The government not only wants to take more control of spatial planning, housing and the rental market, but also more control over the land market in the Netherlands. To be able to build the planned 936,000 homes by 2030, land must become available faster and become cheaper.
Expropriation must become ‘normal’ within this new land policy, according to a letter to Parliament from Minister Hugo de Jonge (Public Housing and Spatial Planning, CDA) on Monday. The national government, municipalities and provinces should not shy away from starting expropriation proceedings against them simultaneously with negotiations with landowners. If the negotiations fail, less time is lost for construction.
It does not have to lead to expropriation, says De Jonge. But it does of course put pressure on the ongoing negotiations.
Politically sensitive
This is already possible through existing legislation, but it does not happen often locally, because expropriation is a sensitive issue. Also political: the letter to Parliament is about expropriation for housing in urban areas, but the principle can also be applied to expropriation of rural areas for new uses.
“It is separate from that,” De Jonge wants to emphasize on the phone. “Suppose: in an urban area there are three, four, five landowners who want to build and one does not. Should the rest wait for that? Negotiations on land purchases now take up to two to two and a half years, as do expropriation procedures. By doing it in parallel, that simply saves two years in the procedures.”
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The government’s ambition to build 936,000 homes by 2030 is already hampered by the rise in interest rates and construction costs. But municipalities, housing associations and project developers do not have enough land either. For example, corporations have land to build 22,000 homes, the ten largest market parties for 115,000 homes outside built-up areas. Places have been designated for more than one million homes until 2030, but zoning plans must also be changed for this.
The shortage of building land goes back in part to the previous housing market crisis (2008-2013). Municipalities saw the value of their plots evaporate and invested much less in land: between 2010 and 2020, the total book value of municipal land fell from 13 to 5.1 billion euros. In addition, many civil servants with knowledge of the land market were cut back.
Unprofitable
Purchasing land in urban areas is often complicated because the ownership is fragmented. Landowners often charge unrealistically high prices, given the increased interest and construction costs, the government believes. Building cheaper rental and owner-occupied homes in urban areas is therefore often not profitable without the government stepping in to help.
This shortfall in exploitation will rise to 26 billion euros for all 936,000 homes by 2030, the cabinet has had it calculated. The government will cover 12 billion euros of this from various funds, but the market will also have to take a loss for the remaining 14 billion euros. It will have to, says the cabinet, because two thirds of the 936,000 planned homes will become ‘affordable’, and will therefore yield less money.
Minister De Jonge now wants to ‘modernize’ the national land policy, he writes to the House. In addition to advancing expropriation procedures, municipalities must make more use of their ‘preferential right’ to be at the front of the queue when selling land. De Jonge also wants to invest in more knowledge and skills of land transactions at municipalities. Municipalities must go from a ‘risk averse’ to an ‘active land policy’ again.
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Recover public costs
Municipalities should be able to recover as much as possible from landowners for ‘public costs’ in construction projects, such as the construction of roads, green spaces and water. One form in which this could be done is a fixed contribution per housing type.
Minister De Jonge also wants to review land valuation methods in order to include the costs and risks of area development in the price. On the other hand, he wants to move towards a new system in which the increase in land prices benefits area development, in fact society.
De Jonge also wants to improve the ‘benefit tax’ for landowners who benefit financially from area development in the area. Municipalities can already levy this tax, but this hardly happens due to “implementation problems”, the letter to parliament states. He also wants to investigate how speculation with land trade, where value ‘leaks’, can be countered.
Minister De Jonge does not refer to the new land policy as intervening in the free market. “It is correcting a lack of government regulation in recent years. This has resulted in unrealistic expectations [van grondeigenaren] and that therefore leads to a brake on construction at the moment. Most of the houses cannot be afforded by people with ordinary incomes. That is of course a very unhealthy situation.”