As Dutch villages continue to trickle empty, one border town managed to stop the outflow

Dutch villages and towns are trickling empty as residents leave for the cities where there are more facilities, homes, and jobs available, according to figures that Statistics Netherlands (CBS) published on Monday. But one town - Megchelen, an Achteroek town on the border with Germany - has managed to stem the outflow.

Between 2011 and 2021, 55 percent of villages with less than 1,000 inhabitants saw their population shrink. The same was true for 45 percent of villages and towns with between 1,000 and 5,000 inhabitants. According to CBS, the population decline in these towns and villages was due to more people moving away than settling there.

“Urbanization in the Netherlands has increased further,” CBS said. “Regionally, there was mainly growth in the most densely populated west and mainly shrinking in the North.” In the western Netherlands, 30 percent of the population centers shrank. In Groningen, Friesland, and Drenthe, 67 percent of cities, towns, and villages saw their population size decrease.

Megchelen, a small town with just under 1,000 residents on the border with Germany, also dealt with a dwindling population, until a group of residents decided to step in and stop the outflow.

According to Dorien Wissing, 57, younger residents were leaving the town because the city offered more. So she and a group of other visitors decided to intervene. It started with opening a local supermarket. She volunteers there as a cashier. “I thought: If I don’t do it, there will soon be nothing left for the younger generation,” she told AD.

The group of residents set it up in a vacant space at the village pub, selling the basic daily groceries. “But coffee is more important here than buying groceries,” Wim Ratering, 70, another of the involved locals said. “The shop is mainly intended as a social place. A woman in her 70s came to buy one item twice a day. It was purely about the conversation. Nice, isn’t it.”

Thanks to locals raising their hands to volunteer and fill gaps where needed, the town still has a primary school with over 60 pupils, a pub, a vibrant club life, and even its own football club with a first team. And the town’s population has been stable at just under 1,000 inhabitants for years.

The next thing the locals are tackling is the housing market. Like in the rest of the Netherlands, affordable housing is a problem. “It is very difficult and almost unaffordable for you people to find a house here,” Wissing said.

Local residents are in the process of constructing over 50 homes, spread over several locations, in the coming years. “All projects were started by private individuals from the town itself,” said George Kiwitz, 83, who is behind five of the new homes. That is Megchelen, he said. “If others don’t do it, we’ll roll up our sleeves ourselves.”