status.