Few home seekers are willing to share one

Housing corporations are promoting home sharing to alleviate the growing housing shortage in the Netherlands. However, only a small group of home seekers are actually prepared to share with someone else who is not in their family, EenVandaag found in a survey of 25,000 members of its Opinion Panel.

Home sharing involves multiple tenants living in a single home without forming a joint household. The tenants have their own bedrooms and sometimes a bathroom for themselves, but they share facilities like the living room, kitchen, and balcony or garden.

Of the respondents who are currently looking for social housing, only 14 percent would be willing to share a home with people who don’t belong to their household. The willingness is slightly higher (27 percent) among private sector home seekers and young people under the age of 35, but these groups also have reservations.

“As a thirty-something who has lived with housemates for 12 years, I simply need my own space,” one respondent said. “As a single person, it is impossible to find anything. But the thought of having to live in a room again makes me very unhappy.”

The tenants who would consider home sharing have conditions for this. 83 percent believe that the rent should be lower than if they had their own rental home. They also believe there should be no “fiscal disadvantage” and that sharing a home should not affect things like their benefits. Another 83 percent want to be able to choose who they share with, calling it “essential” that housemates have the same outlook on life as they do. 73 percent only want to share a home with people they already know.

In general, 36 percent of respondents consider home sharing a positive development. They think it a good “interim solution” for young people who want to leave their parental home. However, many stressed that this has to be temporary and that home sharers must get the opportunity to move into their own homes within a few years.

Almost half (49 percent) are negative about home sharing. They don’t see it as a lasting solution to the housing shortage, fear that it will come at the expense of affordable housing for families and couples, and are annoyed that home seekers now have to make such big compromises because of inadequate policy. “It is crazy that citizens have to solve problems that the government has created,” one respondent said. “For decades, buying a house has been encouraged while there is no balance between buying and renting.”