Two ways to speed up construction
The Dutch housing shortage is worsening, but the annual number of newly built homes is reaching record lows. The shortage already creates a national feeling of anger, and if this continues, this may boil over. An acceleration in new construction is desperately needed. Here are two practicable ideas for achieving that acceleration.
Small scale projects
A first obstacle to acceleration is that the Netherlands has a lot of small construction projects. To give an example, all the housing projects on the drawing board in the province of Limburg add up to an impressive 43,000 or so homes. But of those projects, about 15,000 consist of only one home. Each plan must be reviewed by the municipality, and of course it is faster to review a plan of one dwelling than a plan of, say, 300 dwellings. But not 300 times faster, because reviewing and approving a plan consists in part of fixed procedures where the time required is the same for each plan. So if we want to be faster, we have to prioritize larger projects.
The highest administrative judge, the Council of State, recently announced that this is the approach they are going to take. It would be good if all administrative layers required to approve a housing project followed this example. If all municipalities and administrative agencies deal with the largest projects first, this creates an immediate acceleration of construction production. In addition, it gives a strong incentive to the market to come up with large project proposals so that that acceleration becomes permanent.
Red Contours
A second impulse is needed to really bring about that increase in scale. Ever since former Minister Pronk made the idea of Red Contours the cornerstone of spatial planning, we have been building primarily within cities. That leads to smaller projects than the country was used to before, and since more people live in the immediate vicinity of a project in inner-city areas than in rural areas, it also leads to more protests and lengthy appeals. So Red Contours lead to delays in new construction.
Yet that policy is ostensibly popular, as surveys of Dutch citizens consistently indicate that people would rather not sacrifice green space for new construction. However, those surveys never ask for a trade-off between national housing needs and green space. Moreover, few people realize that very little green space needs to be sacrificed to completely solve the housing shortage.
Towards a solution
Compared to the countries around us, the Netherlands has little nature, but a lot of land with agricultural use: a total of almost 60% of the total land area. The proportion of land designated for housing is dwarfed by this, at 6%. On that land stands the total Dutch housing stock of about 8.2 million homes. We will need about 800,000 additional houses in the coming decades, i.e. an expansion of the housing stock of about 10%. At a constant housing density, this would mean that the proportion of land with residential use would have to grow from 6% to 6.6%, and if we were to do this only at the expense of agricultural land, the share of this would go down from 60% to 59.4%: a barely perceptible difference that 99% of farmers would not notice. Impulse two, then, is to go back to the spatial planning policy the country has been successful with for decades, and start building outside the city again, at large scale. These two incentives alone will not be enough to completely solve the shortages in the housing market, but they will provide an acceleration in construction, and that is an essential step toward the solution.
