Initially, it did not look like Harrie Doeleman (69) would spend most of his life in a student room of 24 square meters. He started dating his girl at a young age and when he was put into service, the two decided to get married so that he was entitled to a breadwinner’s allowance. Not much later they bought a house in the Betuwe, had a son and Doeleman (‘Just say Harrie, I still feel young’) started a cafeteria.
On paper, it seemed like he had it all figured out, yet he had an indefinable feeling all along. At first he wasn’t quite sure what it was, but gradually it became clearer. ‘After a while I found out that I liked men after all’, says Harrie. It marked the end of his marriage.
While he is telling his story, Harry is sitting on his balcony. This makes it easy to see how two of his housemates downstairs, both armed with a full crate of Heineken, come up the garden path laughing and stumble towards the front door. Summer is already flowing through the city in powerful waves, so they will no doubt give themselves the courage to dance with the girls who are wearing dresses for the first time this year that only end where the fantasy begins.
‘Beautiful, isn’t it,’ says Harry. “All those young people.”
Although Harrie himself was never a student – after his military service and career as a snack bar owner he worked in care for the disabled – he did know someone who owned a student house in Nijmegen after his divorce. He said: you can sit there for a while until you have something else. But when Harrie first entered the building on Oranjesingel, it felt like coming home to a house he had never known. He loved it.
Harrie’s room is 24 square meters – just enough space for his parents’ red leather sofa and a small dining table. He sleeps in the loft bed that he built himself, so that he would have some space left for his own fridge. He shares the kitchen, just like the toilet and shower, with his housemates. He finds it so pleasant that he has lived there for a quarter of a century now. As a result, he is probably the only resident of a Dutch student house who does not receive a student grant, but AOW.
Harry is way ahead of his time. Partly due to increased individualisation, but also, for example, because we are getting divorced more often and are getting older, the Netherlands has seen an enormous increase in the number of single-person households in recent decades: from 17 percent in the early 1970s to 39 percent now. The result: an acute housing shortage.
Recently, economist Mathijs Bouman stated that, until new houses are built, we will all have to sacrifice housing quality, for example by moving in with more people. Harrie didn’t get that comment, probably because he was having a beer with one of his fifteen roommates.
Most likely with Loyd. That’s a boy whose last name Harry recognized when he moved in a few years ago. What turned out? He used to be a big hit with his grandfather and grandmother. ‘Now Loyd and I eat together once a week and his grandmother visits regularly. That guy is 24, but we really became best friends.’
Incidentally, that happened to more roommates, of whom Harrie saw a few hundred pass over the years. Some are still drinking coffee years later. Sometimes he is invited to their weddings. ‘I can adapt well to those young people’, he says.
And that young people good to him. His grandchildren also think it’s fantastic that their grandfather lives in the middle of the city. They visit once every two weeks, especially his eldest granddaughter, who is now 16, smiling with increasing enthusiasm at Grandpa’s male roommates.
But what if the promised 1 million new homes under the Rutte IV coalition agreement are actually built, so that there will soon be ‘affordable housing for everyone’? Will he finally move?
Don’t think about it, says Harry. Ten years ago, he once responded to a retirement home. But when he was actually allotted that house, he decided against it. ‘I thought to myself, ‘What am I leaving here? All that fun, all that chatter in the stairwell, all those friendships. I never want to lose that again.’