Housing association Actium has started installing the last 52 homes of a new flex district on the Groene Dijk in Assen. People who want to live there will still have to be patient. The homes will not be delivered until February 2026.
The flexible homes will be delivered ready-made from Slovakia in the near future. The rectangular residential units in Assen are quickly placed on top of each other using a crane. You can also take them apart again just as easily. Important, according to Actium, because the houses have to go again after about twenty years. The district should actually have been ready in January, but according to Actium that will be at least a month later.
“The construction of the houses takes about four weeks,” says Rob Hoogeveen, housing manager at Actium. “After that, we still have to work on further developing the neighborhood. Registration opens in December, but there will certainly be no people living here before February.” The houses will eventually appear on the housing website Thuiskompas. According to Actium, anyone who thinks they are eligible for the houses can respond. “But if a mother with two children reports, she will probably get priority over others,” says Hoogeveen.
The flex district is a plan by the municipality of Assen and housing association Actium to provide some relief to the overheated housing market. There will be a total of 148 flexible homes, of which 96 have already been in place since May. These are social rental properties, intended for those seeking urgent assistance. These are people who need a house quickly, such as status holders, young people who want to leave their parental home and people who are going through a divorce.
There is a huge demand for the houses, as is evident from the registration procedure for the houses completed in May. Seven hundred people registered for a place in those temporary housing units. “It sometimes seems like a drop in the ocean and it is not that people in Assen suddenly have a shorter waiting list,” says councilor Cor Staal (Christian Union) of the municipality of Assen about the construction of the flex district. “But it has helped the people who now have a home a lot.”
The first residents of the new neighborhood have been living there since last summer and according to the municipality, so far there have been mainly positive comments about the compact houses. The houses are equipped for one, two and four people. “Some people find it a bit small, especially if they used to live in a larger house,” says Staal. “But I also spoke to someone who previously lived in an asylum seeker center and was overjoyed that he now has a kitchen and bathroom to himself.”
Before the neighborhood was built, residents of the Groene Dijk were concerned about possible nuisance from the neighborhood. They were afraid that many different and sometimes vulnerable groups of people together in one neighborhood would not go well. According to the councilor, this is not the case at the moment.