Tourism is the lifeblood of the Zeeland municipality of Sluis, but it also has a downside. The quality of life in the villages is under pressure due to all those second homes and holiday rentals.
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The primary school has been gone for a few years due to a lack of students, the football club also due to a lack of members. And now the bakery has recently closed its doors due to a lack of customers – adieu Zeeland boluses. “The quality of life is in danger here,” says Peter Zuurbier, chairman of the village council in Nieuwvliet, a village in Zeeuws-Vlaanderen with four hundred inhabitants, 2 kilometers from the North Sea coast.
According to him, this is mainly due to the problem of ‘second homes and tourist rental’. The village has 272 houses, more than half of which are used as second homes of wealthy Belgians, Germans or Dutch who live elsewhere. Or they are rented out as a holiday home.
“The practice is that a large part of the houses is empty for ten months of the year,” says Zuurbier (71) in his detached new-build house with a view over a field full of waving winter wheat – in the distance a colossal container ship sails slowly but steadily. “That affects social cohesion. More people have to live here permanently, participate in social activities, participate in football, buy their bread at the bakery. Now only two restaurants remain.”
The municipality of Sluis – of which Nieuwvliet is one of the fifteen village and city centers – has a ‘city link’ with Amsterdam, Heerlen and the Groningen municipality of Eemsdelta. This band was once initiated by the mayor of Amsterdam Eberhard van der Laan, who ‘as the capital’ also wanted to take responsibility for shrinking municipalities on the fringes of the Netherlands.
‘Broad prosperity’
The mayors of the four ‘twinning municipalities’ are organizing a conference on ‘broad prosperity’ in Heerlen on Friday. This does not only look at economic productivity, but especially at the quality of life, such as health, education, the environment, living environment, social cohesion and safety.
Sluis does not score very well in the Regional Monitor Broad Welfare 2021, which Statistics Netherlands published in December. The economy is doing well: unemployment is low thanks to tourism. But on other indicators, such as distance to primary school, sports field or public greenery, the Zeeland rural community is in the lower regions.
“We do not score very positively,” admits mayor Marga Vermue (CDA) at the town hall in Oostburg, one of the four towns in the municipality of Sluis – even the tiny Sint Anna ter Muiden, with fifty inhabitants, once received city rights. “You see that more on the edges of the country. We have fewer facilities than in urban areas.”
Housing in a shrinking municipality is confronted with all kinds of provincial and national regulations that aim to prevent ‘new construction for future vacancy’.
Housing in a shrinking municipality is confronted with all kinds of provincial and national regulations that aim to prevent ‘new construction for future vacancy’. Photo: Marcel van den Bergh
According to Statistics Netherlands, it is indeed a factor that so-called ‘cross-border aspects of daily life’ are not measured in the border regions. But Vermue makes no secret of the fact that Sluis is quite a special municipality: “The distances are large with us. In terms of area, we are larger than the municipality of Amsterdam, but have only 23,000 inhabitants in 17 centers and a considerable number of hamlets. “We have few inhabitants, but many tourists. Due to tourism, there are many catering establishments and supermarkets, but the quality of life in the villages is under pressure.”
A popular saying in Sluis is that it is easier to buy a holiday home than a house. Or as chairman Zuurbier of the Nieuwvliet village council puts it: “We should not only build for the Roompots and Europarcs in this region, but also for our own population here. Young people want an affordable starter home, seniors a well-insulated service home.”
shrinking municipality
But (social) housing in a shrinking municipality is confronted with all kinds of provincial and national rules, which are intended to prevent ‘new construction for future vacancy’. In addition, Belgian and other buyers of second homes are pushing up house prices, making existing homes almost unaffordable for the local population. The municipality of Sluis estimates that 20 percent of the total number of houses (14 thousand) is a ‘second home’. In villages such as Nieuwvliet and Retranchement, that percentage is even close to 50 percent or higher. If you drive through the latter fortified village right on the Belgian border, you will indeed see a striking number of Belgian license plates along the street.
“It’s kind of a vicious circle,” Mayor Vermue sighs. “Because your population is not growing, you are not allowed to build. But to stop the decline, you have to build. Because without new construction, the young people will certainly leave and the facilities will come under even more pressure.”
A few years ago, the municipal council was able to keep the last secondary school open with a lot of effort and financial support. It is located in Oostburg and has just over seven hundred students. But the aging population or ‘dejuvenation’ (according to the mayor) continues. “We really want to prevent that school from closing, because then students have to go to school 35 kilometers away in Terneuzen and we really end up in a negative spiral,” said Vermue. “That is a big difference with Amsterdam, where children can always go to another school in a different neighbourhood.”
On tires
But there is hope for Sluis. At the end of last year, the city council did not dare to do it, but the brand new coalition wants to finally curb second home ownership and tourist rental in the village centers. In addition, Sluis Lokaal, VVD and PvdA promise housing construction in all villages for young and old, at least 845 homes until 2030.
“It’s about time,” says Peter Zuurbier in Nieuwvliet. Because the silence on the construction front in the villages is in stark contrast to the busy construction activities in Cadzand-Bad directly on the coast, where a Belgian project developer has been building apartment complexes for holiday rental from the ground for years. “I hope that we can put all those doom stories about shrinkage behind us,” said the chairman of the village council. “The villages have to come back to life.”