The cabinet must again oblige municipalities to give status holders priority in the housing market. It is one of the solutions needed to combat the asylum crisis.
That is what the Migration Advisory Council states in the report A house for status holders that appears today. “In recent years, the housing of status holders (asylum seekers with a residence permit, ed.) has not been sufficiently looked forward to. The state must now radiate that there is an urgent problem,” said Monique Kremer, chair of the independent committee that advises the government.
Housing status holders has long been a major problem. When an asylum seeker receives a residence permit, accommodation must be found for him or her outside an asylum seekers center (AZC). However, due to the crisis in the housing market, only a limited number of homes are available and 17,000 status holders still live in asylum seekers’ centres. As a result, the asylum seekers’ centers are overcrowded and emergency reception locations have been set up everywhere in recent months for newly arrived asylum seekers.
Status holders, asylum seekers, safelanders: what do all these terms mean? Find out here.
In order to get those 17,000 people out of the asylum seekers’ centres, the cabinet must again oblige municipalities to give priority to residence-seeking status holders on the local housing market, the Advisory Council now states. That mandatory ‘declaration of urgency’ was abolished in 2017 by the then minister Stef Blok (VVD). Municipalities can themselves designate status holders as ‘urgent’, just as they can do with other emergency seekers such as divorced women with children who are at risk of becoming homeless or mental health patients who come from an institution.
“With the abolition, the central government has sent the wrong signal to municipalities,” the Advisory Council writes. Chairman Kremer: ,,After that, there was less emphasis on accommodation. The sense of urgency disappeared.” While all Dutch municipalities supplied 23,000 houses for 40,000 status holders in 2016, in 2020 only 7,000 for 12,000 status holders. This increased the backlog.
According to the Council, the housing problem is also caused by the liberalization of the housing market. ‘As a result, the share of social rental housing in the total housing stock has continued to decline. That also limits the possibilities for municipalities to find affordable and suitable housing for status holders.’
Due to the enormous tightness in the housing market, tenants without urgency often have to wait for years and a call to give priority to status holders is extremely sensitive. “I understand that sentiment. Housing should be for everyone. But status holders do not cause the housing crisis. More than 90 percent of social rental housing goes to other groups,” Kremer said.
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After the abolition of the obligation, there was much more discussion in municipal councils about who should or should not be accommodated.
The Advisory Council does not know how many municipalities have actually abolished the urgency statement for beneficiaries after 2017. “It is clear that in the following years there was much more discussion in the municipal councils about who you should or should not accommodate,” says Sander Vergeer, co-author of the report. It is clear that Alkmaar, Lelystad and Castricum have abolished the urgency statement for beneficiaries. According to the Association of Dutch Municipalities, few other municipalities followed their example, a total of about 160 municipalities work with emergency declarations.
Target
If a municipality does not give priority to status holders, this does not mean that they should not accommodate them quickly. Each municipality is given a six-monthly task from the national government: a number of status holders for whom a house has to be found. That number is related to the population of a place. If a municipality does not meet this target, the backlog will be added to the target for the new year. In the first half of 2022, municipalities housed nearly 12,000 status holders. ‘With this they have achieved their target and they have made up a (modest) part of their long-term backlog,’ the advisory council writes.
In order to increase the speed, the Council again recommends building more flexible housing for status holders and other urgent seekers. “When the urgency obligation was abolished, the cabinet promised to provide other forms of housing for status holders. That commitment has long been an empty promise, but little is yet to get off the ground.”
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