Abstract
The Netherlands has traditionally been considered an iconic ‘unitary’ rental housing market in which social and private sectors directly compete. More recently however, this unitary market has been undermined by changes in the status of housing associations, the privatization of social housing stock and the promotion of home ownership. It has subsequently been suggested that the Netherlands is drifting toward a ‘dualist’ system in which social and private sectors are critically unequal. This paper takes on this claim, providing, on the one hand, palpable evidence of the waning influence of the unitary housing system in the Netherlands and, on the other, a deeper examination of processes of dualisation as well as the outcomes. We focus on Amsterdam, where housing privatization has been most intense. We specifically draw on a geospatial analysis of changing tenure distributions at the neighbourhood level as well as a household analysis of the shifting profile of tenants and home owners to show how the unitary rental market, which helped establish Amsterdam as an iconic ‘just city’, has been unraveling. We demonstrate the relevance of the unitary/dualist model to understanding contemporary urban processes, especially those featuring social and economic polarization.
Highlights
In recent decades, the Netherlands has undergone dramatic housing sector restructuring with home ownership rates increasing from 45 to 60% since 1990, primarily at the expense of the social rental sector (CBS 2014)
While we demonstrate housing system polarization—with private housing becoming increasingly mainstream and social rental housing more concentrated in terms of low-income households—we more critically show how private and social tenant profiles have diverged in the last two decades, which we argue is indicative of the waning state of the unitary rental system
As we have illustrated, the Netherlands seems to have drifted toward a dualist housing system in which social and private sectors are critically unequal; undermining the capacity of non-market housing providers to keep rents and housing costs low for the populations as a whole
Summary
The Netherlands has undergone dramatic housing sector restructuring with home ownership rates increasing from 45 to 60% since 1990, primarily at the expense of the social rental sector (CBS 2014). A particular concern of our empirical analysis is the extent to which private and social housing sectors still compete on equal terms (as in unitary markets), as well as how dualisation is contributing to urban and social change. Contributions have customarily focused on national level policy developments and rarely taken urban spatial differentiation into account They have, reflected poorly on the outcomes in terms of socioeconomic polarization. At the heart of this analysis is a bifurcation between more economically liberal societies, which tend to pursue dualist rental strategies, and more or less social democratic societies that pursue unitary ones Research inspired by this approach often tends to emphasize the negative outcomes of market forces in housing, such as social segregation and marginalization, along with the positive aspects of unitary systems as forces for social inclusion and equality. The concern, is not a normative one, but rather, to illustrate the salience of urban transformations and the development of this theoretical model in contemporary context
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