The number of Ukrainian refugees has now risen to more than four million, and continues to rise every day. Nobody knows how many there will be in the end, but it seems likely that there will be millions more. Poland now accommodates most of them, but can no longer handle it. It does not seem unrealistic to me that the Netherlands will have hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian refugees within a few weeks. If it ever becomes peace, many will return. But a substantial number will remain.
The Netherlands has become a people magnet. This started cautiously in the 1980s and 1990s, but has accelerated since 2010. This is not only due to wars in Syria and Afghanistan with their many refugees. But also by young people, often ‘knowledge workers’, who are looking for a better future in Northwestern Europe from all over the world. Because they become unemployed in Spain, Italy, Poland or Greece, despite their good education. Or because they are getting tired of the increasingly authoritarian regimes in Russia, Turkey or China. Because they think liberally, in a world that is becoming increasingly illiberal outside Western Europe.
In some parts of Amsterdam, Amstelveen and Hoofddorp, more English is already spoken on the streets than Dutch. In Amsterdam school classes, the number of expat children can often no longer be counted on the fingers of two hands. Their parents work at Booking, in IT, in healthcare or in the hospitality industry.
That is because the Netherlands is an incredibly pleasant country to live in. We ourselves daily complain about the Allowance scandal, incapable politicians, oppressive white men or the evil of diversity (policy). In the rest of the world, they see the Netherlands as a free, democratic constitutional state with excellent healthcare and a top economy. And that while democratic constitutional states are becoming rarer globally. Especially young people from those countries also want to live in such a paradise.
In that light, the protracted discussion about faltering housing is laughable. The government wants to build 100,000 homes per year, but does not achieve that year on year. And gets sand in the eye by some experts who wonder whether there really is a housing shortage.
You don’t have to be a clairvoyant to see that in the current chaotic world the magnetic field of paradise Netherlands will only become more powerful. Unless you build a wall around the Netherlands, and who wants that, the population will undoubtedly grow faster every year. And we haven’t even taken into account the millions of climate refugees that are predicted.
Even if those hundred thousand houses a year succeed, that will be far too little. It would make you desperate, were it not for the fact that other countries have faced much hotter fires.
Take Turkey, which I know well. In 1970, that country had less than 35 million inhabitants, who also – large families – lived in one house with many more people than today. Turkey now has 85 million inhabitants, of which five million are refugees who seem to live there permanently. What has been built in that country in the past decades!
And how did they do that in the United States in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries? Shiploads of people from Europe arrived in New York every day. The whole of America must have been one big construction site, New York itself first.
Whether we like it or not, the Netherlands should start looking at housing as those two countries did at the time. The discussion should not be about a million houses until 2030. But about how quickly we can convert Amsterdam into a small New York, to avoid having to fill Drenthe, the Veluwe and Friesland full of terraced houses. Hundreds of thousands of homes per year? Three hundred thousand seems more realistic to me.
We hate demographics in the Netherlands. The scarce forecasts we have assume a maximum 20 million people in 2060† There are also scenarios that assume much less. Unless more wars break out after Syria and Ukraine. If the number of young people with liberal views in Asia and Africa continues to increase sharply, while their home countries remain stuck in repression and lack of freedom, then those forecasts are, of course, downright unrealistic. Then we will be at 30 million in 2060. That does not have to be a problem, there are now world cities such as Shanghai or Mexico City that can reach that number of people on their own.
Hong Kong and New York have more than 27,000 inhabitants per square kilometer. Amsterdam is at more than 5,300. The current territory of Amsterdam would therefore also fit 5 million people. That requires thinking differently. And to build differently (much higher).
Aylin Bilic is a head hunter and publicist.
A version of this article also appeared in NRC in the morning of March 31, 2022