Strengthening the Urban Housing Market: The Dutch Approach

The contrast between the city and its surroundings is sharp not only in the United States, but also in the Netherlands. There are no reasons to support any expectation of a spontaneous back-to-the-city movement in the near future. In 1997 the Dutch government announced a new policy to strengthen urban districts: the redifferentiation of the housing stock and the restructuring of a large number of urban districts with a large share of social rented dwellings, mostly in multifamily estates. The Dutch government will spend about US$2 billion before 2010 to promote urban restructuring, namely, the demolition of low-quality dwellings, upgrading, renovation, and amalgamation of units, the sale of rented property, and improvement of the urban structure and public spaces. Although a number of fundamental questions have yet to be answered, the Dutch government's new urban policy seems promising. Strengthening urban housing markets would appear to be easier in the Netherlands—with a comparatively wide range of incomes among the urban population—than in the United States, where the income gap between the city core and the suburbs may be too wide to be bridged by limited federal and state programs. Should the Dutch policy to strengthen the urban housing market prove successful, the next step would be to support the restructuring of the growth centers built in the 1970s and 1980s.