That 65 square meters of living space per person is of course an average. There are whole families who live on 50 m2, but also single people who ‘occupy’ a large house. For many people, having so much space is a conscious choice. Nevertheless, all kinds of measures are possible to ‘seduce’ people and thus get more people into a house. “Houses are often used very little efficiently. Cohabitation should pay more,” says Frank Wassenberg of Platform31. “The more people who can move into existing homes, the less you have to build.”
Benefit and cohabitation
“There are now a number of things that hinder the ability to share living space with more people,” says Ellen van Bueren, professor of Urban Development Management at TU Delft. “Mortgage lenders, for example, make it difficult to rent out a floor in your house. And the legislator sets certain conditions for a benefit.”
For example, it often does not pay for two people on benefits and both with their own social rental home to start living together and give up a house: one person living alone receives 1075 euros, so two people living alone receive 2150. rent (including surcharge) but about 350 euros less.
The Woonbond and trade union FNV, among others, believe that this rule should disappear. Because then people on benefits will start living together more quickly and more homes will become available, according to Platform31. “Why wouldn’t you keep that second home now? As a reserve for when cohabitation does not go well, as storage, and so on,” said Wassenberg. “You can ask yourself whether as a society you want to save those few hundred euros through a lower benefit, while at the same time you have to build extra homes that cost two or three tons.”
Add waiting time
And so there are more ideas to get more people into a house. You often have to wait for years for a social rental home. To encourage several people to occupy a rental home, you can, for example, add up the waiting time of people if they start renting together. Then it’s your turn faster with two or three.
Corporation Zayaz in Den Bosch has been trying out something similar since 2019. The corporation makes houses suitable for housing sharing, for example with a second bathroom. Home seekers can live there with a known or unknown person. “It does require a careful matching process to find people who want to live together in this way,” according to the corporation. There are now six tenants in three houses who share houses.
You can also give people who leave social housing because of cohabitation the temporary guarantee that they can move to another house if the relationship fails. Then they are also less inclined to keep their own home.
Return of the landlady?
It used to be quite normal to rent out a room in your house, to a student for example. But living with a landlady rarely happens. According to Platform31, in addition to loss of privacy, the tenant’s fear of strict rent protection can be an obstacle.
The rule now is that in the first nine months the landlord may terminate the lease. After that, the tenant has rent protection. “It has an image problem,” Wassenberg says. “With the idea: you bring in a nice student who turns out to be a tyrant that you can’t get out of your house anymore. But with information and an enthusiastic policy, for example with more protection for the landlord, this could grow again. more and more elderly people who live alone and experience loneliness. Then you think: one plus one equals two?”
Friends contracts and rooming
There are other ways to better fill homes, Platform31 writes: at friends-contracts (named after the hit TV series) you rent a house with several people and you are jointly responsible for the rent. With ‘rekamering’ you individually rent a room in a larger house and you have your own rental contract.
Some municipalities are taking measures to combat these forms of letting: apartments with many, often young people, together can lead to nuisance in a neighbourhood. Municipalities also fear that landlords are increasingly moving into rooms in order to earn more from homes. This leaves fewer homes for families.
“It’s a bit of an easy reaction: more people leads to more nuisance,” says Wassenberg of Platform 31. “They are really not all wild partying students. As a municipality, take specific measures against nuisance, but do not prohibit people from gathering together in a living in a house. Most landlords are not slum landlords who only go for the maximum rent. Those are excesses, tackle them.”
How much home profit?
It’s hard to predict how many fewer homes you’ll need to build by getting more people into existing homes. “It is worth trying out all the measures, because it can provide relief in the short term,” says Ellen van Bueren of TU Delft. “The complicated thing is that not everyone has the same urgency to alleviate the housing shortage.”
Platform31 estimates that the housing shortage can be reduced by around 15,000 homes annually by making more use of existing homes. That shortage is now about 279,000 homes, so you didn’t solve that quickly either. But it can make the situation a little less dire.
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