A 360-degree look at three decades of Dutch housing policy
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Juan Palacios
Over the past three decades, the Netherlands has introduced a range of policies to make housing more accessible. How much have they helped people buy their first home or find an affordable place to rent? At the Maastricht Housing Workshop on 4 and 5 November, SBE housing economists Dirk Brounen, Max Löffler, Nils Kok, Piet Eichholtz and Juan Palacios brought together researchers, policymakers and real estate professionals to take stock of what these policies have achieved.
The limits of helping first-time buyers
Let’s start with the Dutch transfer tax exemption for young homebuyers (startersvrijstelling). The exemption led to more home purchases, but the increase in homeownership was small and short-lived, and house prices rose. A tax break can help people buy sooner while doing little to widen access to ownership. The study by Jonas Wogh (Tilburg University and University of Colorado Boulder) and Max Löffler (Maastricht University School of Business and Economics) found that the exemption made upper-middle-class households better off, with no comparable gains for other groups.
Getting onto the housing ladder is only the first step. When Dutch homeowners move, equity built by paying down their mortgage can help them borrow less on their next home. Gains from rising prices often go towards buying that next home in a market that has also become more expensive. The way households build equity matters for what they can do with it, as research presented by Matthijs Korevaar (Erasmus School of Economics, Erasmus University Rotterdam) showed.
Housing policies reshape the rental market
Mortgage rules can also change who buys the homes that come up for sale. When the Netherlands tightened limits on mortgage payments relative to income, some households could borrow less. Investors bought some of the homes those households might otherwise have purchased and put them on the rental market. A policy designed to limit household borrowing also helped expand private renting, according to research presented by Florian Sniekers (Tilburg University).
The links extend to social housing. In the market studied by Hans Koster (Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam) and his co-authors, an increase in private housing supply lowered private-market prices and shortened social housing waiting times. For someone on a waiting list, what gets built elsewhere in the city can matter alongside how the queue is managed.
Who can afford to live in our cities?
Access also depends on where people can live. Dutch workers without a university degree still earn more per hour in cities, but lower employment offsets that advantage in annual earnings. Social housing helps shape who can afford to live in those cities in the first place, a link explored in research presented by Sebastian Siegloch (University of Cologne).
Who gets to live where is also central to the debate over how immigration is reshaping our cities. Research presented by Albert Saiz (MIT Urban Economics Lab and MIT Center for Real Estate) offers new evidence from Denmark on how neighbourhood turnover happens. In the areas the team studied, native-born residents were more likely to move out as more immigrants moved in, especially in dense housing complexes. At the same time, other native-born households continued to move in. The researchers call this pattern white churn. A snapshot of a neighbourhood’s demographic mix can miss much of that movement and obscure how patterns of segregation emerge.
Where do we go from here?
More than 50 housing professionals took up that question during the workshop’s roundtables. The highest-ranked proposal for the owner-occupied market was to agree on clear national housing targets and rules, remove extra local requirements that hold up construction, and give provinces and municipalities responsibility for delivery alongside local partners.
For the rental market, the top proposal was to give housing associations more financial room to build, including by exempting new developments from corporate income tax and creating incentives to take on difficult projects. Participants also discussed directing subsidies to households so they can move more easily as their needs change, and using tax policy to attract foreign pension capital to expand rental supply.
The roundtables put concrete options on the table. The research gave us a way to judge them. As these proposals are debated, we’ll be asking who would gain a housing option they can afford, how long it would take, and what would happen to households elsewhere in the market.
The Maastricht Housing Workshop was made possible by generous financial support from the Graduate School of Business and Economics through its 2026 Conference Funding programme, the Maastricht Center for Real Estate, the Maastricht Institute of Adaptation and the Dutch Research Council (NWO). Francien Schijlen (Department of Finance) and Elke Lucas (Department of Microeconomics and Public Economics) led the workshop’s planning and coordinating the arrangements that supported greatly the quality of its delivery.
