Over 60% of Netherlands homes "under occupied," Eurostat says

The Netherlands is facing a massive housing shortage. At the same time, 61.1 percent of homes in the Netherlands are “under-occupied,” according to Eurostat. That means there are more bedrooms in the home than people living there, NOS reports.

According to the European statistics office, the Netherlands has one of the highest under-occupancy in the European Union. Only Malta, Cyprus, and Ireland have a higher percentage of homes with more rooms than people. The EU average is 33.6 percent.

Eurostat’s definition of perfect occupancy is that each home must have a living room and a bedroom for every couple, every single adult, every two children under 12, every two children between 12 and 17 of the same sex, and individual children of different sex between 12 and 17. If there are still bedrooms left, the home is under-occupied.

If there are not enough bedrooms, it’s overcrowded. Only 2.9 percent of Dutch homes are overcrowded, the third lowest percentage in the EU after Cyprus (2.2%) and Malta (2.8%). The EU average is 16.8 percent.

Private homeowners decide for themselves how many people live in their homes. But housing corporations, which have the social task of housing people and struggle with long waiting lists, also have many under-occupied homes.

Of the 2.1 million social housing units in the Netherlands, 51 percent are rented to a single-person household, the Housing Corporation Authority calculated for NOS. And of the social housing units that became available each year, 70.5 percent go to a single person, despite many being suitable for two or more single people.

Several housing corporations have started trying to address this under-occupation by renting larger homes to two or more single people - home sharing. The Nijmegen corporation Talis now rents 40 homes to two singles and plans to add 50 more every year, aiming to eventually home-share 2,000 of its 16,000 homes. “We have many large single-family homes, and renting them to one person is a waste of space,” a spokesperson told NOS.

For this project, Talis is converting vacant three-bedroom homes, turning the third bedroom into a second bathroom so that residents have their own sanitary facilities. They share the living room and kitchen. The homes are raffled among interested home seekers, and the winner chooses the second tenant. They can’t be partners, and both must be registered and eligible for social housing.

Aedes, the umbrella organization for housing corporations, is seeing more and more of these types of initiatives, a spokesperson told the broadcaster. “It is a way to help starters and young people, in particular, find housing more quickly. There is now more attention to using the existing housing stock more efficiently.”