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Isinlor

Do I understand correctly that they want to kick out all the students from the cities?

When I was studying in Groningen I had to look for places to rent out of the city.

Some students were camping in tents in front of the campus.

Here is a photo from another city, Tilburg:

https://www.dutchnews.nl/wpcms/wp-content/uploads/2019/09/st...

Some academic staff were even taking them in due to shortage of places to rent.

I managed to rent a very nice place in Bedum, a village 13 km from the university campus, and I was commuting every day on bike.

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The trend here in Trondheim (third-largest city in Norway with 200k residents, of these ca. 40k are students) is that a lot of houses and apartments are explicitly offered for sale with plans for conversion to student apartments.

Rents in the city have increased by 8.2% over the last 12 months, property prices by 20-25% over the last two years. The price per square meter to buy anything reasonable is above 6k Eur now. Salaries are, of course, not adjusted to compensate for this...

So I can understand and support this Dutch initiative, but of course universities and municipalities then have to ensure they provide an appropriate amount student accommodation. Since students are an important economic factor, this doesn't sound to be a too unreasonable demany to me.

The Norwegian government also tries a different approach - it tries to enable young people to buy property already in their twenties by funding special discounts on interest rates. Together with banning investors from the cities, this might also be a model for the Netherlands, which, like Norway, has quite a high rate of home ownership (69% NL vs. 81% NO). Some of my recent master students owned an apartment here and made a nice profit when they sold it this year and moved back to Oslo...

[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/543453/house-owners-amon...

[2] https://tradingeconomics.com/netherlands/home-ownership-rate

Everyone is suggesting ineffective solutions with idiotic side effects. The proper way of solving this problem is to build a lot more homes. Otherwise you'll be creating a plan economy where bureaucrats are constantly scrambling to alleviate the side effects of their shuffling of deck-chairs on the sinking ship.

But of course, few cities want to do this. The biggest cities in Norway are particularly bad at not even attempting to solve this problem at the root.

Let's just say it loudly and proudly: If you're against allowing the free market to build as much as the demand indicates, you're for high housing costs and screw everyone who is negatively affected. This hypocritical virtue signalling has gotten really old.

I can envision a scenario where both are true and result in short term (possibly on the order of decades) pain for locals. The supply of housing is not meeting the demand of local residents and the supply of “desirable” investments in stable societies is not met for global investors.

It is an arbitrage and inefficiency scenario created by the ability of capital to move easily around the world, but not people.

Do you have any examples where building more would have resulted in stabilizing or lowering housing prices? This is the classical suggestion but doesn't seem like there would be any supporting evidence of it actually working in practice.

Of course I want cities to build more. But I don't imagine it will ever actually lower the housing costs.

Cities rarely try this out in practice. There are examples of smaller cities that manage to keep up - e.g. Kristiansand in Norway, which kept the real estate price development slightly negative during a decade when the rest of the country had a massive increase. I get the impression Copenhagen has also managed to build enough. Their bubble popped in 2006 AFAICT, with moderate development since then in spite of negative interest rates.

But for large cities, there seems to almost universally be democratic agreement that we won’t build a lot more right here.

You get the odd symbolic attempt. But I’m not talking about re-zoning the odd industrial park and rationing them out to the three developers that get things done in this town.

I’m talking about building 40 stories everywhere, where previously there were 8. Consistently allowing developers to build in front of their neighbors’ ocean view. Turning 50% of the beloved hills around the city into high-rise apartments. Stuff like this, to a degree proportional with demand. Annual price increase or decrease is the signal to steer by.

My point: If you support local democratic policy that will lead to an outcome every passing ECON101 student can predict -

Own it.

Even better - ban profit on property sales.

Person living in Groningen right now, as Dutch citizen here.

There aren't enough houses for students right now.

> Do I understand correctly that they want to kick out all the students from the cities?

Presumably not, unless those students are property investors.

> investors won't be allowed to buy cheap and medium-priced homes and rent them out

So, who will be renting cheap and medium-priced homes?

There are already extremely severe shortages as exemplified by students camping in tents.

People living in them? That's how it mostly works elsewhere. Also, it is not customary in the Netherlands for students to live in dorms?

Right, because that’s what every family dreams about: having a stranger living in their house. Also, if there was enough space in dorms for everyone there wouldn’t be those students camping in tents, as OP wrote.

There's no need for every family to sublet. Usually a small minority of residences house subletters.

I'm not quite sure how worsening the situation for everyone by property investors hoarding houses would make it better for students, either.

Property investors are not "hoarding" houses. They buy them and then rent them out, thus increasing the supply. It is actually better for students this way: an investor that does not live in their property can rent out it whole. If a house can fit 5 people that means a living space for 5 students. If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 available for rent. I don't know, maybe that's the hidden goal of this policy: push the students out, and bring in more families.

> They buy them and then rent out, thus increasing the supply.

That doesn't increase supply. I'm really not sure how middlemen skimming money could increase supply since that should push the supply curve to the left.

> If the house gets bought by a family, that family moves in, so 3 out of 5 spots are now occupied, leaving only 2 available for rent.

And the family moved in from somewhere else, leaving you with three spots in that some other place plus two spots in the new place, so you have 5 places for students regardless. Not sure why you think this changes something.

The optimal solution is obviously to fix the dorm system. It's well organized, cheap, and space efficient - at least in my country, at about half the price of renting your own place. Surely my backwards country is not more capable than the Dutch in this respect.

> And the family moved in from somewhere else, leaving you with three spots in that some other place plus two spots in the new place, so you have 5 places for students regardless. Not sure why you think this changes something.

Because that family might have moved from out of town, and students can't move to their old place that is too far from the university?

EDIT: I'm not sure that building more dorms is a good idea. My experience (although from totally different country) is that dorm rooms are the worst possible environment for learning. During my time in college there was a clear division: those who prioritized studying lived in the quiet rental apartments, those who prioritized socializing lived in the dorms :)

That's not a problem specifically for students, though. That's a problem for everyone when X people need to move to a city where there's Y<X capacity of housing.

> During my time in college there was a clear division: those who prioritized studying lived in the quiet rental apartments, those who prioritized socializing lived in the dorms :)

And I wonder who ended up better off :).

The longer I live, the more I realize that I made a mistake during my university years. I focused on learning where I should've been partying - because as it turns out, knowledge is the easy part. The hard part - and the important part - is building a network of friends and connections, which happens at parties, not in quiet rental apartments.

I know a girl who bought a house with a mortgage backed by her government-student-grant somewhere around 2006 iirc.

Additionally, If prices weren't so high there would be more students buying houses with their parents money.

None of that is to say I understand the market, it's history or future. But your take seems to be based on dogma and an oversimplified supply and demand model.

> an investor that does not live in their property can rent out it whole

There's a flip side to this. An investor that does not live in their property doesn't care about the property as a place to live. So...

> If a house can fit 5 people that means a living space for 5 students.

But what actually happens these days is the house gets renovated to turn those 5 living spaces into 8 or 10. Students don't have any leverage on the market, so investors will densify houses over time, until they health and safety limits, and then some (the rents, of course, don't drop proportionally). Not enough students anymore? Fortunately there's AirBnB now. What about people who actually want to settle in the area? Nah, they're too needy, literally the least efficient bunch to extract money from.

Elsewhere in the thread, some people say that the problem is with people who want to settle in expensive, wealthy cities. But perhaps the main reason those cities are expensive is because of property investment? That is, all those high salaries cancel out with high rents. Get rid of high rents, salaries may drop, but so do costs of living, and the whole market settles at a more approachable and sustainable level.

If there was enough rooms I could have rented a tiny room, like a Norwegian prison cell, from a student housing. But there was not enough of these rooms. And they were available only for one year. You had to vacate them after that.

Presumably the reason for why there isn't enough housing for students is related to why there isn't enough housing for everybody else.

You misunderstood. The only way to rent a place is to rent it from an investor. If investors are banned from the city, then students need to buy the house/room they live in. This is of course not feasible for the majority of students.

> The only way to rent a place is to rent it from an investor.

You mean in the Netherlands? Because I never had to do that in my country. I'm not aware of places where the only landlords are investors.

I think you are missing the point.

All landowners are investors. They bought the property to make money. That makes them an investor. Maybe not a coporation but an investor.

Surely the Dutch are not using your proposed definition, because that would make zero sense unless they wanted to turn the Netherlands into another Chernobyl exclusion zone. That seems unreasonable, so they must be using a different one.

It is the definition we use. This is just gonna create more kafka tier stuff for people to deal with, its not gonna end housing if Amsterdam decides it only wants multi millionaires with privately owned overly expensive houses in certain areas.

Investor or parasite?

Lots of student and young people housing is owned by non-profits around here. My whole campus was non-profit.

I suppose the implied question is: who's going to rent to students if the landlords' investments get penalized for them not living there themselves. There's presumably too many students in these cities for all of them to find some family who have a spare room to rent.

Even if this action were to have unintended consequences, the question was "do they want to". No, they don't, obviously, not any more that the people who gave "go" to STS-51L wanted to kill seven astronauts. What they want to do is to get rid of predatory investors.

There are some very hard limits to taking students in too. You don't want to be a student after the covid induced decline in demand is over. Especially not if you are not from here. The regulation exempt SSH will put you in a room with another student or two and charge you 800 or so.

The municipality can designate locations where these rules apply and they can designate if a location is intended for student housing.

I'm not seeing an issue that is directly exacerbated. There are simply more tools that can be (ab)used .

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