Productions
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16 April 2007
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SF 10 vor 10
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The Dutch social housing system |
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Swiss EU-correspondent Christoph Nufer visits The Netherlands to investigate how the Dutch organised its housing market. Two thirds of the apartments in Amsterdam are rented through a special social housing system that keeps prices low for people with small budgets. The idea behind the policy is that Amsterdam keeps its mixed population. Sadly enough most of the apartments are relatively small and vacancies do not appear often. This forces young families to move to a larger house outside the city. Since many of these family members still work in town, this causes a serious increase of traffic jam kilometers. Also the housing policy from the sixties and seventies to stimulate suburbanisation to centres of growth further away from the bigger cities in the West, plays a large role in the terrifying increase of traffic jams. All new housing projects in the West now factor in larger apartments and a large percentage of market rate housing to keep the families in the west.
Activities: research & set-up, find examples of social housing and of suburbanised families.