In the near future, the municipality of Utrecht will make a large part of the vacant social rental homes available to accommodate status holders. This concerns a period of six weeks from August, during which 490 asylum seekers with a residence permit can go to a home “accelerated”. In this way, Utrecht says it is closing the gap in offering almost five hundred status holders a home, the municipality has made. Wednesday morning announced†
Also read: Why do asylum seekers sleep on chairs in Ter Apel?
Utrecht states that the priority arrangement will be in effect temporarily: normally 70 percent of the vacant housing associations will go to house seekers and 30 percent to vulnerable people, such as refugees. Responsible alderman Dennis de Vries says in the statement that he wants to return to “the usual distribution” in September. “They are all equally dear to us,” says De Vries. In Utrecht – which last year had about 46,500 social rental homes – the average waiting time for this is about eleven years.
The municipality emphasizes that houses will remain available “for home seekers in need” in the coming months. Utrecht states that it is lagging behind the obligation to accommodate status holders due to a lack of suitable housing. Now that it is becoming available, priority is given to asylum seekers with a residence permit. In the coming 2.5 years, about 2,500 social rental homes are to be built in the municipality.
Ter Apel
By quickly assigning the homes to status holders, the pressure on the Ter Apel application center should decrease. Asylum seekers report there for a procedure, after which they go to regular asylum seekers’ centers. When a residence permit is granted, they then have to go to a home somewhere in the Netherlands. But those houses are hardly available. Because they remain in the asylum seekers’ centres, the flow from the Groningen application center also comes to a standstill.
Currently, about 14,000 asylum seekers with a residence permit are waiting for a home somewhere in the Netherlands. New asylum seekers register daily in Ter Apel, while there is officially a capacity of 275 places. The application center has recently been overcrowded, forcing people to regularly sleep on chairs or in the open air. Also in the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, about ten to twenty asylum seekers slept outside.