Hans Rodenburg: The challenge of framing a problem in a certain way is first and foremost about defining what the problem is. Do you see this in the debate about the housing crisis? 

Cody Hochstenbach: Absolutely. The fact that we are talking about a housing crisis is already a sign of things to come. The term “housing crisis” was mentioned in the Dutch House of Representatives for the first time in 2019, when it was used by Socialist Party MP Sandra Beckerman. Before then, the conversation was mostly about a housing shortage. The shift from a housing shortage to a housing crisis implies that the definition of the problem has changed.  

The term housing crisis appeals to me because it recognises that the current situation involves a multitude of housing problems. It’s about the housing shortage – that is certainly part of it – but it is also about affordability, the enormous power imbalance between tenant and landlord and, of course, homelessness. At the same time, it is in line with the daily reality of so many people living in housing that is too expensive, insecure or unsuitable. Their experience is one of crisis. 

However, an important outstanding question remains: who will take ownership of the housing crisis? Who will determine what that crisis means? On the one hand, we are now seeing that the term “housing crisis” gives room for left-progressive answers; they blame the liberalisation and commodification agenda and point to the fact that the government has massively boosted the housing market while affordable rentals have been squeezed. At the same time, the term also provides an opening for anti-immigration sentiments. Today, status holders are explicitly being identified as scapegoats. And if it’s not the fault of status holders, the other right-wing frame is that the crisis is the result of overly strict rules: environmental standards, sustainability requirements, or other regulations.  

Crisis as a concept thus offers opportunities for both a left-progressive framing and a radical-right framing that give very different analyses of the problem and therefore also come up with completely different solutions.  

Do you think the position taken by left-wing parties in this struggle is ideologically sharp enough? 

In fact, it has become a lot sharper in recent years. For fun, you could read the GroenLinks (GreenLeft) and Partij van de Arbeid (PvdA, the Labour Party) election programmes from a few years ago. There you still see a total lack of urgency when it comes to housing. That has significantly changed. The current risk is that all political parties have started using the same words. For instance, they all emphasise that housing is, or should be, a fundamental right and not a commodity. Even the Volkspartij voor Vrijheid en Democratie (VVD, a conservative-liberal party) shouts this out at every given opportunity. The risk is that “housing as a fundamental right” becomes empty rhetoric, so vague that everyone can appropriate it without truly striving for it. 

Left-progressive parties could be a bit more ambitious in the messages they convey and particularly in the solutions they advocate. The current plans are too often a correction of the current housing policy rather than a truly alternative vision. For example, they do not provide a narrative for why we should stop favouring owner-occupied homes over rental homes, financially and ideologically. There is still no vision for the portrayal of renting as a full-fledged alternative to buying. 

Because the main cause of the housing crisis lies precisely in that skewed ratio between renting and buying. 

Yes. The idea of an owner-occupied home is still sacred. Hugo de Jonge [of the centrist party Christen-Democratisch Appèl, CDA] took several good actions when he was housing minister (2022-2024), such as curbing rents, abolishing temporary rental contracts, and scrapping extra taxation of not-for-profit housing associations. But nothing has been done about the enormously privileged position of the homeowner. The mortgage interest tax deduction remains untouched, and the surplus value of owner-occupied properties is virtually untaxed. I also see too little change in the ideological narrative. The image is still that whoever buys a home is a responsible, proud citizen, and the tenant just hobbles along behind like a poor bugger. 

The risk is that “housing as a fundamental right” becomes empty rhetoric, so vague that everyone can appropriate it without truly striving for it. 

In the past, during the heyday of social housing, the Left was telling a completely different story about social renting. 

Until the late 1980s, the idea was that the social housing sector was a broad provision, and it was also available to middle-income households. I hear from older colleagues that they moved to social housing after completing their PhD dissertations. This was completely normal. The whole concept of the “scheefhuurder”, the idea that you are antisocial if you earn a little more than the social rent limit, only arose in 1989. Before then, the whole concept of a separate social housing sector did not exist. There were no income limits, let alone the idea that social housing was a provision for poor people. Precisely because it was available to a large section of the population, the sector had a lot of social support. Today, that support is much less. People are quick to think: “I have a middle income, so social housing is not meant for me.” This undermines social and crucial electoral support for the entire sector. 

Yet I have not heard any party say that we should return to the old situation, where not-for-profit housing associations build homes for all of us. 

Former housing minister Hugo de Jonge did say that we were going to restore social housing, but it was mainly about the social housing sector as it is now: rental housing for people with low incomes. There is not a single party that truly advocates for making social housing broadly available again to people with a range of incomes. 

Shouldn’t a leftist frame of the housing issue also put more emphasis on creating nice neighbourhoods and a pleasant living environment rather than only focusing on the number of homes? 

I think so. Of course, we need to build a lot of houses, but the goal should be much more about building pleasant living environments. Housing must not only be affordable, but also safe, suitable, and sustainable. When social housing in the Netherlands took off a hundred years ago, the idea was definitely not to quickly build lots of cheap homes. Instead, people were told an inspiring story: we are finally going to provide living comfort to the middle classes and to workers. We are going to give these people their own bathrooms for the first time, we are going to connect them to electricity, and we are going to expand their living space. This was a positive story, and the focus was deliberately not on being as austere and cheap as possible. The goal was really to improve quality: nice neighbourhoods with everything available just around the corner, all amenities close by, and often surrounded by greenery. 

In addition to the definition of the problem, a good frame contains another element: the assigning of blame. In your view, who is primarily responsible for the housing crisis? 

The housing crisis is the result of decades of deliberate politics. It cannot be reduced to one person, cabinet, term of office, or political party. From the late 1980s until today, it has been a long-term ideological project in which a multitude of political parties have collaborated at the local, regional, and national levels. But if I must pinpoint the main culprit: it is politics. It is, however, important to emphasise that government and market are not in opposition. They have worked hand in hand in this case: it was the government that drove the housing market.  

There is not a single party that truly advocates for making social housing broadly available again to people with a range of incomes.

This is also the essence of neoliberalism: not an absent government that leaves everything to the market, but an active one that gives the market a push, creates the conditions for markets to flourish. This becomes very clear in the tax rebate of nine billion euros per year for homeowners via the mortgage interest tax deduction, as well as in the stimulation of mortgage debts. The Netherlands is really an outlier internationally. It has one of the highest relative mortgage debts in the world. The steady supply of mortgage debts drives up house prices. That’s what it’s all about, as this is what homeowners want.  

So this really is a systemic crisis. Should left-wing parties then target slumlords or commercial property developers and investors? They are not the cause of the crisis, but they are getting filthy rich from it.  

I sometimes have doubts about that myself. Let me start by saying that slumlords are an easy target. Many people dislike them. At the same time, I think that these types of investors are primarily a symptom of the housing crisis. They are profiting from a problem they did not necessarily cause themselves. The core of the problem lies more in the interplay between politics and big market interests, such as the stimulation of owner-occupied housing and institutional investment. What strikes me about institutional investors is how well-organised their lobby is. 

Do you mean Dutch pension funds, or also the large foreign equity funds? 

I’m talking mainly about Dutch players. They are united in the Vereniging van Institutionele Beleggers in Vastgoed (Association of Institutional Investors in Real Estate), which includes clubs like Vesteda and Bouwinvest. These groups have a well-organised lobby. You notice this with the Affordable Rent Act, for example. This act has recently introduced more strict rent controls for middle-income housing. However, various exemptions were included in that Act for new-build homes, which are exactly the homes these investors put their money into. The Affordable Rent Act therefore means relatively little for their financial returns. They have arranged this well for themselves, without much publicity. The small private individuals, the slumlords, are quite the opposite: they constantly react indignantly in the media. 

Right-wing parties like the PVV (Party for Freedom) and the NSC (New Social Contract) make the housing crisis primarily a migration issue and blame refugees. How do you think the Left should deal with this?  

Refuting that frame is very difficult. I have tried so many times to explain that you cannot reduce the housing crisis to status holders, but this frame keeps coming back. It is simply much easier to punch down than it is to punch up.  

The French sociologist Didier Eribon talks about redrawing the “us-versus-them” opposition. Now the opposition is “we the people” versus “those who come from outside”: the migrant, the status holder. The opposition that we need to make more often runs along class lines: so “we who are weighed down by capital” versus “they who can use their capital to get rich at our expense”. Migrants are more of an ally in that struggle; they are also victims of the housing crisis.  

But how to make this frame stick? Our undergraduate geography students spent years researching the attitudes of local residents towards asylum seekers’ centres. They generally found that people became a lot more positive – in fact more indifferent – about asylum seekers’ centres after they had been built. Perhaps the same applies to housing.  

One of the trends in social housing is that we have started to rent the cheapest homes to the most marginalised groups for the sake of affordability. This has improved affordability, but the downside is that these cheap homes are clustered in certain neighbourhoods. So we are getting more and more neighbourhoods where status holders and people with all kinds of special needs are concentrated. This reduces contact with other groups even further. When these people remain anonymous, they are easy scapegoats. It is much more difficult to blame your kind neighbour who brings around food on your birthday, but happens to be a migrant. 

In your latest book, you also call the housing crisis an invisibility crisis. Can you explain that? 

Homelessness is the most distressing indicator of the housing crisis as far as I am concerned. But it is only the tip of the iceberg. Below it, you find many other forms of suffering due to the crisis. We may see someone selling street newspapers in front of the supermarket, but we don’t allow the true meaning of their situations to really sink in.  

The Netherlands is very good at hiding away homeless people, making them invisible. I think it’s very important that we focus our attention on the lived experiences of people confronted with the housing crisis. I find it telling that we know the monthly fluctuations of average house price to the euro, but we have no clue how many people experiencing homelessness there are in our country. 

So it’s about emphasising the role of the middle class. 

I think inequality is a very important issue. Everyone finds it bizarre to learn that the median homeowner in the Netherlands has 90 times more wealth than the median renter. The degree of inequality here is not on the radar. The same goes for the number of homeless people. If you tell people roughly 100,000 people are currently estimated to experience homelessness in the Netherlands, they find that difficult to believe  

We invariably estimate inequalities as being smaller than they really are. So inequality must be part of the frame. This is also the plea of sociologist Matthew Desmond: we need to look at poverty relationally. It is a product of exploitation, and it is inextricably linked to wealth. If we really want to solve it, we must also denounce unearned wealth. 

In your book, you speak very deliberately about marginalised rather than vulnerable people.  

This is related to what I just mentioned. Often, people are not vulnerable at all. On the contrary, they are very resilient. But when you have a whole system against you it doesn’t matter how resilient you are: you will eventually succumb to it. 

Translated from the Dutch by Ann Doherty.  

This interview was first published in the Winter 2024 issue of De Helling. It is republished here with permission.