For her plan to realize homes, therapy rooms and a work garden for young people in Heerhugowaard, Nardy Stolker from Heiloo still finds little response from the municipality. Housing cooperatives like hers are now jointly calling on provinces to help realize their alternative form of housing.
“We have sent a manifesto to all provinces with the aim of ensuring that cooperative housing ends up in the coalition agreements,” says Trevor James of Cooplink, the network of housing cooperatives. According to him, it is generally difficult to find money and a place to realize the initiatives – and according to him there are many – for collective housing.
Little space available
This is also evident in North Holland: Nardy Stolker from Heiloo has been looking for a location for a cooperative form of housing for the past two years, but the municipalities are not making much available, she says. “The land always goes to project developers or housing corporations. I also looked in the east of the country, but I’m back in North Holland, because I think that’s the most beautiful province.”
Now she has her eye on a piece of land in Heerhugowaard-Noord. “It is an area of 2.5 hectares with a large barn that is about to collapse. Two residential units could be built there with a common room and therapy rooms for various care providers,” says Stolker.
“Citizens are really capable of getting something off the ground together”
She also wants to create a garden for young people where they can work as a shelter and build a number of Tiny Houses there. “But when I say that, everyone is already on tilt,” she says about the officials she has to deal with. “Then the agricultural landscape becomes ‘cluttered’, they say. But this is an area where there are many trees. Our approach is precisely that you preserve such a fairytale piece of nature and that the houses in between disappear.”
Distrust
It is difficult to change the zoning plan of the piece of land, Stolker notes. “If you have such an integrated plan like I do, with a social function as well, then you will be dealing with all kinds of different people within the municipality in their own sub-area. It is difficult to get that together. You then need someone with a helicopter view, and you won’t find it.”
Read on under the photo.
She finds that difficult to reconcile with the ‘nice stories on municipal websites’, which encourage alternative forms of housing and sustainable food initiatives. “Then you expect them to look forward to our integrated plan with open arms, but the reality is very different. There is a lot of mistrust among civil servants. And that while citizens are really capable of getting something off the ground together.”
National fund
According to Trevor James of Cooplink, a lot of work is already being done on a loan fund nationwide, with which financial problems, like what De Nieuwe Meent initiative in Amsterdam had to deal withhopefully less prominent in the future.
But locations remain a problem, he says. That is why collective housing should be included in the zoning plan of municipalities, and provinces should also include this in their policy, he believes. “Anything that can help people get locations for their housing initiative.”
The appeal to provinces of housing cooperatives
- Specify a target percentage for housing units intended for collective forms of housing
- Give priority to co-operative forms of housing when divesting government locations
- Make it possible to accelerate the conversion of an agricultural destination of farmyards into a ‘residential destination for cooperative living’ upon sale
- Provide grants, loans and guarantees to collective housing initiatives
read here the entire manifesto.
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