Building a whole new village to tackle the housing shortage. The provincial VVD faction for Brabant has that plan. It is roughly a village the size of Sint Willebrord or Moergestel.
Party chairman Roel Gbraken came up with the plan during the discussion of the budget for 2024. “We are doing a lot of construction in the city centers and in villages there will be ‘an additional street’, as Minister De Jonge often says. But with that we will reach 130,000 homes that we want to build before 2030,” Gstromen said. “And so we want to conduct research into a location for large-scale housing construction in Brabant. So just add a core.” The VVD member, whose party is in the coalition, then thinks of a village with 3,000 to 5,000 homes.
“I had to chuckle for a moment,” says Ivo Dieleman, landscape architect and urban planner from the MINT agency in Breda. “It’s election time. It’s really a trial balloon.” He thinks it is a better idea to expand existing villages and towns.
‘Takes years’
Is the VVD idea feasible? “It will really take years. It will take you ten to fifteen years before you can even start,” he laughs. He outlines: “You have to find a location. You may have to purchase or expropriate land from different owners. Anyone can object and delay the process.”
A progress report on housing construction that the province presented last week showed that the pace has slowed. In the past two years, almost 27,000 homes were completed in Brabant ‘in record time’. But partly as a result of the war in Ukraine and increased commodity prices, significantly fewer homes will be added this year and next year than budgeted.
The VVD, together with BBB, submitted a motion to start research into the feasibility of a completely new village and to challenge residents to come up with creative ideas through a competition. “We must do everything we can to get Brabant unlocked and that requires creativity. To build more homes, unnecessary regulatory pressure and obstacles must be removed. Not just with regard to nitrogen.”
Living with the farmer
The BBB, the largest faction in Brabant, which dropped out of the coalition negotiations and is now in the opposition, advocated the construction of flexible housing in the ‘new village’ and proposed using the edges of agricultural land for this. According to party chairman John Frenken, farmers are prepared to ‘temporarily surrender livestock to create nitrogen space’ and to make their land available on long lease for flexible housing. “That way the farmers also make money from it.”
If it were all feasible, Ivo has some fun suggestions. He brainstorms out loud: “If we have to build a Brabant village, then there must be a pub. A good baker with Brabant sausage bread cannot be missed, of course. A village must have a soul, it should not become Almere.”