Builders of flexible housing in Brabant say they are ready for the asylum crisis. On Friday it became clear that Brabant must immediately receive even more status holders and refugees than is already the case. “We can certainly double in production,” says builder De Meeuw in Oirschot.
“It is certainly possible to scale up very substantially”, says commercial director Joziene van de Linde of De Meeuw. The company in Oirschot will deliver about 1500 to 2000 homes this year. “We can certainly double that number.” Production has already increased in recent months.
On Friday it turned out that every security region, including those outside our province, must not accommodate 225 but 450 refugees. In March, the cabinet already decided that each security region must receive 2000 asylum seekers. Later, another 225 asylum seekers were added and that number will be doubled in this new plan. In total, this means that the three Brabant security regions must each accommodate 2450 asylum seekers.
Starting next week, municipalities will look at how they can distribute housing across the province. Joziene: “I think they will call again. We already had intensive contact with municipalities, the province of North Brabant and the ministry.” According to the director, the factory can open longer and the number of houses per shift can also be increased.
Build faster than paperwork
Paperwork is a bigger hurdle for builders than finding staff or purchasing materials. “Building houses is faster than going through a procedure”, says Joziene. “It’s going unbelievably slow right now. In Vlaardingen, the procedure went quickly, the houses were there within five months of the first meeting.”
They also recognize this image at Barli in Uden. A new factory was opened there in April. “We can build quickly. The procedures are really the problem,” said a company spokesperson.
Flex homes also still have an image problem, they think at De Meeuw. “It’s not about containers. They meet the same requirements as normal houses.” They also look the same according to the director. “If we were to do a quiz, you wouldn’t be able to tell them apart.”
Mayor Theo Weterings also hopes that there will be more room for flexible housing: houses that can be built quickly. In the crisis, he speaks on behalf of the Brabant municipalities. “I know that in practice the construction of these houses often takes a lot of time. Now it should be the case that fewer rules are needed for this,” he said on Friday. The cabinet set up a task force in June, but the regulatory burden has not yet disappeared.
Chaos
Due to the asylum crisis, it has been chaos in Ter Apel in Groningen for weeks. Things are so inhumane at the application center in the village that MSF had to provide medical assistance for the first time in our country this week.