Students regularly left with no heat, hot water in DUWO-run Amsterdam housing complex
Students living in an Amsterdam apartment building run by DUWO are growing frustrated with the education agency. They’re facing regular breakdowns of heating, hot water, and WiFi that sometimes last weeks, and DUWO seems unable to come up with a permanent solution, Parool reported.
Residents of the housing complex on Caroline MacGillavrylaan in Amsterdam-Oost have been complaining for years. “My heating hasn’t been working for weeks,” 20-year-old German student Natalie Moeller told the newspaper. Her tiny student room is covered in blankets, and she has a small, portable heater under the table to keep her legs warm while she studies. “I’ve built a whole stup to stay warm.”
For the past two years, students have been keeping track of when the heating malfunctions. Since 2024, it’s broken down every few months, leading to cold temperatures in the apartments and no hot water. Heating is not the only problem. The WiFi regularly breaks down, there are recurring leaks in the common areas, and the washing machines are out of order.
The worst outage so far happened in November, residents told Parool, showing the newspaper their communications with the landlord. Residents had no heating and no hot water for over three weeks.
Student Bas Gerritsen (25) went to shower at Lab42, a nearby University of Amsterdam building. The building has a shower that is not intended for him. ”But at some point, I just had to,” Gerritsen said to the newspaper. “Everything was greasy, and my hair was sticking out.”
According to the student, who has been living in the flat for four years, the problems are very unpredictable. “Sometimes I have no heating for a few hours, but sometimes it has lasted for weeks. My room cools down to 15 degrees Celsius. When I report a problem, DUWO sometimes sends someone to repair it. Often, it breaks again shortly after, and then another part is missing. I often get no response at all to a report.”
The cold is unbearable, several students said. One student told Parool that she resorted to washing herself with water heated in the kettle. 26-year-old Azka sleeps in thermal underwear and four blankets on top of her duvet. “This is truly awful,” student Nikki Eng said. “I'm from Singapore, so I'm very far from home. I have no social support network here. My time studying in Amsterdam has been great so far, but this situation is really putting a damper on it."
According to Jeroen Koster of the !Woon Foundation, which assists residents who have problems with their landlord, DUWO is failing these students. The Rent Assessment Committee’s defects manual clearly states that a living room must be able to reach a certain temperature, around 20 degrees. “If that can’t happen, it’s a defect.”
What complicates the matter is that DUWO only fixes the defects temporarily, Koster said. “You can go to the Rent Assessment Committee if a specific defect hasn’t been fixed. But if you want to address the recurring nature of the problems, you have to go to court to demand that the system be fixed.”
DUWO acknowledged to Parool that it has been experiencing outages in the building for “a long time” and says it fully understands the “residents’ dissatisfaction.” DUWO: 'We are working very hard with the various parties to resolve these problems as quickly and permanently as possible."
