Government Architect Francesco Veenstra advocates large-scale housing construction in Drenthe. Who’s waiting for that?

Climate change means that we have to think differently about housing construction, said Chief Government Architect Francesco Veenstra last week in an interview with Het Parool . So far, the central government’s emphasis has been on the Randstad. But besides the fact that it is quite full there, large parts of the Randstad are also far below sea level. It will become increasingly difficult and therefore expensive to guarantee everyone there dry feet. And floods will sometimes be unavoidable.

High and dry

You can still live high and dry in Drenthe, Twente and Gelderland, so why wouldn’t you build more houses there? This idea of ​​Veenstra is strongly reminiscent of the plan that the three northern provinces and Flevoland presented two years ago. In the Delta Plan for the North, they offered to build an additional 220,000 houses in the long term, on top of the 100,000 already planned.

The provincial administrators presented their plan as a compensation to the cabinet, which is worrying about where the 1 million new homes needed to alleviate the housing shortage should be located in the next ten years.

Better railways

The North could therefore meet a large part of that demand. But then we have to make the North much better accessible by rail, the provincial administrators said. According to them, improvements to the bottleneck at Meppel, the construction of the Lely line and the arrival of the Lower Saxony line are necessary. The Lely line quickly connects Groningen via Friesland and Flevoland with Amsterdam, the Lower Saxony line runs from Groningen, Stadskanaal and Emmen to Enschede. Veenstra also says that the next cabinet must invest rigorously in public transport.

That’s not saying too much. The bill for the Lely line alone is approaching 10 billion euros. The improvement of the track near Meppel will consume around 80 million euros. The Lower Saxony Line could easily cost half a billion euros.

Cuts

The current outgoing cabinet and House of Representatives have already set aside money for each of those three projects, but that is roughly half of the minimum required. The coalition negotiations are again about cuts and that does not bode well.

Apart from that, the question remains how much enthusiasm there is among Randstad residents to move to the northern provinces. “Would a primary school teacher move to a nice house in Drachten if his school is in Haarlem?” asked the Groningen planner Gert de Roo in response to the northern plan for 220,000 additional houses.

Close to station

And the principle that all these new houses must be easily accessible by train rather limits the number of locations, De Roo noted. After all, you want to live close to a station if you have to travel often.

Space is also not available in abundance in Drenthe, as is evident from the many discussions about nitrogen, agricultural land and the relationship with nature. Although there are seven times as many people living on one square kilometer in South Holland as here.

Chief Government Architect Veenstra rightly points out the consequences of climate change for housing in the low and swampy parts of the Netherlands. However, he still needs a lot of convincing before more houses can really be built in Drenthe and Twente. Both Randstad residents and Drents are not looking forward to a population migration.