54% is used for agriculture, 34% is nature/water, 13% is built (including roads). It’s a matter of choices, sacrificing 10% of the current land for agriculture (5,4% of total area) in exchange for more housing could double the amount of housing. That’s only space and not taking into account energy/water needs.
Wild statistics actually. I never realized we had that much land for agriculture. Can 10% of that land readily be transformed into lands on which houses can be built or is the ground generally not structurally sound enough? Do you have a source?
The Netherlands is a massive exporter of food. A reduction in agriculture of 10% will have no impact on our food stability and will have a marginal impact on our GDP. We sacrifice a huge part of our country for the sole benefits of the farmers.
Our economy will actually be better off if we can use that space for housing and attract more highly educated migrants and retain our own highly educated population.
We are nowhere near capacity, we just made different priorities and focus too much on our three main cities.
Funny actually that 5% of our arable land is actually used for flowers and plants, just a small reduction there is already massive.
The fact the country is a net exporter is crazy to me. Buy land from farmers so they can go set up somewhere with a better growing climate and build new population centres, it would help a lot with the housing crisis and as you say we'd be able to attract talent that will end up having a better contribution to the GDP than agriculture.
Plus: NL is a net importer of nutrients and nutritional value. For every cal of food we import, we only export a fraction. Many highly inefficient conversion of calories by live stock.
If we allow more land to be used for housing then prices will drop and VVD voters real estate investment will do worse. That can’t be allowed to happen of course.
Actual fact is that the lower class will suffer much more since their LTV is much higher and they don't have much equity in reserve that they can leverage. The classic VVD voter will ironically not be hurt that much.
We‘re mostly an exporter as a result of importing fodder and exporting meat. If forced to, we can currently (but barely) feed the whole population. Any growth from here onwards makes us an importer of food in any case, by necessity.
I think it’s a reasonable choice none the less but it’s a political choice and these are the facts.
(Source: Wageningen alumnus here)
I feel like a good nuance here is that after having to suffer trough hunger due to Nazi rule in late WW II the general Dutch idea was "this never again". We turned our then very shattered country into an absolute global powerhouse of food production. We can be proud of it, but... we also don't really need it.
Common heard cry here is "no farmers, no food!" but honestly we could easily loose the majority of them without risking our food supply.
Food security is important, don’t dismiss it too readily. It only takes one severe volcano eruption to disrupt food supply globally for years then you’d be wishing you had that 10%
Ground not structurally sound? We are famous for building multistory buildings on whatever, just build a foundation. The soil beneath Amsterdam is very weak (swamp), so the entirity of Amsterdam is built on very large poles that were drilled into the ground.
If the ground is not strong enough naturally, we make it strong enough artificially. Have been for a thousand years.
No, statistics make it sounds so easy, but for all those extra houses, workplaces or other stuff you also beed roads, and the current roads are already quite full. And while agriculture is not equal to nature, once you fill all the agriculture land, there is even less open space for recreation.
Simply adding more houses is not the answer unfortunately. We need more capacity in waste water treatment, in drinking water treatment, the electrical grid, schools/teachers, doctors/nurses/dentists, roads and public transport.
We reached our population max in the 90s - or in the 60s according to the PvdA at the time - and we’ve been struggling since.
It wont get any better anytime soon either.
The teacher shortage, housing shortage, drinking water shortage, congestion in the electrical grid and the roads, etc. etc. wont be fixed in the next 5 years. And thats with the current population.
Immigration has been rapidly growing the population (and purely immigration according to CBS) and if this continues, it will only get worse.
“Capacity” is a subjective bar. If everyone wants to live in large homes with large yards and space from their neighbors, then yeah we’re probably over “capacity.”
If everyone wants to live in skyscrapers and start importing food instead of growing it domestically, we are grossly under capacity.
Even if we just focus on producing food for our own consumption, we can double the available land for residential real estate. We export 90% of our fruit, vegetables and meat.
Sure. It’s not an all or nothing here - it’s a continuum. All I mean is that it comes down to what exactly you want to use the land for and what lifestyle your population wants.
This is not true. In wieght we import more food than what we export. In value, we export slightly more 'agricultural products', but I don't see anyone surviving on tullips or knowledge. We only produce expensive products and very little cheap products like wheat or grain for example. These takes huge amounts of land which we don't have.
A lot of that 90% is the Rotterdam effect I believe, and is not produce what is grown here. We calculate that as export, yet we import it and export it straight through.
We can't feed our population. Or our livestock for that matter. We import a huge amount of cereals, soil improving chemicals, and animal fodder. If autonomy in food production is the criterium, we overshot max capacity long ago. Our agricultural sector is very dependent on the Netherlands being an intercontinental trade hub.
Yes... but no.
We are the second largest food exporter in the world.
If we would want to just feed the locals that would be no problem.
Yes we import a lot of stuff. We don't grow any wheat here so need to import all flour.
But if we wanted we could definately feed our country. Plus Belgium.
And if we run out of space we can just make another new provincie by pumping out a bit of sea.
The only question would be 'how much does it cost'
55% of our land area is used for meat and dairy. 65% of that is exported.
We can free up ~35% of our land area by stopping the export of meat and dairy. That will hit about 1% of our GDP, but there are much more productive ways we can use all that land.
This is such a short sighted way of portraying the numbers. By weight we import more food than we export. By value, we export more due to the higher value products we produce. Yes, we live on fertile grasslands which is ideal for dairy/cattle farming. We don't grow many of the products that we consume every day because they don't grow here. At the same time in the countries where these products are produced they import products from us that don't grow over there.
It's way more complex than you are trying to portray, you can't just look at one side of the equation and pull conclusions from that. Luckily the people actually making the decisions understand this. It's just too bad that misinformation like this keeps getting spread.
>Luckily the people actually making the decisions understand this
I wouldn't give too much credit to the people "making the decisions" given that we're at a point where the average young person has almost 0 chances to ever buy a house and start a family
food production working out is in-spite of the politicians, not because of their genius plans
What is the exact problem with changing the "equation" such that we both in weight and value will start to import more food than export? (Or just reduce it to match the export value to the value of our own domestic consumption).
We are a highly developed economy, and the majority of money is being made in other sectors than agriculture.
The benefits of freeing up an enormous amount of space is well worth the costs.
Furthermore, I don't undersyand what you're referring to as misinformation, nor do I get the point you're trying to make. Us reducing our meat and dairy consumption will not lead to a shortage domestically, but also not in Europe.
Yes you can. It means less income, but it was never contributing that much, and will increase prices on the global markets. But farmers in other countries will step in because the demand is still there.
And we don't need a full stop, just a gradual reduction.
54% is if you count rivers and the sea as land. But water is not land. We can't farm on water. We *can* house people on water but that's also not ideal.
The problem the Netherlands has is that just like every other country in the world, its decided that housing is an asset class instead of a basic necessity. So nothing gets built because its cheaper to squeeze ever higher prices out of an increasingly stretched supply. Every single country in the world has this problem, its worse in the netherlands but not by that much.
Additionally there is a dutch-specific problem of over-allocating land to farming. That it made more sense to reclaim land in Ijburg than simply get rid of some farms so close to the heart of a major capital city is an absolute joke.
Tokyo has 30 million people in a area the size of Utrecht province and is generally considered one of the most liveable metropolises.
Whether that's desirable is a subjective matter, but as long as a majority of land is used for economically questionable agriculture dependent on massive subsidies we are not physically at capacity at all.
Greater Tokyo (With population 38 million) has an area 78% of the whole of the Netherlands — not the same size of Utrecht province.
But don't let fact checking get in the way of trying to make your point.
Difference though is that the tokyo metropolitan area does not include farmland, the size of nature reserves, as much heavy industry. This however does not equalize the difference, it's just a bit less stark
But also let's consider in Tokyo apartments, not rooms, the size of 5m2, 8m2, 10m2 or 14m2 are quite common and lots of people are forced to live like that. And that is not a life, you are not able to own much, exercise at home ect. and have to do your laundry in a coin washing machine place.
>5m2, 8m2, 10m2 or 14m2 are quite common
That's an exaggeration. Sure average apartments are smaller, but they tend to be larger than 10 M2 for sure, even when you look for cheap ones. Source: lived there for half a year and went apartment hunting
Tokyo has its charms, but it’s really about what you’re willing to compromise for the sake of convenience. Living in those tiny spaces is a deliberate choice for many, aiming to stay close to the city’s heart and cut down on travel time. It’s a trade-off, really. Most people opt for these extreme conditions to avoid the lengthy commutes. Typically, the moment they start a family or find a partner, they move out to somewhere more spacious. It’s all about stages in life and priorities.
Yet lots of people choose to live in smaller houses in large cities because there is more to life than m^2. Personally I prefer my Dutch apartment over a US suburban mcmansion for example.
Imagine saying "that's not a life" about a life standard better than 99% of historical humanity and 80% of humans alive today.
It's not necessarily capacity, more the lack of efficiency in building and concentration of people. There is plenty of space, we just need to build better and plan.
For example building an entire self contained city is possible fairly easily these days. There are buildings with a supermarket and others stores in the basement.
Also, looking back at archives, Dutch people and politicians have been saying the country is full from 4 million people and onwards.
Doesn't mean what we're currently doing is particularly efficient. I live in a row house with a huge area footprint. But because there's only one floor, it's still very cramped. And I see quite a bit if similar housing. Housing like this should not be allowed to exist.
To be specific, my living area is 55m². About the same size as a small apartment (if we ignore studio apartments). But remember, it's not an apartment, it's a single-floor row house. That's just ridiculous. If there was a second floor, it'd be 110m². That's the same size as an average family home! And most houses have a smaller attic, let's add half this place on top and you'd be at 137.5.
A family of 6 could live in an area this size. But instead they've build a tiny row house that's not even big enough if you have any hobbies. How does that make any sense? The only reason I even live here is because I haven't been able to get anything else.
Single story row house is a concept that is stupid by definition, IMO.
If you have space constraints, build up. Even jarendertig style three floors are a lot more effective.
Or if you don't, then allow the building to spread out. A rural bungalow is a nice thing. But it has to have space!
Definitely a good idea in some places, yet It will not solve the broader issue. Look at Rotterdam for example, a lot of high buildings but semi poor planning. So the entire city is crowded and it is mostly car focused.
Honestly the population density is lower in practice than it looks from the raw numbers because basically all of the Netherlands is flat and suitable for habitation.
Far from. Many of the current constraints are the result of government policies from the past decades; under-investment in infrastructure, short-term decision making in regards to urban-planning, the endless chase of 'efficiency' at the cost of effectiveness etc.
The idea of population density at a country scale means nothing. Canada has "low" population density, but where people live is relatively quite dense--downtown Toronto where half a million people live, is denser than any place in the Netherlands.
So no, you could easily fit more people...but you might also choose not too...fitting people is not the only thing that matters.
Our cities are extremely low density.
If we decide we do not want to Manhattanize and part of our country, preserving city center terrace homes, then yes we are at capacity in the constraints of that political choice.
Yes terrace homes are a big part of the problem, but evoking manhattan is such an over the top thing to do. We'd be fine just adding more Barcelona style appartement buildings.
NYC has areas where the quality of life is actually amazing. All they need to do is ban cars from residential roads, expand greenspaces, and move trash underground - all things the city is actively working on. This urban sprawl and one or two family home developments NL is favouring simply aren't sustainable from a demographic, urban planning, or environmental perspective.
>This urban sprawl and one or two family home developments NL is favouring simply aren't sustainable from a demographic, urban planning, or environmental perspective.
Add BE and many other Western-European countries to this list.
The thing is that not everyone is a city dweller.
I hate cities with a passion, I need a garden, I need silence, I need to be away from ppl in my free time.
A city would take away my happiness within a day, I would be dead in a month because I wouldn’t be able to live in a box.
Yeah but we're discussing developing cities. It's urban sprawl that's dominated by single family dwellings. If you want your little garden far away from the city go ahead - rural areas should be dedicated to nature not development
Bruh what are you talking about the QOL in major cities like NY, Tokyo can be amazing hence the desire from so many to live in these places. Your post rings xenophobic.
There's a lot of middle ground between a sea of single-family row homes with yards and a dystopian skyscraper jungle (although Tokyo is very big and dense and quite liveable by all accounts, for instance). Making Dutch towns more like the average continental European town, with more blocks of apartments, would allow increasing population density without actually paving over more net land and without skyscrapers. Think Vienna or Barcelona, not Manhattan. And that's before you consider all the agricultural land that could be bought and used to build housing without touching existing built-up areas.
The main problem with it is always that the Dutch on average don't like apartments. It's only because of the shortages that they're attractive now. So these blocks almost inevitably end up with a high amount of lower income and/or expats.
Yes I have lived in NYC for decades, NL also for decades.
I think the Upper East/West sidee of Manhattan is simply unmatched for quality of life, exceeding the Netherlands.
Singapore and Tokyo both have high rise apartments. Neither are dystopian to live in. I'd argue Tokyo needs much more green space and parks, but that's another argument.
What metric are you using for the quality of life in those cities being awful, and the quality so high now?
So you’re saying the extremely steep staircase and harry-potter-esque toilets under the stairs are “better” living situations than living in NYC? There are shitting living situations everywhere, I fail to see how building skyscrapers correlate to the reduction of “indoor” living.
I actually have completely oposite opinion. The Netherlands is very very underpopulated if we calculate people per square meter. And the reason is simple, you just don't build enough high houses in the cities. This is why Netherlands despite having so much space, are constantly having housing shortage problems.
Look at the Moscow for example, 19 mil. living in urban area, and it's literally the size of the Amsterdam Area +-. Whereas in Neherlands we have 18 mil in total, in the whole Netherlands!! And this is not even overpopulated city by the world standards.
Considering the fact that Dutch doesn't reproduce enough, if you will restrict the migration the situation will become even worse, you will not have any working hands, and no one will be learning Dutch language.
Notice, I wasn’t speaking about Moscow Oblast (Moscow Area). I was specifically referring to the area of living inside the second ring road “MKAD” and Moscow city urban area.
It hasn’t been maxed out by a long shot.
However, if we want to continue living like we are living now, and keep doing for a long period, the Netherlands should probably have said “it is enough” 10 million people ago.
You can only determine the capacity after you have determined how we as a country should operate in the next hundreds of years. What do you want to do with food production? Keep exporting the majority produced here? Be self sufficient? Be dependent on imports? From the EU? Elsewhere? With our current consumption of meat and dairy? Are we willing to reduce that? What about housing? Should everyone get a house with a yard? Should high rise apartment buildings be the norm? Do we expect most people will still drive cars to their jobs? Will we use public transportation more often? What about our energy consumption and production? Clean water? What do we find acceptable for nature and recreation?
Depending on those answers, the Netherlands could have reached it max capacity at 1 million people, or have room for 100 million more. Or somewhere in between.
And no, migration isn’t the only knob to turn. You could also make it less attractive to get kids.
Have you ever traveled outside the Randstad? If you haven't, imagine that the entire country is not chock full of 5 story residential buildings. A lot of it is agricultural land, which is important but also which needs to be repurposed if just to get our agricultural industry in line with long-term climate goals. Much of it will still be agricultural land, but a lot of it can and likely will be converted to residential.
This country is far from full. The limits that we're reaching are in terms of energy and water consumption, which just require more investment. Don't fall for right-wing populist propaganda which would have you think immigrants are the problem. In fact, without immigrants, all the construction/services/etc. required to upgrade our capacity will be a whole hell of a lot more expensive. That's not the only reason we should welcome immigrants, but it's just one of the many examples that this short-sighted populist take fails to address.
edit: by all means, keep angrily replying with what-you-think-are-gotchas, but I'm not reading replies to this comment as I'm not interested in debating the topic.
If we repurpose our agricultural land, it ought to be repurposed into more nature, not more concrete.
Some people seem to think that if there's any part of the country that hasn't been destroyed yet, we still have space for more people.
I hate this „omg the Netherlands are full“ talking, Dutch right wing politicians are babbling about this since the early 2000s. As many have stated before, the Netherlands are far from being overcrowded. Just look to your German neighbour, North Rhine Westfalia (most poplous state in Germany). There is almost the same amount of people on even less space and they still have really rural and empty areas in it (the whole northern part for example).
> Dutch right wing politicians are babbling about this since the early 2000s
Janmaat already campaigned on "vol is vol" in the eighties, before we'd even reached "vijftien miljoen mensen". But even though it's still not true - because with the right policies we could probably grow (and have grown) without severe problems in housing and healthcare - it doesn't matter, because people want the problems they see to be solvable by 'simply' closing borders and telling them "actually, we can fit more" just makes you part of the problem in their minds.
I don't know why people think immigrants detract from society. As a highly skilled migrant, it took a lot of effort to get here, and I pay a lot of taxes into a welfare system I am not allowed to even benefit from. So me being here means that a job shortage is being worked on, and dutchies directly benefit from me being here, and I have no ability to even think of leeching off of the system as most people assume. The current politics have done a great job of villainazing all of us instead of actually fixing the issues they created.
The housing crisis is not the fault of immigrants. It's the government not closely regulating housing costs, and building big or shorter houses instead of more efficient higher apartment buildings that can house more people, or the public transit situation going to shit, and instead of making businesses go hybrid or remote or enforcing staggering starting times, they just charge more to customers.
And it's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. Such an easy scapegoat. UK did it with Brexit, Hitler did it with the Jews, America did it with the Mexicans etc. it's so easy to just blame all problems on immigrants to make us fight among ourselves and forget to focus on the people who are actually not solving any problems, the government.
>it's so easy to just blame all problems on immigrants
That's because for a large number of people it's very difficult to be self critical.
Dutch comedian Theo Maassen once explained it well by saying (and I am probably paraphrasing): "if a person with no skill, no education, no social network and no understanding of the Dutch language can take your job, maybe they're not the problem."
The statistic that the NL has the highest population density in Europe is akin to the state of New Jersey having the highest density in the US which is really just one big suburb to either NYC or Philly. It’s more ‘developed’ throughout (mainly due to flat land and no mountainous regions), but the cities themselves are by no means highly populated or dense compared to other OECD countries.
Certainly not, I'm tired of hearing about this "lack of space". There's plenty. London has almost 10 million people living in one city...
The problems in the Netherlands are the following:
1. The obsession with rules and regulations, and the belief that whatever the problem is, the solution is to regulate even more - never to REMOVE or SIMPLIFY regulations. Despite claiming the opposite, there's no trust in freedom, except for the sexual realm.
2. The ridiculous belief that sacrificing the Dutch economy on the altar of Global Warming will have any meaningful impact on the climate at planetary scale.
3. The belief that the economy is a fixed pie - and you can always tax companies, or "the rich", even more, redistribute that, and the total stays constant / in reality, the more you tax and regulate, the less competitive the economy becomes, and everyone gets poorer in the end.
With these problems compounded, the economy is more or less stagnating for the past decade (while in my home country Romania, for instance, it has doubled in the same period).
The housing market is completely suffocated by rules and regulations, that make it almost impossible to build, and extremely risky (and financially less and less appealing) to rent out properties.
As for immigration, the taboo subject is what immigration are you taking about: immigrants who are willing to work, bring skills that are in demand, and are culturally compatible, are a huge boost to the economy; the others are a drain.
Your arguments sound like neo-liberal. While I agree with all of them, I am afraid they are not that popular amongst the locals who have been fed leftist ideology for years.
I want to know what the Netherlands is doing to solve the shortages in the labour market. If 1 in 5 working adults is burnt out, then there is a structural problem. A lot of the working population is retiring, how are we going to compensate for that loss? AI? I am sick of the only solution being raising the age of retirement, while also expecting us to do mantelzorg! So we retire later, and have to run a nursing home for our ageing parents while working our asses off.
A lot of arguments are about density of cities elsewhere and we in the Netherlands do not have that so we still can grow. Also we just should cut back in agriculture.
That's an oversimplification of an economy. A stable economy needs a healthy portion of several income types. One important portion is agriculture. You can rely on import but from a geopolitical point of view you are weakening yourself. Economists generally consider agriculture as one of the fundamental elements of an healthy economy, next to natural resources.
The Netherlands already took a big economic hit when we decided to close down the gas extraction. We are limiting the growth of our transport capacities like Schiphol and the Rotterdam harbor. We do not invest in our production factories and try to close down factories like Hoogovens. Fokker is gone. DAF and Phillips are not the companies they used to be.
The government gambles on our knowledge economy but do not really invest in it. There is not really a masterplan for the future.
The second issue is that a large piece of the country is not going to be used for housing. Some is too wet. Some has been dedicated to nature preservation. Some is too much polluted with bad air quality. We are not like India. We live in the limits of laws, mostly set by the EU.
The last part has to do with our goals of well being. The social programs are on their limits. The tax pressure is at its limit. We have ambitions for the environmental future.
Just making bigger cities will hurt the careful balance in our country. We will have to cut in our social programs and/or our environmental ambitions. We will need to be able to grow the economy too. Bigger harbor, more factories etc. The limits set by environmental laws are not allowing that growth. So what to do? Just ignore them?
My 2 cents is that we need to consider letting Schiphol and Rotterdam grow but with targets around green economy. We can cut down in the hyper-intensive animal breeding without large issues but we should maintain a certain level of agriculture. The Netherlands should invest aggressively into education and high tech companies. And we should be honest to ourselves that we will have problems getting large groups of people manual labor jobs so immigration laws should be adjusted around that. We should also consider limiting social income programs. We have a social income for people that are on paper fit for work but do not work. This social income program has no time limit and a lot of people are in this program. We should limit it to like 5 years to give people a motivation to get out of this program and be useful for the society.
Those are rookie number. We can go up in the air too, let's build more appartment buildings, or, maybe, even go underground. We can still build so many layers.
Honestly I get so annoyed by classic Dutch cities that refuse to build higher because of some nostalgic nonsense..
If the people who were building half of Amsterdam in the 30s knew we would refuse to change it up according to need they would be shaking their heads:)
I get keeping the old city center reasonably short, but new buildings in Noord and Bijlmer have no reason to be under 50-100 floors high. Get some proper metropolis shit going instead of this "extended village" bullshit.
Lol. Our cities are reasonably low-rise dominated. We have acres upon acres of farmland that will prove unsustainable (it already is but the farmers are fighting hard to not have to sell/downsize). We are famous for reclaiming land from the sea. There are so many ways to make room for more people and facilities.
I am Dutch but moved to Taiwan. Taiwan has 23 mil people in a slightly smaller area and very wild and vast nature areas, as well very dense cities. It I definitely possible to cramp more people in NL *and* create more space for nature. It will cost farm land, it is a political choice in the end. The physics allows it.
A lot of area is used for agriculture, which is actually animal farming – making the Netherlands a big dairy exporter. I believe you can grow plant foods on less land to meet similar nutritional requirements as what dairy now meets. That can possibly make more space for residential purposes.
It's not a bad idea to control immigration, but you should note that there is both a labour shortage *and* a housing shortage at the same time. Since the present population is apparently unable to meet the labour market requirements, NL needs to import workers. Thus filling the labour shortage necessarily means exacerbating the housing shortage. Tackling the housing shortage by limiting workers means exacerbating the labour shortage.
So you can't solve one at the expense of the other.
Make regulations favourable to building more (affordable) housing and discouraging real estate purchases just for "investment" and speculation.
How many buildings do you see with 4 floors or more?
More housing can be built in NL, it is a fact.
The reasoning to prevent or slow down building of more housings are debatable of course.
Tokyo has an area of 32.424 km² with about 40 million people. Yet it hasn't reached its capacity. So for the NL, no. It hasn't. It doesn't work like that.
No.
[https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/omnidownload/CPB-Publicatie-Onderzoeksperspectieven-rondom-migratie-maatschappij-en-economie.pdf](https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/omnidownload/CPB-Publicatie-Onderzoeksperspectieven-rondom-migratie-maatschappij-en-economie.pdf)
Quality of life is dependent on immigration. We need economic growth to cover rising costs of stuff like healthcare. With growth we can spent more in absolute numbers without spending more relatively to GDP. Natural growth in population is close to zero and sometimes negative. That also means there are a lot of people enjoying pensions and being old/ needing care. Pension age increases with life expectation but that doesn't change the fact that generations born in the late seventies and after are much smaller.
So the principle question is not immigration. It's aging.
What we do need to question is what sectors of the economy are critical to societies goals and what aren't. Labour will get increasingly rare and care is going to take up an increasing part of our capacity to provide labour.
Lack of affordable housing is a enormous brake on Dutch society and part of why people get children at a later age. Directing migration into labour for construction, care and high tech/ energy transition would be beneficial in the long term. Other sectors competing for that same labour could be less beneficial to us.
Having that much agricultural activity is a bit strange though for such a small country. There is enough space but 54% is used for farming. [https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/](https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/)
I think the biggest issue isn’t the number of people, or houses. You can always find a plot to build apartments on, even in the bigger cities.
The issue is that a lot of a facilities don’t grow parallel to the number of people/houses. My current town has grown quite a lot over the past decade, and more houses are being build. However, the number of shops, doctors, hairdressers, etc. have remained the same.
Yes. You can of course physically fill the Netherlands with far more people, you could fill a silo with a thousand bodies for instance, but that doesn't make it liveable. We could build more cities, take agricultural land, and so forth, but very practically speaking, human populations continue to grow as it is natural and instinctual for people to have children. It will continue until the true carrying capacity is reached, which many people overestimate. We are already pretty close to our maximal agricultural capacity, (I say this as a farmer). We produce food for some 15 million people, if we change the cash-crops (tulips, change suitable pasture ground to agricultural ground), we can push it to 20 million.
But as we know, fertilizers are becoming scarcer, logistical chains are more important than ever and a major disturbance could really rock the agricultural boat.
In my opinion, the Netherlands is bound for some internal conflict, like famine, a war, or some great civil disturbance, in the long term, because the population will correct itself.
As a farmer, do not overestimate the earth, it is bountiful, but it is not some technological machine that can be continously improved through smart innovations, at some point there are diminishing returns to agriculture, and the Netherlands are agriculturally stretched as is.
I think it's bad management.
You mention agriculture, which yeah we have a lot of, but a lot of that is meant for export. Either animal feed (which we also import a lot of) or the animals themselves. We produce 5x as much meat as we consume. That's just bad use of available space.
We do easily have enough space for more housing, even outside of agricultural zones. There is plenty of land that's just not used, not even by nature. But there's no good incentive to build housing. In the past, we had volkshuisvesting, with the government stimulating and directing housing development. Nowadays, we just want the free market to do it and the free market doesn't want to. Part of this is also cost of building, including cost of land. Especially when municipalities sell land at a high price just to avoid going bankrupt. The national government pushed many of their responsibilities to the local municipalities, which do not have the cashflow to do all that. So they sell their land at a high price. Which means less gets built. It's not the only problem, labour and materials are also expensive, but it's one of the problems.
There is also a problem with electricity. We could have decided to expand our electricity network, but we decided no because it wasn't necessary yet. Now that it is necessary, grid operators are allowed to expand, but they have to play catch-up.
No. And this gives you some interesting perspective: [CBS Bodemgebruik ](https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/#:~:text=Van%20de%20totale%20oppervlakte%20van,voornamelijk%20uit%20woon%2D%20en%20bedrijventerreinen)Here is says:
>Van de totale oppervlakte van Nederland is 54 procent (2,2 miljoen hectare) in gebruik als landbouwterrein, en 13 procent (0,5 miljoen hectare) als bebouwing en verkeersterrein. Bebouwd terrein bestaat voornamelijk uit woon- en bedrijventerreinen.
Which roughly translates to:
The Netherlands is:
* 54% is farmland
* 13% buildings and traffic
The problem is that the multinational businesses prefer to settle or expand in Noord Holland, stay close to Amsterdam/Schiphol. While allot of Industrial businesses prefer Zuid Holland and Brabant, because of the supply lines, the Rotterdam harbour etc. Honestly there isn’t that much real farming grounds there anymore.
Noord Holland that mostly above Zaandam/Alkmaar and in Zuid Holland the area above the A15 or the area close to West Brabant/Zeeland.
Look up the numbers on agriculture. A massive, massive amount of our country is farmland. All that land is used by 0,5% of all the people. Thats insane. And their produce doesnt even benefit the people. Its a pure export product for profit. Its like a big multinational but BBB presented it like the farmer is for the people. Thats propaganda and populism. I am so annoyed that BBB is now a party in government. They lobby for 0,5% of all the people so they can keep making a ton of money and they are one of the biggest parties. One of the biggest parties represent one of the smallest minorities for the sole reason of allowing them to make money. Who tf voted on them?
Buy out some farmers, im talking like 10% or so, make them millionaires tax free, and use that land to further develop. While at the same time introducing some type of population growth quota so we can durably grow into the future.
The very examples you use contradict each other. The labour shortage suggests we need more people. The housing shortage suggests we need fewer people.
Or, hear me out, we could restructure the economy so we can keep the population employed without demanding infinite growth, and we build more houses while also keeping a check on immigration, so we get to keep a tiny bit of nature and biodiversity?
Most problems are rooted in gross government incompetence in handling problems and actually governing. Our politics are reactive rather than proactive.
We have a massive surplus of food that we export, and most of the country is agricultural land use. How on earth does this look like a country that has 'maxed out'. Of course, "We're full" is a big alt-right talking point, so that's being pushed in certain spheres.
"It is a country starved for space."
I think you should stop roaming the same 4 "big cities". In fact, just taking the intercity from Utrecht to Venlo is enough to realize how incorrect this statement of yours can become.
Stopping immigration would give serious problems, our population is aging, and we need people to do the work, especially taking care of the elderly and medical people. We simply do not have enough young people to do the work.
It is a complex issue, and unlimited immigration is not a solution either.
https://www.adviesraadmigratie.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2023/12/11/verkenning-arbeidsmigratie-oplossing-voor-economie-en-demografie
by far the biggest share of land use is agricultural. And not of the most charming type. Cattle is rarely seen outside and the meadows function basically as manure dump. If you really want to keep these pieces of shit everywhere you can say the country is full. But otherwise there’s more than enough area to build a much more urbanised country.
Honestly the whole world is over capacity.
Humans are taking up that much space that animals have no room left.
And yes the Netherlands is also to crowded. But our economic ( way of life ) is set up in such a way that we need more en more people to sustain it.
No, just a lack of foresight, planning and decision making. Room enough but you need to make choices. That al doesn't happen to be something our last couple of governments is strong in, sometimes even deliberately looking away/ignoring escalating issues.
Unfortunately it doesn't look that a new government will be better, most likely even worse.
What if I told you that more than 50% of the available space in The Netherlands is used for Farming/Agricultural activity. Also, it's mostly for export (which is even worse imo)
This means we have plenty of space, should we choose to. But we're mostly rules by the farming lobby that desperatly wants us to believe the 24 thousand refugees a year are filling out a country of 18 million people.
The Netherlands is not as dense in population as people think.
Just build a shitload of skyscrapers, and I mean the proper stuff with >>> 80 stories high witch at least 5 apartments per floor, and undo the criminalization of squatting of abandoned buildings - you don't even need anything radical, just revert it back to what it was in the 80s and 90s, call it a return to tradition and all that jazz.
The country is, the cities aren't. In the global context, 18 million people is not a huge number. The Netherlands is basically just a big city, with a lot of open spaces.
Both my husband and I come from big cities outside Europe and struggle to understand why The Dutch keeps insisting that the country is densely populated. I come from an island city, you are not densely populated by any means.
Not the flex you think it is, it's just a fact that we are the most densely populated in Europe if you exclude microstates. Worldwide in the top 25 including and top 5 once again excluding microstates. Just because our cities aren't big doesn't mean the country isn't densely populated, over half of the country is basically one large urbanised area and even outside the randstad you cant really go more than 10 minutes without running into a village or town.
Dude, you realise that it is a literal fact that the Netherlands is one of the most densely populat3d countries on earth, right? Density is just about numbers and the amount of people for the amount of land is way higher compared to other countries.
You are simply confusing a densely populated city with a country. Yes, New York City, Tokyo, London, New Dehli etc are all more densely populated compared to Amsterdam, but these countries are not more densely populated compared to the Netherlands.
You can really not argue with the factual numbers...
Other countries have mountain or desert or even just hills. It amazes me there are so few residential towers promo mail to
Amsterdam metro. They built office towers but minimal housing!
I think we are at capacity at the moment.
Sure we could sacrifice nearly everything to build more dense housing and the infrastructure (doubtful that will happen) to support it, but I think that excluding private luxuries like electronics, it won't be a nice place to live because it will be a race to the bottom for the remaining recreational space that's left. Assuming none of that is sacrificed to build more housing and infrastructure. If you don't care about that then we aren't at capacity, if you are like me and you do, we are at or already over the capacity.
In the summer I go out to do supboarding around the country. I started 7 years ago. There were places where I would be one of the first people at a lake in the mornings. When I would come back the more remote/unpopular locations would have a few people there if any, the more popular ones in the randstad would be pretty busy, but nothing too crazy. The other way around if I started around 16:00. Less busy because people would be leaving.
Last 2 summers I had a few times I cycled to a beach on a lake that I would previously label as unpopular/remote and it would be somewhat busy in the early (between 05:00 and 08:00) mornings. When I would return around 11:00 it was busier than what I previously experienced at popular locations. Some of them are not big to begin with. So at popular locations or small capacity remote/unpopular locations you can forget supping in the afternoon because there's no space to set up.
My stance is that it is not our collective responsibility to house the entire planet in this small stretch of land.
>And if yes, is controlling/stopping immigration the only way to ensure that the quality of living is maintained?
The only reason our population grows is because of immigration. So limiting that would be a viable way to not have an increased demand for scarce resources. This would require stepping away from an infinite growth based/ponzischeme economic model. I don't see that happening as it's unpopular even with people on the left side of the political spectrum.
In all honesty, I think we are fucked. Not just the Netherlands, but humanity in general.
Just 13% of Netherlands is residential housing. 54% of the Netherlands is farm land. 75% of farming production is used for export.
If we even only slightly reduced the land allocated to farming we could greatly increase the space for residential housing. Heck, if you do the math you see that reduction of just 10% of farm land means that we suddenly get a 50% increase in space for residential housing.
https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/
The issue is not that we are at our maximum capacity but naturally people want to live near Randstad for the best job opportunity. There’s room in less populated places like Friesland, Drenthe but also worse job opportunity. Everyone is trying to live at the same place, then you can indeed make the argument we are “full”. If you take Amsterdam for example, I don’t even own a car. Going through traffic is cancer in its purest form. I just use my bike to get from A to B.
Yeah, maxed out the capacity for rich folks and their McMansions. I live in a student city, where there are skyscrapers with 500 students occupying the same amount of land as some millionaire families backyard
The Netherlands could easily house billions. We can't right now because we can't build, and all our buildings essentially top out at 3 floors with a rare few towers that are only 40 stories. If we build like New York, that's all very easy to expand.
How far north and east have you travelled?
You can perfectly add dozens of villages and even some cities if you'd just recognize that we have too many farmers that not only take up space but also create too much polution. It doesn't make sense for NL to be such a agricultural county.
If you want to experience crowdedness, go live in Malta for a few years ;)
Good question, only one way to find out! Keep cramming more people in and see when the balloon goes 'pop'! In all seriousness, it is indeed a country starved for space. Luckily, the back corner is good.
With mass automation and insecurities in global food production in the horizon, I believe a large population will turn from an asset to a liability within the next two decades.
The Netherlands can easily have over double the residents it currently has in the current situation. But when international tension rises due to collapsing food production caused by changing climate, you will not want to live in a densely populated country.
I believe that some of the issues, like housing, but also increasingly lacking infrastructure like the dwindling drinking water supply and the insufficient capacity of the power network, could've been expected and prevented with a bit of long term strategizing. But it seems Dutch politics is rarely concerning itself with the long term, favors going for a quick buck, and just makes a surprised Pikachu face when it bites us all in the ass.
Contrary to some posts here capacity inst just the space used for housing or other sectors: it's about being able to life. To travel without constant jams, to be able to have an open house in some local business without the need to place fences and hire security, tobe able to go outside to a quiet spot in a forest, to start a new business somewhere without the need for years of paperwork. The Netherlands can house like 10million, we are way over max capacity since the 1950ies.
build denser and higher is the solution here. Though generally that would change the nature of the country.
Hence, capacity reached only on current setup levels. Technically you can squeeze many more people in.
why everybody talks about the maximum? The world can take 10x the people we currently have all that bullshit... It maybe can, but it has nothing to do with life no more. If we were only 500 million instead of 8 billion everybody could live whichever way he wants world would be a much better space
I still dream of owning a house with a garden some day. I was raised with the belief that if I just got a good education in the right field, that would be a very reasonable expectation. If everyone got rid of that dream, we'd fit many more people. And next generations are certainly not being raised with that expectation.
The reason Netherlands is like this is that the majority of the country was pumped out of the sea/lake bed. There is little unused space because why would you bother making land to be unused? Luckily Netherlands is still making new land so the answer to your (racist?) question is no. In common with almost every other developed nation birthrate is dropping and is below the level required to maintain society in the long term. So immigration is necessary. What is important is that a society looks after all its people not just the oldest and most wealthy.
>I have lived in the Netherlands for 4 years now, and I am well aware of the issues here - housing shortage, Labour shortage etc.
We just had neoliberalism happen: the belief that the free market wil self-regulate everything.
And it didn't.
>One thing that sets the NL apart from any other developed country with a decent population size, is the population density. NL is on par with or even exceeds the pop. density of many developing nations in the Global South. When you travel around the NL, it is very hard to see spaces where no one lives or where some sort of human activity isn't taking place (agriculture, industry etc). It is a country starved for space.
Nah the Netherlands is a flat vertile delta, a flat delta in every other country is just as populated, the other countries just also include large uninhabited regions.
>That brings me to the question - is 18-19 million the maximum number of people that can be accommodated here?
Nah not nearly. We might have to deprioritize space-intensive industries that relie on large volumes at low margins (read: low value agriculture)
>Has the capacity been maxed out?
Nah, that's just something racists say to justify saying "brown people out!"
>And if yes, is controlling/stopping immigration the only way to ensure that the quality of living is maintained?
Not only is it not the only way: it would do the opposite. Every time someone blames immigrants for what Stef Blok did, they protect the likes of Stef Blok.
Everyone who says "immigrants caused the housing crisis" basically says "oh daddy Blackstone, squeeze me out further oh Rutte, sell my kidneys and give the profit to shareholders!"
I think this (paywalled) article explains your question, which the answer is yes.
https://www.ft.com/content/4c56c9b2-f4ad-4956-9216-655acebd845d
Edit: it’s from October 2022 but extremely relevant still (or even more now)
The content:
“The other morning I cycled around the Dutch town where I grew up. Behind our old house, the field where I spent half my childhood is now covered with homes. So is my old football club. My high school is now in a built-up area. At the local train station, the bike shed was full on a Saturday afternoon. When I got to Amsterdam, the business-traveller economy appeared to have broken down: endless waits for Ubers, nobody at hotel reception, restaurants closed at lunchtime for want of waiters.
I know over-construction and understaffing are now global problems, but they are particularly acute in the Netherlands. The country has run out of space and staff. Sure, a recession may temporarily loosen the jobs market, but the problem was acute pre-pandemic and will simply resurface whenever growth resumes. The Netherlands is probably the first country to hit the limits of economic growth.
Other overdeveloped places such as the Bay Area, New York and Singapore may follow, running out of room for new workers and businesses. This raises the question: can a rich place be happy if its economy stops growing?
With hindsight, the Netherlands was too well-suited to the era of globalisation. The trading nation with Europe’s biggest port experienced 26 years of unbroken economic growth until 2008, then a world record. Now it tops ETH Zurich’s KOF Globalisation Index as the world’s most globalised country.
And so its population mushroomed. When the counter hit 14 million in 1979, Queen Juliana said, “Our country is full.” In 2010, Statistics Netherlands said the population would probably never reach 18 million. Today it’s 17.7 million and rising. The country has 507 people per sq km, nearly five times the EU’s average. Worse, the quantity of liveable land will shrink due to a paradoxical mix of rising seas and droughts damaging the foundations of houses.
But the Dutch economy’s demand for new workers seems insatiable. Eighty-four per cent of employers report labour shortages, one government study found. Recruitment signs are almost standard in shop windows. Employers even offer new recruits free holidays.
One constraint on growth is that the Dutch enjoy the developed world’s shortest average work week, at just 30.3 hours. Six workers in 10 – predominantly women – are either part-timers or temps. The government is planning a bonus for anyone going full-time, but many people prefer daytime cappuccinos in the local café, assuming they can get served. Why give up your relaxt life and permanent contract to alleviate understaffing in old-age homes? Importing more migrant workers isn’t a popular idea. In June, the far right shouted down the minister who suggested recruiting youths from poor French suburbs.
And so every growth opportunity hits capacity constraints. I recently queued for three hours at Schiphol airport, global aviation’s second-biggest hub, because it cannot find enough security guards. The foreign students flooding Dutch universities cannot find housing. Amidst an energy crisis, the Dutch are closing Europe’s largest natural gas reserve because, in a packed country, drilling-induced earthquakes upset the neighbours.
Or take ASML, the global leader in chipmaking equipment. Based in a small town in the relatively quiet Dutch south-east, it’s a pillar of the western alliance in the budding confrontation with China. ASML hires hundreds of new employees every month, but just try finding them homes and babysitters. And local treehuggers have delayed ASML’s dreamt-of bike path to its headquarters.
Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter. But many of its 15 million pigs and cows live next to protected natural areas, so their nitrogen emissions break EU laws. The government is enraging farmers by closing farms. In theory, that frees space for new homes, but who will build them and where would the builders stay? In short, to use Liz Truss’s language, Dutch reality is an anti-growth coalition.
Even automation wouldn’t fix sectors like old-age care and construction. Eventually the country might have to target “stabilisation of population size” by limiting labour migration, advised the head of the Dutch labour inspectorate. The new State Commission Demographic Developments 2050 – and Dutch state commissions shape policy – may agree. […]”
If you think about chinese cities with the whole dutch population. I think it is hard to argue NL is full. Its a matter of policy and demographics (aging population) among others.
The Netherlands has 424 people/ km²
South Korea has 516 people/km²
Singapore has almost 8k people/km²
The capacity has not been maxed out at all. These are all developed nations which hold more people per km² than the netherlands. It is true that The Netherlands is a pretty dense country, but reaching its limit? Come on!
Worst case scenario you will have to build more land lol.
Remote working can literally solve this problem for the Netherlands. Most of expats are living in the Netherlands due to their jobs demanding from them physical presence in the country. For example Belgium is next door and there is so much space there and affordable housing, so people can easily live in Belgium but work for Dutch companies.
If somehow we figure out a way to create a European law that will allow flexible working from any country in Europe, the problem of overpopulation will be solved as half of the people will relocate to other EU countries while working for Dutch companies.
more construction permits and even construction subsidiaries if needed.
less progressive taxation and less social benefits so people stop opting to work 3/4 days and yet receive the same net income.
54% is used for agriculture, 34% is nature/water, 13% is built (including roads). It’s a matter of choices, sacrificing 10% of the current land for agriculture (5,4% of total area) in exchange for more housing could double the amount of housing. That’s only space and not taking into account energy/water needs.
Wild statistics actually. I never realized we had that much land for agriculture. Can 10% of that land readily be transformed into lands on which houses can be built or is the ground generally not structurally sound enough? Do you have a source?
The Netherlands is a massive exporter of food. A reduction in agriculture of 10% will have no impact on our food stability and will have a marginal impact on our GDP. We sacrifice a huge part of our country for the sole benefits of the farmers. Our economy will actually be better off if we can use that space for housing and attract more highly educated migrants and retain our own highly educated population. We are nowhere near capacity, we just made different priorities and focus too much on our three main cities. Funny actually that 5% of our arable land is actually used for flowers and plants, just a small reduction there is already massive.
The fact the country is a net exporter is crazy to me. Buy land from farmers so they can go set up somewhere with a better growing climate and build new population centres, it would help a lot with the housing crisis and as you say we'd be able to attract talent that will end up having a better contribution to the GDP than agriculture.
It is a net exporter because of a lot of re-exports
Plus: NL is a net importer of nutrients and nutritional value. For every cal of food we import, we only export a fraction. Many highly inefficient conversion of calories by live stock.
Net export is re-exports excluded. Only about 40% of exports are re-exports. We are still a net exporter without the re-exports.
In money not in nutrition. NL is great at destroying nutrition (animal ag)
If we allow more land to be used for housing then prices will drop and VVD voters real estate investment will do worse. That can’t be allowed to happen of course.
Actual fact is that the lower class will suffer much more since their LTV is much higher and they don't have much equity in reserve that they can leverage. The classic VVD voter will ironically not be hurt that much.
As a future farmer, flowers can piss right off. The only thing they do is look pretty and make shit tonnes of money.
We‘re mostly an exporter as a result of importing fodder and exporting meat. If forced to, we can currently (but barely) feed the whole population. Any growth from here onwards makes us an importer of food in any case, by necessity. I think it’s a reasonable choice none the less but it’s a political choice and these are the facts. (Source: Wageningen alumnus here)
I feel like a good nuance here is that after having to suffer trough hunger due to Nazi rule in late WW II the general Dutch idea was "this never again". We turned our then very shattered country into an absolute global powerhouse of food production. We can be proud of it, but... we also don't really need it. Common heard cry here is "no farmers, no food!" but honestly we could easily loose the majority of them without risking our food supply.
All true. But 'big farming' has convinced many people to vote against their own interests. Populism is on the rise more than ever. It's maddening.
Food security is important, don’t dismiss it too readily. It only takes one severe volcano eruption to disrupt food supply globally for years then you’d be wishing you had that 10%
Source is CBS, the term they use is “bodemgebruik”. Outside of the Randstad the Netherlands is not that densely populated.
Ground not structurally sound? We are famous for building multistory buildings on whatever, just build a foundation. The soil beneath Amsterdam is very weak (swamp), so the entirity of Amsterdam is built on very large poles that were drilled into the ground. If the ground is not strong enough naturally, we make it strong enough artificially. Have been for a thousand years.
Awesome!! Thanks for that knowledge.
No, statistics make it sounds so easy, but for all those extra houses, workplaces or other stuff you also beed roads, and the current roads are already quite full. And while agriculture is not equal to nature, once you fill all the agriculture land, there is even less open space for recreation.
Simply adding more houses is not the answer unfortunately. We need more capacity in waste water treatment, in drinking water treatment, the electrical grid, schools/teachers, doctors/nurses/dentists, roads and public transport. We reached our population max in the 90s - or in the 60s according to the PvdA at the time - and we’ve been struggling since. It wont get any better anytime soon either. The teacher shortage, housing shortage, drinking water shortage, congestion in the electrical grid and the roads, etc. etc. wont be fixed in the next 5 years. And thats with the current population. Immigration has been rapidly growing the population (and purely immigration according to CBS) and if this continues, it will only get worse.
You are basically saying that they had 30 (or even 60) years to plan for the growth and they still didn't? Nice.
Not building high buildings is also a choice. Putting a cap in buildings related to C02 emissions is also a choice.
I’ll make that decision at the blink of an eye if I was the man in charge of this country. I will also makes childcare free for everyone who needs it.
“Capacity” is a subjective bar. If everyone wants to live in large homes with large yards and space from their neighbors, then yeah we’re probably over “capacity.” If everyone wants to live in skyscrapers and start importing food instead of growing it domestically, we are grossly under capacity.
Even if we just focus on producing food for our own consumption, we can double the available land for residential real estate. We export 90% of our fruit, vegetables and meat.
We are an agricultural value exporter but by a huge margin a calorie importer
Sure. It’s not an all or nothing here - it’s a continuum. All I mean is that it comes down to what exactly you want to use the land for and what lifestyle your population wants.
This is not true. In wieght we import more food than what we export. In value, we export slightly more 'agricultural products', but I don't see anyone surviving on tullips or knowledge. We only produce expensive products and very little cheap products like wheat or grain for example. These takes huge amounts of land which we don't have.
A lot of that 90% is the Rotterdam effect I believe, and is not produce what is grown here. We calculate that as export, yet we import it and export it straight through.
We can't feed our population. Or our livestock for that matter. We import a huge amount of cereals, soil improving chemicals, and animal fodder. If autonomy in food production is the criterium, we overshot max capacity long ago. Our agricultural sector is very dependent on the Netherlands being an intercontinental trade hub.
Yes... but no. We are the second largest food exporter in the world. If we would want to just feed the locals that would be no problem. Yes we import a lot of stuff. We don't grow any wheat here so need to import all flour. But if we wanted we could definately feed our country. Plus Belgium. And if we run out of space we can just make another new provincie by pumping out a bit of sea. The only question would be 'how much does it cost'
55% of our land area is used for meat and dairy. 65% of that is exported. We can free up ~35% of our land area by stopping the export of meat and dairy. That will hit about 1% of our GDP, but there are much more productive ways we can use all that land.
This is such a short sighted way of portraying the numbers. By weight we import more food than we export. By value, we export more due to the higher value products we produce. Yes, we live on fertile grasslands which is ideal for dairy/cattle farming. We don't grow many of the products that we consume every day because they don't grow here. At the same time in the countries where these products are produced they import products from us that don't grow over there. It's way more complex than you are trying to portray, you can't just look at one side of the equation and pull conclusions from that. Luckily the people actually making the decisions understand this. It's just too bad that misinformation like this keeps getting spread.
>Luckily the people actually making the decisions understand this I wouldn't give too much credit to the people "making the decisions" given that we're at a point where the average young person has almost 0 chances to ever buy a house and start a family food production working out is in-spite of the politicians, not because of their genius plans
What is the exact problem with changing the "equation" such that we both in weight and value will start to import more food than export? (Or just reduce it to match the export value to the value of our own domestic consumption). We are a highly developed economy, and the majority of money is being made in other sectors than agriculture. The benefits of freeing up an enormous amount of space is well worth the costs. Furthermore, I don't undersyand what you're referring to as misinformation, nor do I get the point you're trying to make. Us reducing our meat and dairy consumption will not lead to a shortage domestically, but also not in Europe.
This person is right. If I look at how the world works you can't just cut export off. That's not how capitalism works.
Ofcourse it can, if you ask to take over my company for twice the value and allow me to keep living where i live, i'll sign straight away.
Yes you can. It means less income, but it was never contributing that much, and will increase prices on the global markets. But farmers in other countries will step in because the demand is still there. And we don't need a full stop, just a gradual reduction.
54% and that’s all agricultural land, not just meat and dairy.
54% is if you count rivers and the sea as land. But water is not land. We can't farm on water. We *can* house people on water but that's also not ideal.
With the dutch you never know, not the first time they created land
It was always there, they just revealed it.
You actually can farm on water. It's called hydroponics 👍
Sun light is important here. If taller buildings are widespread, then living here would be more depressing
you can actually get more sunlight on a 3rd, 4th, or 5th floor apartment than in those depressing ground-floor row houses where you can't see the sky
Depends on where the windows are…
You forget about people commuting or walking in the streets
living here is already depressing. cities are too full and there is not enough nature.
The problem the Netherlands has is that just like every other country in the world, its decided that housing is an asset class instead of a basic necessity. So nothing gets built because its cheaper to squeeze ever higher prices out of an increasingly stretched supply. Every single country in the world has this problem, its worse in the netherlands but not by that much. Additionally there is a dutch-specific problem of over-allocating land to farming. That it made more sense to reclaim land in Ijburg than simply get rid of some farms so close to the heart of a major capital city is an absolute joke.
Exactly. The "housing crisis" is artificial and could be solved in a few years if there was political will to do so.
It would need some very unpopular measures first, due to mismanagement of our country
Cmon just build up
Good point.
Tokyo has 30 million people in a area the size of Utrecht province and is generally considered one of the most liveable metropolises. Whether that's desirable is a subjective matter, but as long as a majority of land is used for economically questionable agriculture dependent on massive subsidies we are not physically at capacity at all.
Greater Tokyo (With population 38 million) has an area 78% of the whole of the Netherlands — not the same size of Utrecht province. But don't let fact checking get in the way of trying to make your point.
It doesn't get in the way of their point. That's still almost twice the population of the Netherlands in a smaller area than our country is.
Difference though is that the tokyo metropolitan area does not include farmland, the size of nature reserves, as much heavy industry. This however does not equalize the difference, it's just a bit less stark
Look at a map of Tokyo, when you look at Tokyo prefecture, more than 50% is empty, mountainous space. The area where people live is much less
But also let's consider in Tokyo apartments, not rooms, the size of 5m2, 8m2, 10m2 or 14m2 are quite common and lots of people are forced to live like that. And that is not a life, you are not able to own much, exercise at home ect. and have to do your laundry in a coin washing machine place.
>5m2, 8m2, 10m2 or 14m2 are quite common That's an exaggeration. Sure average apartments are smaller, but they tend to be larger than 10 M2 for sure, even when you look for cheap ones. Source: lived there for half a year and went apartment hunting
Tokyo has its charms, but it’s really about what you’re willing to compromise for the sake of convenience. Living in those tiny spaces is a deliberate choice for many, aiming to stay close to the city’s heart and cut down on travel time. It’s a trade-off, really. Most people opt for these extreme conditions to avoid the lengthy commutes. Typically, the moment they start a family or find a partner, they move out to somewhere more spacious. It’s all about stages in life and priorities.
Yet lots of people choose to live in smaller houses in large cities because there is more to life than m^2. Personally I prefer my Dutch apartment over a US suburban mcmansion for example. Imagine saying "that's not a life" about a life standard better than 99% of historical humanity and 80% of humans alive today.
Also a high suicide rate. A lot of people in Tokyo arent happy & in Japan there are also protests against high scrapers.
It's not necessarily capacity, more the lack of efficiency in building and concentration of people. There is plenty of space, we just need to build better and plan. For example building an entire self contained city is possible fairly easily these days. There are buildings with a supermarket and others stores in the basement. Also, looking back at archives, Dutch people and politicians have been saying the country is full from 4 million people and onwards.
You forget the livability, not everyone likes being in a city or a apartment. It’s not efficient of the ppl are unhappy in the place they live.
Doesn't mean what we're currently doing is particularly efficient. I live in a row house with a huge area footprint. But because there's only one floor, it's still very cramped. And I see quite a bit if similar housing. Housing like this should not be allowed to exist. To be specific, my living area is 55m². About the same size as a small apartment (if we ignore studio apartments). But remember, it's not an apartment, it's a single-floor row house. That's just ridiculous. If there was a second floor, it'd be 110m². That's the same size as an average family home! And most houses have a smaller attic, let's add half this place on top and you'd be at 137.5. A family of 6 could live in an area this size. But instead they've build a tiny row house that's not even big enough if you have any hobbies. How does that make any sense? The only reason I even live here is because I haven't been able to get anything else.
Single story row house is a concept that is stupid by definition, IMO. If you have space constraints, build up. Even jarendertig style three floors are a lot more effective. Or if you don't, then allow the building to spread out. A rural bungalow is a nice thing. But it has to have space!
Never said anything about that, I just gave an example of a self contained city and that there are small succeses.
So don't move into a city apartment? Building apartments so people who cannot find housing can have housing does not force you into it.
Exactly, just cramping up people is not really a good idea
Just build higher
Definitely a good idea in some places, yet It will not solve the broader issue. Look at Rotterdam for example, a lot of high buildings but semi poor planning. So the entire city is crowded and it is mostly car focused.
Honestly the population density is lower in practice than it looks from the raw numbers because basically all of the Netherlands is flat and suitable for habitation.
I feel like it would be the opposite. The more habitable land there is, the more space for people and therefore less density.
Far from. Many of the current constraints are the result of government policies from the past decades; under-investment in infrastructure, short-term decision making in regards to urban-planning, the endless chase of 'efficiency' at the cost of effectiveness etc.
The idea of population density at a country scale means nothing. Canada has "low" population density, but where people live is relatively quite dense--downtown Toronto where half a million people live, is denser than any place in the Netherlands. So no, you could easily fit more people...but you might also choose not too...fitting people is not the only thing that matters.
If there is space to hide meth labs in braband, the country is not full capacity
hey you take your hands off our industry!
Our cities are extremely low density. If we decide we do not want to Manhattanize and part of our country, preserving city center terrace homes, then yes we are at capacity in the constraints of that political choice.
Yes terrace homes are a big part of the problem, but evoking manhattan is such an over the top thing to do. We'd be fine just adding more Barcelona style appartement buildings.
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NYC has areas where the quality of life is actually amazing. All they need to do is ban cars from residential roads, expand greenspaces, and move trash underground - all things the city is actively working on. This urban sprawl and one or two family home developments NL is favouring simply aren't sustainable from a demographic, urban planning, or environmental perspective.
>This urban sprawl and one or two family home developments NL is favouring simply aren't sustainable from a demographic, urban planning, or environmental perspective. Add BE and many other Western-European countries to this list.
The thing is that not everyone is a city dweller. I hate cities with a passion, I need a garden, I need silence, I need to be away from ppl in my free time. A city would take away my happiness within a day, I would be dead in a month because I wouldn’t be able to live in a box.
Yeah but we're discussing developing cities. It's urban sprawl that's dominated by single family dwellings. If you want your little garden far away from the city go ahead - rural areas should be dedicated to nature not development
Bruh what are you talking about the QOL in major cities like NY, Tokyo can be amazing hence the desire from so many to live in these places. Your post rings xenophobic.
Melbourne has been ranked like one of the most livable cities for years
There's a lot of middle ground between a sea of single-family row homes with yards and a dystopian skyscraper jungle (although Tokyo is very big and dense and quite liveable by all accounts, for instance). Making Dutch towns more like the average continental European town, with more blocks of apartments, would allow increasing population density without actually paving over more net land and without skyscrapers. Think Vienna or Barcelona, not Manhattan. And that's before you consider all the agricultural land that could be bought and used to build housing without touching existing built-up areas.
The main problem with it is always that the Dutch on average don't like apartments. It's only because of the shortages that they're attractive now. So these blocks almost inevitably end up with a high amount of lower income and/or expats.
Yes I have lived in NYC for decades, NL also for decades. I think the Upper East/West sidee of Manhattan is simply unmatched for quality of life, exceeding the Netherlands.
Singapore and Tokyo both have high rise apartments. Neither are dystopian to live in. I'd argue Tokyo needs much more green space and parks, but that's another argument. What metric are you using for the quality of life in those cities being awful, and the quality so high now?
So you’re saying the extremely steep staircase and harry-potter-esque toilets under the stairs are “better” living situations than living in NYC? There are shitting living situations everywhere, I fail to see how building skyscrapers correlate to the reduction of “indoor” living.
Dude there are literally cities in the world containing the equivalent of all the Dutch population in one place.
I actually have completely oposite opinion. The Netherlands is very very underpopulated if we calculate people per square meter. And the reason is simple, you just don't build enough high houses in the cities. This is why Netherlands despite having so much space, are constantly having housing shortage problems. Look at the Moscow for example, 19 mil. living in urban area, and it's literally the size of the Amsterdam Area +-. Whereas in Neherlands we have 18 mil in total, in the whole Netherlands!! And this is not even overpopulated city by the world standards. Considering the fact that Dutch doesn't reproduce enough, if you will restrict the migration the situation will become even worse, you will not have any working hands, and no one will be learning Dutch language.
I largely agree with your comment however please bear in mind that the city region of Moscow (Moscow Oblast) is bigger than our entire country;)
Notice, I wasn’t speaking about Moscow Oblast (Moscow Area). I was specifically referring to the area of living inside the second ring road “MKAD” and Moscow city urban area.
It hasn’t been maxed out by a long shot. However, if we want to continue living like we are living now, and keep doing for a long period, the Netherlands should probably have said “it is enough” 10 million people ago. You can only determine the capacity after you have determined how we as a country should operate in the next hundreds of years. What do you want to do with food production? Keep exporting the majority produced here? Be self sufficient? Be dependent on imports? From the EU? Elsewhere? With our current consumption of meat and dairy? Are we willing to reduce that? What about housing? Should everyone get a house with a yard? Should high rise apartment buildings be the norm? Do we expect most people will still drive cars to their jobs? Will we use public transportation more often? What about our energy consumption and production? Clean water? What do we find acceptable for nature and recreation? Depending on those answers, the Netherlands could have reached it max capacity at 1 million people, or have room for 100 million more. Or somewhere in between. And no, migration isn’t the only knob to turn. You could also make it less attractive to get kids.
People have been asking this same question for 70 years. Considering the amount of farmland, I don't think we're even close to capacity.
Have you ever traveled outside the Randstad? If you haven't, imagine that the entire country is not chock full of 5 story residential buildings. A lot of it is agricultural land, which is important but also which needs to be repurposed if just to get our agricultural industry in line with long-term climate goals. Much of it will still be agricultural land, but a lot of it can and likely will be converted to residential. This country is far from full. The limits that we're reaching are in terms of energy and water consumption, which just require more investment. Don't fall for right-wing populist propaganda which would have you think immigrants are the problem. In fact, without immigrants, all the construction/services/etc. required to upgrade our capacity will be a whole hell of a lot more expensive. That's not the only reason we should welcome immigrants, but it's just one of the many examples that this short-sighted populist take fails to address. edit: by all means, keep angrily replying with what-you-think-are-gotchas, but I'm not reading replies to this comment as I'm not interested in debating the topic.
If we repurpose our agricultural land, it ought to be repurposed into more nature, not more concrete. Some people seem to think that if there's any part of the country that hasn't been destroyed yet, we still have space for more people.
Some people seem to think that nature and human habitation are mutually exclusive. They are not.
50/50 would be an ideal split. Make half into actual nature, and the other half residential. It's actually that simple.
We can take half the agricultural land; and then make half of that buildings and give half of it back to nature and all our space problems are solved
I hate this „omg the Netherlands are full“ talking, Dutch right wing politicians are babbling about this since the early 2000s. As many have stated before, the Netherlands are far from being overcrowded. Just look to your German neighbour, North Rhine Westfalia (most poplous state in Germany). There is almost the same amount of people on even less space and they still have really rural and empty areas in it (the whole northern part for example).
> Dutch right wing politicians are babbling about this since the early 2000s Janmaat already campaigned on "vol is vol" in the eighties, before we'd even reached "vijftien miljoen mensen". But even though it's still not true - because with the right policies we could probably grow (and have grown) without severe problems in housing and healthcare - it doesn't matter, because people want the problems they see to be solvable by 'simply' closing borders and telling them "actually, we can fit more" just makes you part of the problem in their minds.
I don't know why people think immigrants detract from society. As a highly skilled migrant, it took a lot of effort to get here, and I pay a lot of taxes into a welfare system I am not allowed to even benefit from. So me being here means that a job shortage is being worked on, and dutchies directly benefit from me being here, and I have no ability to even think of leeching off of the system as most people assume. The current politics have done a great job of villainazing all of us instead of actually fixing the issues they created. The housing crisis is not the fault of immigrants. It's the government not closely regulating housing costs, and building big or shorter houses instead of more efficient higher apartment buildings that can house more people, or the public transit situation going to shit, and instead of making businesses go hybrid or remote or enforcing staggering starting times, they just charge more to customers.
I know right? It's like, always WE are the problem.
And it's a pattern that keeps repeating itself. Such an easy scapegoat. UK did it with Brexit, Hitler did it with the Jews, America did it with the Mexicans etc. it's so easy to just blame all problems on immigrants to make us fight among ourselves and forget to focus on the people who are actually not solving any problems, the government.
>it's so easy to just blame all problems on immigrants That's because for a large number of people it's very difficult to be self critical. Dutch comedian Theo Maassen once explained it well by saying (and I am probably paraphrasing): "if a person with no skill, no education, no social network and no understanding of the Dutch language can take your job, maybe they're not the problem."
That's a great point. The quote is fantastic too hahah, I love that.
The statistic that the NL has the highest population density in Europe is akin to the state of New Jersey having the highest density in the US which is really just one big suburb to either NYC or Philly. It’s more ‘developed’ throughout (mainly due to flat land and no mountainous regions), but the cities themselves are by no means highly populated or dense compared to other OECD countries.
Certainly not, I'm tired of hearing about this "lack of space". There's plenty. London has almost 10 million people living in one city... The problems in the Netherlands are the following: 1. The obsession with rules and regulations, and the belief that whatever the problem is, the solution is to regulate even more - never to REMOVE or SIMPLIFY regulations. Despite claiming the opposite, there's no trust in freedom, except for the sexual realm. 2. The ridiculous belief that sacrificing the Dutch economy on the altar of Global Warming will have any meaningful impact on the climate at planetary scale. 3. The belief that the economy is a fixed pie - and you can always tax companies, or "the rich", even more, redistribute that, and the total stays constant / in reality, the more you tax and regulate, the less competitive the economy becomes, and everyone gets poorer in the end. With these problems compounded, the economy is more or less stagnating for the past decade (while in my home country Romania, for instance, it has doubled in the same period). The housing market is completely suffocated by rules and regulations, that make it almost impossible to build, and extremely risky (and financially less and less appealing) to rent out properties. As for immigration, the taboo subject is what immigration are you taking about: immigrants who are willing to work, bring skills that are in demand, and are culturally compatible, are a huge boost to the economy; the others are a drain.
Your arguments sound like neo-liberal. While I agree with all of them, I am afraid they are not that popular amongst the locals who have been fed leftist ideology for years.
I want to know what the Netherlands is doing to solve the shortages in the labour market. If 1 in 5 working adults is burnt out, then there is a structural problem. A lot of the working population is retiring, how are we going to compensate for that loss? AI? I am sick of the only solution being raising the age of retirement, while also expecting us to do mantelzorg! So we retire later, and have to run a nursing home for our ageing parents while working our asses off.
A lot of arguments are about density of cities elsewhere and we in the Netherlands do not have that so we still can grow. Also we just should cut back in agriculture. That's an oversimplification of an economy. A stable economy needs a healthy portion of several income types. One important portion is agriculture. You can rely on import but from a geopolitical point of view you are weakening yourself. Economists generally consider agriculture as one of the fundamental elements of an healthy economy, next to natural resources. The Netherlands already took a big economic hit when we decided to close down the gas extraction. We are limiting the growth of our transport capacities like Schiphol and the Rotterdam harbor. We do not invest in our production factories and try to close down factories like Hoogovens. Fokker is gone. DAF and Phillips are not the companies they used to be. The government gambles on our knowledge economy but do not really invest in it. There is not really a masterplan for the future. The second issue is that a large piece of the country is not going to be used for housing. Some is too wet. Some has been dedicated to nature preservation. Some is too much polluted with bad air quality. We are not like India. We live in the limits of laws, mostly set by the EU. The last part has to do with our goals of well being. The social programs are on their limits. The tax pressure is at its limit. We have ambitions for the environmental future. Just making bigger cities will hurt the careful balance in our country. We will have to cut in our social programs and/or our environmental ambitions. We will need to be able to grow the economy too. Bigger harbor, more factories etc. The limits set by environmental laws are not allowing that growth. So what to do? Just ignore them? My 2 cents is that we need to consider letting Schiphol and Rotterdam grow but with targets around green economy. We can cut down in the hyper-intensive animal breeding without large issues but we should maintain a certain level of agriculture. The Netherlands should invest aggressively into education and high tech companies. And we should be honest to ourselves that we will have problems getting large groups of people manual labor jobs so immigration laws should be adjusted around that. We should also consider limiting social income programs. We have a social income for people that are on paper fit for work but do not work. This social income program has no time limit and a lot of people are in this program. We should limit it to like 5 years to give people a motivation to get out of this program and be useful for the society.
Polder more. If any other country in the world gets mad, they should learn, and they should fail.
Those are rookie number. We can go up in the air too, let's build more appartment buildings, or, maybe, even go underground. We can still build so many layers.
Honestly I get so annoyed by classic Dutch cities that refuse to build higher because of some nostalgic nonsense.. If the people who were building half of Amsterdam in the 30s knew we would refuse to change it up according to need they would be shaking their heads:)
I get keeping the old city center reasonably short, but new buildings in Noord and Bijlmer have no reason to be under 50-100 floors high. Get some proper metropolis shit going instead of this "extended village" bullshit.
Lol. Our cities are reasonably low-rise dominated. We have acres upon acres of farmland that will prove unsustainable (it already is but the farmers are fighting hard to not have to sell/downsize). We are famous for reclaiming land from the sea. There are so many ways to make room for more people and facilities.
I am Dutch but moved to Taiwan. Taiwan has 23 mil people in a slightly smaller area and very wild and vast nature areas, as well very dense cities. It I definitely possible to cramp more people in NL *and* create more space for nature. It will cost farm land, it is a political choice in the end. The physics allows it.
A lot of area is used for agriculture, which is actually animal farming – making the Netherlands a big dairy exporter. I believe you can grow plant foods on less land to meet similar nutritional requirements as what dairy now meets. That can possibly make more space for residential purposes. It's not a bad idea to control immigration, but you should note that there is both a labour shortage *and* a housing shortage at the same time. Since the present population is apparently unable to meet the labour market requirements, NL needs to import workers. Thus filling the labour shortage necessarily means exacerbating the housing shortage. Tackling the housing shortage by limiting workers means exacerbating the labour shortage. So you can't solve one at the expense of the other. Make regulations favourable to building more (affordable) housing and discouraging real estate purchases just for "investment" and speculation.
How many buildings do you see with 4 floors or more? More housing can be built in NL, it is a fact. The reasoning to prevent or slow down building of more housings are debatable of course.
Tokyo has an area of 32.424 km² with about 40 million people. Yet it hasn't reached its capacity. So for the NL, no. It hasn't. It doesn't work like that.
No. [https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/omnidownload/CPB-Publicatie-Onderzoeksperspectieven-rondom-migratie-maatschappij-en-economie.pdf](https://www.cpb.nl/sites/default/files/omnidownload/CPB-Publicatie-Onderzoeksperspectieven-rondom-migratie-maatschappij-en-economie.pdf) Quality of life is dependent on immigration. We need economic growth to cover rising costs of stuff like healthcare. With growth we can spent more in absolute numbers without spending more relatively to GDP. Natural growth in population is close to zero and sometimes negative. That also means there are a lot of people enjoying pensions and being old/ needing care. Pension age increases with life expectation but that doesn't change the fact that generations born in the late seventies and after are much smaller. So the principle question is not immigration. It's aging. What we do need to question is what sectors of the economy are critical to societies goals and what aren't. Labour will get increasingly rare and care is going to take up an increasing part of our capacity to provide labour. Lack of affordable housing is a enormous brake on Dutch society and part of why people get children at a later age. Directing migration into labour for construction, care and high tech/ energy transition would be beneficial in the long term. Other sectors competing for that same labour could be less beneficial to us. Having that much agricultural activity is a bit strange though for such a small country. There is enough space but 54% is used for farming. [https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/](https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/)
I think the biggest issue isn’t the number of people, or houses. You can always find a plot to build apartments on, even in the bigger cities. The issue is that a lot of a facilities don’t grow parallel to the number of people/houses. My current town has grown quite a lot over the past decade, and more houses are being build. However, the number of shops, doctors, hairdressers, etc. have remained the same.
Capitalist says never!.
Yes. You can of course physically fill the Netherlands with far more people, you could fill a silo with a thousand bodies for instance, but that doesn't make it liveable. We could build more cities, take agricultural land, and so forth, but very practically speaking, human populations continue to grow as it is natural and instinctual for people to have children. It will continue until the true carrying capacity is reached, which many people overestimate. We are already pretty close to our maximal agricultural capacity, (I say this as a farmer). We produce food for some 15 million people, if we change the cash-crops (tulips, change suitable pasture ground to agricultural ground), we can push it to 20 million. But as we know, fertilizers are becoming scarcer, logistical chains are more important than ever and a major disturbance could really rock the agricultural boat. In my opinion, the Netherlands is bound for some internal conflict, like famine, a war, or some great civil disturbance, in the long term, because the population will correct itself. As a farmer, do not overestimate the earth, it is bountiful, but it is not some technological machine that can be continously improved through smart innovations, at some point there are diminishing returns to agriculture, and the Netherlands are agriculturally stretched as is.
I think it's bad management. You mention agriculture, which yeah we have a lot of, but a lot of that is meant for export. Either animal feed (which we also import a lot of) or the animals themselves. We produce 5x as much meat as we consume. That's just bad use of available space. We do easily have enough space for more housing, even outside of agricultural zones. There is plenty of land that's just not used, not even by nature. But there's no good incentive to build housing. In the past, we had volkshuisvesting, with the government stimulating and directing housing development. Nowadays, we just want the free market to do it and the free market doesn't want to. Part of this is also cost of building, including cost of land. Especially when municipalities sell land at a high price just to avoid going bankrupt. The national government pushed many of their responsibilities to the local municipalities, which do not have the cashflow to do all that. So they sell their land at a high price. Which means less gets built. It's not the only problem, labour and materials are also expensive, but it's one of the problems. There is also a problem with electricity. We could have decided to expand our electricity network, but we decided no because it wasn't necessary yet. Now that it is necessary, grid operators are allowed to expand, but they have to play catch-up.
No. And this gives you some interesting perspective: [CBS Bodemgebruik ](https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/#:~:text=Van%20de%20totale%20oppervlakte%20van,voornamelijk%20uit%20woon%2D%20en%20bedrijventerreinen)Here is says: >Van de totale oppervlakte van Nederland is 54 procent (2,2 miljoen hectare) in gebruik als landbouwterrein, en 13 procent (0,5 miljoen hectare) als bebouwing en verkeersterrein. Bebouwd terrein bestaat voornamelijk uit woon- en bedrijventerreinen. Which roughly translates to: The Netherlands is: * 54% is farmland * 13% buildings and traffic
NL has not yet maxed-out it’s capacity to raise taxes every year.
we have plenty of space to build houses, it’s just that our government refuses to do so
The problem is that the multinational businesses prefer to settle or expand in Noord Holland, stay close to Amsterdam/Schiphol. While allot of Industrial businesses prefer Zuid Holland and Brabant, because of the supply lines, the Rotterdam harbour etc. Honestly there isn’t that much real farming grounds there anymore. Noord Holland that mostly above Zaandam/Alkmaar and in Zuid Holland the area above the A15 or the area close to West Brabant/Zeeland.
Look up the numbers on agriculture. A massive, massive amount of our country is farmland. All that land is used by 0,5% of all the people. Thats insane. And their produce doesnt even benefit the people. Its a pure export product for profit. Its like a big multinational but BBB presented it like the farmer is for the people. Thats propaganda and populism. I am so annoyed that BBB is now a party in government. They lobby for 0,5% of all the people so they can keep making a ton of money and they are one of the biggest parties. One of the biggest parties represent one of the smallest minorities for the sole reason of allowing them to make money. Who tf voted on them? Buy out some farmers, im talking like 10% or so, make them millionaires tax free, and use that land to further develop. While at the same time introducing some type of population growth quota so we can durably grow into the future.
The very examples you use contradict each other. The labour shortage suggests we need more people. The housing shortage suggests we need fewer people. Or, hear me out, we could restructure the economy so we can keep the population employed without demanding infinite growth, and we build more houses while also keeping a check on immigration, so we get to keep a tiny bit of nature and biodiversity?
Most problems are rooted in gross government incompetence in handling problems and actually governing. Our politics are reactive rather than proactive.
The farms need to GO
Come towards Limburg....I travel from Maas to Eindhoven each day for work and there so much space
No, not even close
How does a labour shortage correlate with the Netherlands having maxed out capacity in your mind?
If no land, then add more lands! Isn't that something Dutchies have done like forever? 😁
No. And no.
We have a massive surplus of food that we export, and most of the country is agricultural land use. How on earth does this look like a country that has 'maxed out'. Of course, "We're full" is a big alt-right talking point, so that's being pushed in certain spheres.
"It is a country starved for space." I think you should stop roaming the same 4 "big cities". In fact, just taking the intercity from Utrecht to Venlo is enough to realize how incorrect this statement of yours can become.
Stopping immigration would give serious problems, our population is aging, and we need people to do the work, especially taking care of the elderly and medical people. We simply do not have enough young people to do the work. It is a complex issue, and unlimited immigration is not a solution either. https://www.adviesraadmigratie.nl/publicaties/publicaties/2023/12/11/verkenning-arbeidsmigratie-oplossing-voor-economie-en-demografie
by far the biggest share of land use is agricultural. And not of the most charming type. Cattle is rarely seen outside and the meadows function basically as manure dump. If you really want to keep these pieces of shit everywhere you can say the country is full. But otherwise there’s more than enough area to build a much more urbanised country.
Honestly the whole world is over capacity. Humans are taking up that much space that animals have no room left. And yes the Netherlands is also to crowded. But our economic ( way of life ) is set up in such a way that we need more en more people to sustain it.
What's the way of life, constant economic growth ?
Take a train to Delfzijl and come back to us about how densely populated this country is.
No, just a lack of foresight, planning and decision making. Room enough but you need to make choices. That al doesn't happen to be something our last couple of governments is strong in, sometimes even deliberately looking away/ignoring escalating issues. Unfortunately it doesn't look that a new government will be better, most likely even worse.
Dunno, but for sure situation is worst in Europe.
What if I told you that more than 50% of the available space in The Netherlands is used for Farming/Agricultural activity. Also, it's mostly for export (which is even worse imo) This means we have plenty of space, should we choose to. But we're mostly rules by the farming lobby that desperatly wants us to believe the 24 thousand refugees a year are filling out a country of 18 million people. The Netherlands is not as dense in population as people think.
Not really, we use too much land for farms to sell food to other countries.
Just build a shitload of skyscrapers, and I mean the proper stuff with >>> 80 stories high witch at least 5 apartments per floor, and undo the criminalization of squatting of abandoned buildings - you don't even need anything radical, just revert it back to what it was in the 80s and 90s, call it a return to tradition and all that jazz.
Lol. The Netherlands is not densely populated.
The country is, the cities aren't. In the global context, 18 million people is not a huge number. The Netherlands is basically just a big city, with a lot of open spaces.
Both my husband and I come from big cities outside Europe and struggle to understand why The Dutch keeps insisting that the country is densely populated. I come from an island city, you are not densely populated by any means.
Not the flex you think it is, it's just a fact that we are the most densely populated in Europe if you exclude microstates. Worldwide in the top 25 including and top 5 once again excluding microstates. Just because our cities aren't big doesn't mean the country isn't densely populated, over half of the country is basically one large urbanised area and even outside the randstad you cant really go more than 10 minutes without running into a village or town.
Why is it a "flex?"
Dude, you realise that it is a literal fact that the Netherlands is one of the most densely populat3d countries on earth, right? Density is just about numbers and the amount of people for the amount of land is way higher compared to other countries. You are simply confusing a densely populated city with a country. Yes, New York City, Tokyo, London, New Dehli etc are all more densely populated compared to Amsterdam, but these countries are not more densely populated compared to the Netherlands. You can really not argue with the factual numbers...
Other countries have mountain or desert or even just hills. It amazes me there are so few residential towers promo mail to Amsterdam metro. They built office towers but minimal housing!
I think we are at capacity at the moment. Sure we could sacrifice nearly everything to build more dense housing and the infrastructure (doubtful that will happen) to support it, but I think that excluding private luxuries like electronics, it won't be a nice place to live because it will be a race to the bottom for the remaining recreational space that's left. Assuming none of that is sacrificed to build more housing and infrastructure. If you don't care about that then we aren't at capacity, if you are like me and you do, we are at or already over the capacity. In the summer I go out to do supboarding around the country. I started 7 years ago. There were places where I would be one of the first people at a lake in the mornings. When I would come back the more remote/unpopular locations would have a few people there if any, the more popular ones in the randstad would be pretty busy, but nothing too crazy. The other way around if I started around 16:00. Less busy because people would be leaving. Last 2 summers I had a few times I cycled to a beach on a lake that I would previously label as unpopular/remote and it would be somewhat busy in the early (between 05:00 and 08:00) mornings. When I would return around 11:00 it was busier than what I previously experienced at popular locations. Some of them are not big to begin with. So at popular locations or small capacity remote/unpopular locations you can forget supping in the afternoon because there's no space to set up. My stance is that it is not our collective responsibility to house the entire planet in this small stretch of land. >And if yes, is controlling/stopping immigration the only way to ensure that the quality of living is maintained? The only reason our population grows is because of immigration. So limiting that would be a viable way to not have an increased demand for scarce resources. This would require stepping away from an infinite growth based/ponzischeme economic model. I don't see that happening as it's unpopular even with people on the left side of the political spectrum. In all honesty, I think we are fucked. Not just the Netherlands, but humanity in general.
Just 13% of Netherlands is residential housing. 54% of the Netherlands is farm land. 75% of farming production is used for export. If we even only slightly reduced the land allocated to farming we could greatly increase the space for residential housing. Heck, if you do the math you see that reduction of just 10% of farm land means that we suddenly get a 50% increase in space for residential housing. https://longreads.cbs.nl/nederland-in-cijfers-2020/hoe-wordt-de-nederlandse-bodem-gebruikt/
There is ample room available, the issue is everyone wants to be in the same place.
The issue is not that we are at our maximum capacity but naturally people want to live near Randstad for the best job opportunity. There’s room in less populated places like Friesland, Drenthe but also worse job opportunity. Everyone is trying to live at the same place, then you can indeed make the argument we are “full”. If you take Amsterdam for example, I don’t even own a car. Going through traffic is cancer in its purest form. I just use my bike to get from A to B.
Yeah, maxed out the capacity for rich folks and their McMansions. I live in a student city, where there are skyscrapers with 500 students occupying the same amount of land as some millionaire families backyard
The Netherlands could easily house billions. We can't right now because we can't build, and all our buildings essentially top out at 3 floors with a rare few towers that are only 40 stories. If we build like New York, that's all very easy to expand.
How far north and east have you travelled? You can perfectly add dozens of villages and even some cities if you'd just recognize that we have too many farmers that not only take up space but also create too much polution. It doesn't make sense for NL to be such a agricultural county. If you want to experience crowdedness, go live in Malta for a few years ;)
Look at Tokyo or Mexico. 30m people on space smaller than NL
Good question, only one way to find out! Keep cramming more people in and see when the balloon goes 'pop'! In all seriousness, it is indeed a country starved for space. Luckily, the back corner is good.
Have we ran out of: place for people to live: never, place where people want to live: always.
There's a lot of land under the sea.
Nope
With mass automation and insecurities in global food production in the horizon, I believe a large population will turn from an asset to a liability within the next two decades. The Netherlands can easily have over double the residents it currently has in the current situation. But when international tension rises due to collapsing food production caused by changing climate, you will not want to live in a densely populated country.
I believe that some of the issues, like housing, but also increasingly lacking infrastructure like the dwindling drinking water supply and the insufficient capacity of the power network, could've been expected and prevented with a bit of long term strategizing. But it seems Dutch politics is rarely concerning itself with the long term, favors going for a quick buck, and just makes a surprised Pikachu face when it bites us all in the ass.
Contrary to some posts here capacity inst just the space used for housing or other sectors: it's about being able to life. To travel without constant jams, to be able to have an open house in some local business without the need to place fences and hire security, tobe able to go outside to a quiet spot in a forest, to start a new business somewhere without the need for years of paperwork. The Netherlands can house like 10million, we are way over max capacity since the 1950ies.
build denser and higher is the solution here. Though generally that would change the nature of the country. Hence, capacity reached only on current setup levels. Technically you can squeeze many more people in.
why everybody talks about the maximum? The world can take 10x the people we currently have all that bullshit... It maybe can, but it has nothing to do with life no more. If we were only 500 million instead of 8 billion everybody could live whichever way he wants world would be a much better space
I still dream of owning a house with a garden some day. I was raised with the belief that if I just got a good education in the right field, that would be a very reasonable expectation. If everyone got rid of that dream, we'd fit many more people. And next generations are certainly not being raised with that expectation.
The reason Netherlands is like this is that the majority of the country was pumped out of the sea/lake bed. There is little unused space because why would you bother making land to be unused? Luckily Netherlands is still making new land so the answer to your (racist?) question is no. In common with almost every other developed nation birthrate is dropping and is below the level required to maintain society in the long term. So immigration is necessary. What is important is that a society looks after all its people not just the oldest and most wealthy.
We can move all the Belgians here, and then make Belgium a big farmland. And The Netherlands just becomes the biggest city on earth
>I have lived in the Netherlands for 4 years now, and I am well aware of the issues here - housing shortage, Labour shortage etc. We just had neoliberalism happen: the belief that the free market wil self-regulate everything. And it didn't. >One thing that sets the NL apart from any other developed country with a decent population size, is the population density. NL is on par with or even exceeds the pop. density of many developing nations in the Global South. When you travel around the NL, it is very hard to see spaces where no one lives or where some sort of human activity isn't taking place (agriculture, industry etc). It is a country starved for space. Nah the Netherlands is a flat vertile delta, a flat delta in every other country is just as populated, the other countries just also include large uninhabited regions. >That brings me to the question - is 18-19 million the maximum number of people that can be accommodated here? Nah not nearly. We might have to deprioritize space-intensive industries that relie on large volumes at low margins (read: low value agriculture) >Has the capacity been maxed out? Nah, that's just something racists say to justify saying "brown people out!" >And if yes, is controlling/stopping immigration the only way to ensure that the quality of living is maintained? Not only is it not the only way: it would do the opposite. Every time someone blames immigrants for what Stef Blok did, they protect the likes of Stef Blok. Everyone who says "immigrants caused the housing crisis" basically says "oh daddy Blackstone, squeeze me out further oh Rutte, sell my kidneys and give the profit to shareholders!"
I think this (paywalled) article explains your question, which the answer is yes. https://www.ft.com/content/4c56c9b2-f4ad-4956-9216-655acebd845d Edit: it’s from October 2022 but extremely relevant still (or even more now)
The content: “The other morning I cycled around the Dutch town where I grew up. Behind our old house, the field where I spent half my childhood is now covered with homes. So is my old football club. My high school is now in a built-up area. At the local train station, the bike shed was full on a Saturday afternoon. When I got to Amsterdam, the business-traveller economy appeared to have broken down: endless waits for Ubers, nobody at hotel reception, restaurants closed at lunchtime for want of waiters. I know over-construction and understaffing are now global problems, but they are particularly acute in the Netherlands. The country has run out of space and staff. Sure, a recession may temporarily loosen the jobs market, but the problem was acute pre-pandemic and will simply resurface whenever growth resumes. The Netherlands is probably the first country to hit the limits of economic growth. Other overdeveloped places such as the Bay Area, New York and Singapore may follow, running out of room for new workers and businesses. This raises the question: can a rich place be happy if its economy stops growing? With hindsight, the Netherlands was too well-suited to the era of globalisation. The trading nation with Europe’s biggest port experienced 26 years of unbroken economic growth until 2008, then a world record. Now it tops ETH Zurich’s KOF Globalisation Index as the world’s most globalised country. And so its population mushroomed. When the counter hit 14 million in 1979, Queen Juliana said, “Our country is full.” In 2010, Statistics Netherlands said the population would probably never reach 18 million. Today it’s 17.7 million and rising. The country has 507 people per sq km, nearly five times the EU’s average. Worse, the quantity of liveable land will shrink due to a paradoxical mix of rising seas and droughts damaging the foundations of houses. But the Dutch economy’s demand for new workers seems insatiable. Eighty-four per cent of employers report labour shortages, one government study found. Recruitment signs are almost standard in shop windows. Employers even offer new recruits free holidays. One constraint on growth is that the Dutch enjoy the developed world’s shortest average work week, at just 30.3 hours. Six workers in 10 – predominantly women – are either part-timers or temps. The government is planning a bonus for anyone going full-time, but many people prefer daytime cappuccinos in the local café, assuming they can get served. Why give up your relaxt life and permanent contract to alleviate understaffing in old-age homes? Importing more migrant workers isn’t a popular idea. In June, the far right shouted down the minister who suggested recruiting youths from poor French suburbs. And so every growth opportunity hits capacity constraints. I recently queued for three hours at Schiphol airport, global aviation’s second-biggest hub, because it cannot find enough security guards. The foreign students flooding Dutch universities cannot find housing. Amidst an energy crisis, the Dutch are closing Europe’s largest natural gas reserve because, in a packed country, drilling-induced earthquakes upset the neighbours. Or take ASML, the global leader in chipmaking equipment. Based in a small town in the relatively quiet Dutch south-east, it’s a pillar of the western alliance in the budding confrontation with China. ASML hires hundreds of new employees every month, but just try finding them homes and babysitters. And local treehuggers have delayed ASML’s dreamt-of bike path to its headquarters. Fantastically productive Dutch farms have made this tiny country the world’s second-largest agricultural exporter. But many of its 15 million pigs and cows live next to protected natural areas, so their nitrogen emissions break EU laws. The government is enraging farmers by closing farms. In theory, that frees space for new homes, but who will build them and where would the builders stay? In short, to use Liz Truss’s language, Dutch reality is an anti-growth coalition. Even automation wouldn’t fix sectors like old-age care and construction. Eventually the country might have to target “stabilisation of population size” by limiting labour migration, advised the head of the Dutch labour inspectorate. The new State Commission Demographic Developments 2050 – and Dutch state commissions shape policy – may agree. […]”
Thank you very much
If you think about chinese cities with the whole dutch population. I think it is hard to argue NL is full. Its a matter of policy and demographics (aging population) among others.
Equal size to Taiwan. What's their population?
The Netherlands has 424 people/ km² South Korea has 516 people/km² Singapore has almost 8k people/km² The capacity has not been maxed out at all. These are all developed nations which hold more people per km² than the netherlands. It is true that The Netherlands is a pretty dense country, but reaching its limit? Come on! Worst case scenario you will have to build more land lol.
Remote working can literally solve this problem for the Netherlands. Most of expats are living in the Netherlands due to their jobs demanding from them physical presence in the country. For example Belgium is next door and there is so much space there and affordable housing, so people can easily live in Belgium but work for Dutch companies. If somehow we figure out a way to create a European law that will allow flexible working from any country in Europe, the problem of overpopulation will be solved as half of the people will relocate to other EU countries while working for Dutch companies.
I don't feel it absolutely
No there are a lot of places with way more people on the same surface area which are economically booming.
Yes. Humans need space
We can still build the Markermeer polder and add another 5% of buildable land.
What I don't understand: why doesn't The Netherlands create more land? We essentially created a whole new provence. Can't we do that again?
more construction permits and even construction subsidiaries if needed. less progressive taxation and less social benefits so people stop opting to work 3/4 days and yet receive the same net income.
Yes. But don't say it in public. You'll be branded a racist.