Housing must be in the highest gear, it sounded loud and clear today during the council meeting in Emmen. With a series of motions from almost all corners of the council, the parties want to take control and remove bureaucratic delays. “In my opinion, accelerating is the fashion word,” Leo Hoogenberg (Wakker Emmen) also noticed.
The reason is not small: the municipality of Emmen has the ambition to have grown to 120,000 inhabitants in 2040. This requires an estimated 10,000 extra homes. But housing is standing through long procedures, a jumble of rules and capacity problems among civil servants. That is why councilors are calling for a tooth with regard to the speed.
Hoogenberg started with a proposal for an Gevelingtafel Bouw Emmen, a consultation in which civil servants, aldermen and other stakeholders sit together to immediately pull stuck building plans smoothly. According to him, it would help if the cooperation between initiators and officials would run more smoothly. This may mean that a consultation hour may be held to go through building plans and pull it smoothly. “For example, it should be prevented that application procedures take unnecessarily long.”
VVD councilor Patrick de Jonge recognized the problem from his own experience. “I had to run my home a quarter on the advice of the welfare committee. That takes time, money and motivation.”
Wakker Emmen also argues for smoother rules for CPO projects (collective private commissioning), in which residents themselves and together build homes without the intervention of project developers. “In the villages, people are willing to do it themselves, but then the rules must be workable,” says Hoogenberg.
In the meantime, the PvdA argued for an umbrella residential plan in which all proposals regarding housing are bundled. Anita Louwes party leader: “As a advice, we may have shot too many loose flodders in the hope that we would hit the goal.”
Among other things, the party wants to realize fifty flex homes within a year, three -quarters of which must consist of social rental homes. They must be built throughout the municipality, with priority for residents of Emmen.
The CDA wants to use artificial intelligence (AI) for licensing. “We are already doing a pilot at event permits. Start with housing, because the need for acceleration is greatest there,” said René Wittendorp party leader.
D66 and GroenLinks pointed to risks concerning privacy and discrimination, but the CDA emphasized that AI only serves as an aid and not as a replacement for humans.
A second CDA motion about the possibilities of parallel plans (the simultaneous implementation of construction phases) was also introduced. The PVV is in line with a call for shorter permit processes.
The bucket politics agree on one thing: housing must be faster, smarter and better. It was remarkable that the groups did not put their heads together. There was a talk about that, but in the end everyone brought in their own plan separately. All motions were then adopted.
Alderman Albert-Jan Jakobs was fine in the points proposed. The lion’s share can thus get a place in the new housing program of the municipality, which is on the agenda before the beginning of 2026.