Status holders occupied 20 percent of the association homes that were allocated to a starter household in 2023. That is an increase of three percentage points compared to 2022.
This is evident from figures from CBS that were announced on Wednesday morning. If the number of allocations to status holders is compared to the total number, including relocations within the housing association housing stock, this amounts to 8 percent. This percentage has fluctuated between 4.4 (2020) and 6.9 (2022) percent in recent years.
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Figures on status holders and social housing vary – and may still be correct
Many municipalities house status holders as a matter of urgency, a practice that the outgoing cabinet wants to put an end to with an amendment to the Housing Act. Outgoing Minister Mona Keijzer, responsible for both Housing and Asylum and Migration (BBB), has sent a bill to the House of Representatives, which the Council of State ruled negatively. By categorically prohibiting municipalities from giving priority to status holders, they are actually disadvantaged, the independent advisory council for legislation stated.
The share of association homes that go to status holders has been the subject of discussion for several years. This includes the independent migration researcher and mathematician Jan van de Beek, author of the book Migration magnet Netherlandshas been harping for years on the effect that allocations to status holders have on the waiting time of people looking for social housing.
‘Significant pressure’
His estimates, based on various sources, reach more than 30 percent of association homes for starters that have gone to status holders. Minister Keijzer prefers his presentation to that of CBS, as it does “more justice to the perceived displacement on the social rental market”, she writes in the Explanatory Memorandum to her bill. The government considers the pressure that status holders place on the available social housing stock to be “considerable”.
Statistics Netherlands now explicitly reports the percentage of status holders compared to the number of association homes occupied by starters. This was also previously found in the data. Demographer Ruben van Gaalen of CBS states that “attention is paid to the specific subgroups within which the share of status holders is higher but where the numbers are lower.”
A total of (rounded to the nearest thousand) 265,000 people will have moved into 161,000 vacant corporation homes in 2023, of whom 25,000 were status holders. So almost 10 percent. Households with status holders have more members on average, which means that the percentage of allocations calculated in households is lower, the aforementioned 8 percent.
Of the 2.2 million housing association homes, 2.8 percent will be occupied by status holders at the end of 2023. Including households with one or more former status holders, people who now have Dutch nationality, this amounts to 7.8 percent of the total.
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